Re: Debating the Winds of Change in Community Music Therapy
About Ansdell, Gary
Biography
PhD, is Head of Research at the Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy Centre, London, and Research Fellow in Community Music Therapy at Sheffield University. He works as a clinician (currently in adult psychiatry), as well as a trainer and researcher. He has published several books: Music for Life (1995) and, with Mercedes Pavlicevic, Beginning Research in the Arts Therapies: A Practical Guide (2001) and the recently published Community Music Therapy.
Do We Puncture the Balloon or let it Fly?
Some Thoughts by Gary Ansdell on the Reception of his Article 'Community Music Therapy & The Winds of Change'
John Cage once said: "I can't understand why people are afraid of new ideas. I'm afraid of the old ones!". The problem here, of course, is that for some people so-called 'new ideas' are old ones, whilst for others these 'old ones' are news to them!
Perhaps this is at the core of the bewildering variety of reactions I've had to my article "Community Music Therapy and the Winds of Change" in the last few months. These have ranged across almost the whole possible spectrum: gratitude, hostility, puzzlement, understanding, misunderstanding, enthusiasm, weariness. People have been irritated, saddened, inspired; it has clarified a situation for some but confused others; has given some people permission to do things and think things they had thought taboo; others baulk at my naivety, audacity or (just occasionally) mendacity! Overall I'd say the response was 50:50: the positive response I could summarise as that the article and the construct 'Community Music therapy' is a useful (perhaps temporary) way of clarifying a current developmental shift in some quarters of music therapy; the negative response is that I have both re-invented the wheel and thrown out the baby with the bath-water.
Given that the article was hot off the press just before the World Congress in Oxford in July, I got a lot of immediate feedback from a fairly global perspective. Then there was the Keynote Forum on Community Music Therapy chaired by Mercedes Pavlicevic1, where several hundred participants and an international panel of therapists involved in thinking around varieties of this concept and its practices gathered and agreed, disagreed and agreed to disagree. Again the verdict was mixed: people were confused, enraged, inspired... but, interestingly, not bored! This energy suggested to us that perhaps something is there of relevance and import to current practitioners at an international level. One delegate, however, suggested Community Music Therapy was a 'Big British Balloon' - with the covert suggestion, I think, that it be deflated as soon as possible!
What am I to make of all of this? I've waited a time to respond in order to collect as many reactions as possible. I happen to be on sabbatical in New York at the moment, so I'm also hearing responses from some of the American music therapy community, as well as those involved in overlaps between these ideas and music education and performance arts. There have also been two formal responses to my article on VOICES by Anna Maratos and Jane Edwards, and also on the subject was Thomas Wosch's fortnightly column 'Four Thoughts about Community Music Therapy' (August 26-September 8 2002). Finally, Brynjulf Stige has published on the latest edition of VOICES the most comprehensive international survey and analysis of Community Music Therapy yet available2. This will considerably improve the informed comparative discussion of this construct and variety of practices in the future.
I'll try here to respond to some of this. I'm sorry that the many people who have contacted me informally have not made their thoughts more public - I still appeal to them to do so. These were often to do with how the disciplinary pressure of the 'consensus model' was felt by them to be professionally discriminatory or limiting. Part of any debate such as this should involve an airing of the ethical dimensions of 'disciplinary strength' as represented by 'consensus' theoretical models. Public debate helps clarify the ethical complexities of these matters.
One thought I've had about the disparity of the responses is that these reflect a very new situation in music therapy dialogue and debate - epitomized by the VOICES website itself: the obvious fact that aspects of the music therapy dialogue and debate are now global. Only a few years ago most theorizing was distinctly local or national - with just a few books and articles schlepping across the borders, and the occasional combustion at international conferences! Now, however, I think we are seeing the complexities the global debate entails.
Clearly much debate (especially dispute) is very local: about the history and current situation in any one music therapy community. And as Even Ruud has said, theories in music therapy are always connected to social, cultural and intellectual contexts. So with this enhanced global communication between us it is not surprising that the global and local can get confused or misinterpreted. Specifically, I can see quite well that my argument for Community Music Therapy partly relates to a peculiarly local British concern (based on history and disciplinary politics). I said very clearly at the beginning of the article that I comment from a British perspective and wonder how far my questions, arguments and proposals apply, are relevant or even comprehensible, to international colleagues. I asked people to contrast and compare with their own local and national traditions. I understand of course that these sentences in the article are not the ones first read or quoted! This situation, however, has brought home to me the sense of writing for a different audience now - a 'glocal' one. This is something all of us (as well as our journals) are going to have to come to terms with.
Ironically, one of the things many of us wanted a Community Music Therapy construct to stimulate was precisely the need for local, context-sensitive practice, following local needs of therapists, patients and music - certainly not for it to be yet another prescriptive and authoritarian theory. So perhaps I could put it like this: Community Music Therapy is an anti-model that encourages therapists to resist one-size-fits-all-anywhere models (of any kind), and instead to follow where the need of clients, contexts and music leads.
