Re: Debating the Winds of Change in Community Music Therapy
About Jane Edwards
Biography
PhD is an Associate Professor in the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance at the University of Limerick, Ireland, and has been the course director for their MA in Music Therapy programme since 1999. She is a qualified music therapist with clinical experience in providing music therapy for children who are ill in hospital. She is a Guest Professor at the Institute for Music Therapy at the University of the Arts in Berlin, Germany. She is widely published in the field of music therapy with many peer reviewed papers and chapters in a number of well received edited books such as Barbara Wheeler’s Music therapy research, 2nd edition, and Susan Hadley’s Feminist perspectives in music therapy for example. Her edited book Music: Promoting health and creating community in healthcare contexts with contributions from authors in six countries was published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2007. Currently she is on a sabbatical break; editing a book about music therapy in parent-infant programmes, and trying to finish reading Naomi Klein’s horrifying tome The shock doctrine (Penguin, 2007).
I have read Gary Ansdell's article about community music therapy and also Anna Maratos' response. Thanks to both contributors for an interesting and thought-provoking discussion.
[1] I agree with Anna that many of us in music therapy already work (or in fact have always worked) with an understanding of our clients in their broader context and consider their needs and our responses as music therapists with reference to that broader spectrum. Gary doesn't argue with this however he seems to be suggesting that using ideas that are fundamental to community music offer a way forward to further acknowledge and embrace this perspective in the work of music therapy. I am not so sure. I consider that as a music therapist I have always practiced in a wider context of thinking about patients and clients and unlike Gary's assertion about the distinction between community musicians and ourselves, I have not always used traditional music therapy spaces in work with clients. (I wrote a short justification of this as part of a paper in BJMT (Edwards, 1999) but it has also been reflected in some of the Australian work developed in other contexts (Daveson& Edwards, 2001)). Like Anna, I have received concerned comments that some of my work is not music therapy. I have, however, thought of myself as primarily using my best knowledge to help patients and clients within the contexts we have encountered each other rather than applying a formal, perhaps structuralist response based on some idea of what I had been 'trained' to do as a music therapist. I do not disagree that consistent time and space is important for certain types of therapy work but I also think that flexibility is required in applications of this imperative in some contexts. I have both found myself arguing with managers that a designated music therapy space is required and equally arguing to be able to attend hospitalised children during procedures or in their isolation rooms.
[2] Certainly as a manager of a day service for people with Alzheimer's Disease and their carers for two years in Melbourne in the early nineties, I worked within a community practice frame; using my music therapy skills to conduct regular group sessions for programme participants but also using this same skills set to offer counselling and support to family members in home visits and phone calls. I learned some of the approach I used in that work from my experience on placement at Fulbourn Hospital in the mid 80s that was just moving away from the therapeutic community model (the in-house community of patients as a focus of treatment change) and towards a broader community model of conceptualising patient needs, particularly with regards community supports that could decrease admissions.
[3] I think that what this practice that Gary is trying to describe may represent is a move away from humanistic (or perhaps modernist) ideology towards one that is more informed from postmodernism (for want of a better term). I am sure we have all become a little tired as to how many times one has to read about the gift of postmodernism being pluralism however at the risk of boring the reader/myself let me state I do think it is true that a pluralistic approach has helped music therapy to be open to wider ways of working. However, I also think that one of the gifts of postmodernism is the ability to embrace the uncertain and the unfixed while celebrating (or perhaps 'staying with' is more appropriate in a therapy discussion of this) the frailty of our human state, not trying to overcome or triumph over it the way a modernist or humanistic approach might perhaps suggest (and in music therapy we sometimes hear these themes in work where the music is considered to offer an opportunity to access a previously unknown creative self or an opportunity to transcend reality).
[4] I would argue that music therapy is always a socio-political work - in simple terms, what we do with our clients and their families in turn affects our society simply by being part of the warp and weft of the fabric of our community behaviour. In this way, it makes sense that some of the contributions of postmodern (again that word) theory resonate with me. I guess I grew up at a time when the women's movement was at a particularly lively phase of debate within my own family and community and the slogan 'the personal is political' entered my consciousness and has stayed with me. Since the civil rights movement and the movements that followed, including the many strands of feminist theory and feminism, I think it is impossible to live without consciousness of the ways in which our society and community shape our perspective to 'other' whether we understand that in Marxist terms or perhaps even with reference to Kristeva's useful notion of abjection. (Kristeva, 1982)
[5] In some ways the descriptor 'community music therapy' evokes a reaction that might occur if I were described as an educational music therapist because I have found some ideas from education (eg student centred learning) inspiring and informative. Perhaps I might be called a narrative music therapist because Michael White's work is filled with such generosity and authenticity I long to emulate it (White, 1995). I am not happy with these descriptors. I am just not comfortable with adding a word to music therapy. Perhaps there is, or will be, a Kuhnian style paradigm shift as Gary suggests but I propose that we keep our title clear from additional words. I am a music therapist with all the problematic baggage that accompanies that role. Of course we should keep thinking about our work and practice and perhaps those of us who seem not to 'fit' exactly with the general community in the way we practice and feel 'disapproved of' should have more courage to express and explain our ideas and approaches rather than keeping on somewhat in secret hoping that we won't get in trouble!
[6] Finally, and perhaps most pragmatically, as the Course Director of a two year postgraduate university music therapy programme that is taught in the same centre as a community music MA, I am reluctant to use the term 'community music therapy'. I prefer a separate identity when working in the same department as community music lecturers. I have always welcomed the various community musicians who have come into the Irish World Music Centre over the three years I have worked here. Many of my students have had successful collaborations with the community music students and I have given guest lectures in the community music programme. I wholeheartedly support this continuing however I am not comfortable with the descriptor 'community music therapy' although I agree with some of Gary's ideas regards what we might have to talk about together and share with our colleagues from that closely related world of informed professional music practice.
[7] I note that Urie Bronfenbrenner's nested model of the environment (described as micro-system, meso-system, macro-system and exo-system) was referenced to Stige. I include the original reference for interested readers (Bronfenbrenner, 1979).
References
Edwards, J. (1999). Music therapy with children hospitalised for severe injury or illness. British Journal of Music Therapy, 13(1), 21-27.
Daveson, B. A. & Edwards, J. (2001). A descriptive study exploring the role of music therapy in prisons. The Arts in Psychotherapy: An International Journal, 28(2), 137-141.
Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York, Columbia University Press.
White, M. (1995). Re-Authoring Lives: Interviews and Essays. Adelaide: Dulwich Centre Publications.
Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development. Cambridge, MA: Havard University Press.