Having said that I'll address the major comments and critiques people have communicated to me:
Reinventing the Wheel?
I understand how music therapists who have always worked within a flexible continuum of practice read my article and wonder how 'Community Music Therapy' is anything new or unusual. For instance, Jane Edwards' response comes from a useful perspective, Jane having trained and practiced in Australia, but currently training students in Ireland, with a Community Music department next door to her. She writes: "...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". Or, as David Aldridge said to me: I've just missed the fact that 'Community Music Therapy' is what music therapy is; it would be better instead to re-name my tradition of music therapy as 'Clinical Music Therapy', rather than rename what most others already do worldwide as 'Community Music Therapy'.
I take the point, and apologise for re-inventing anyone's wheel! And yet... these comments do not quite match up with the response I'm getting from quite a wide sample of readers. For example, someone is using my construct to help model a communal project of post 9/11 care here in New York3; another is using it to compare to his own formulation of the continuum between therapy and performance in a community psychiatric facility. Another simply said that after the Oxford Congress it was such a relief to feel able to talk publicly about community and spirituality in music therapy. My feeling is still that whatever people have been doing in practice, they seem to have spoken, written or taught little about it. Why not?4
It is true that outside the British and some European traditions there has seldom been an active professional taboo concerning working communally, or outside of a narrow therapeutic frame. However, what I am also hearing is that until recently there has also not been much dialogue between music therapists concerning ways of thinking about, and modeling, this active continuum between private and communal work (or, alternatively, this has been seen as outdated practice reflecting earlier 'recreational' models of music therapy). Secondly, it seems there is little in the current literature to set such practices in relation to wider theory - for example, congruent models of a socio/cultural psychology of personhood, or a social psychology or sociology of music. So either the extant music therapy literature here is thin, or hidden in pockets, or unknown to at least a sizeable section of the international community.
So I'm very much not saying my formulation is any better or more useful than anyone else's. I carefully entitled my article 'A Discussion Paper' given my chief aim was simply to initiate a discussion, centred on a simple model that I hoped my colleagues could compare and contrast to their own practices and formulations.
In this way Thomas Wosch's response was constructive and informative. He sketched out the interesting scenario of the tradition coming from the former East Germany - where pioneer Chistoph Schwabe practiced and taught a 'social music therapy' that emphasized how "...the social dimension is very strongly connected with the individual dimension of the human being". Wosch asks whether such a 'therapy of society' is still a viable proposition. Here is a clear example of 'local theory' that can nevertheless inform international discussion. At the Community Music Therapy Keynote Forum at the Oxford Congress we had similar 'glocal' reverberations from Israel (Nechama Yehuda), Norway (Brynjulf Stige), and the UK (Leslie Bunt, Emma Wintour and Rachel Verney). Nobody here claimed Community Music Therapy to be new - but the renewed debate on the relationship of music therapy to the social, cultural and communal did seem to be useful to people.
After Rachel Verney and I came up with our own formulation some years ago (as a logical point of arrival for our own practice and thinking) I quickly discovered that Brynjulf Stige came to the same point years before this - and now I'm told that half of the music therapy world considers it common practice! Formulations very often seem to come to the same conclusion in different places, each independent of the other (serialism in music and the identification of autism come to mind). I'll deal with the naming issue later, but surely what's significance is not who arrives at what formulation when, but what use such various formulations serve, and when they becomes useful. So what I'd like ask is: what's the significance of the obvious interest in a more international formulation, modeling and validation of Community Music Therapy now?
Throwing out the (Analytic) Baby with the Bathwater
A British (and partly European) issue in the debate is whether Community Music Therapy is compatible with a psychoanalytic model of therapy. My 'declaration' in the Oxford panel (we each had to 'declare' a position on the subject) was that it isn't. Some of my fellow panelists disagreed. The response by Anna Maratos (VOICES - July 16 2002) discusses this further. Anna writes that, according to my criteria she is "...a Community Music Therapist. Yet unlike Gary, I am also someone who works in a very psychodynamically oriented way". She then describes the production of a musical she, her patients and colleagues put on in the psychiatric hospital she works in - a fictionalized account of Edward Elgar's work as a bandmaster in a psychiatric hospital. I've seen the video of this - and it's an inspiring piece of music therapy, with Anna superb as the 'available resident musician therapist' (her term!). She openly acknowledges the problems she's had doing this project - problems stemming from the prejudice of a consensus theory concerning roles, boundaries, sites and attitudes. She acknowledges that this sort of work is 'kept underground'. To her great credit she simply went on with the work she knew was right for her patients, colleagues and hospital.
Anna makes two central points from her stance on this work. Firstly that her therapist expertise ('dynamic insights') and her and her colleagues' 'availability' as therapists helped the difficult process of mounting the performance to happen without undue mishap - and in fact to great human effect for all concerned. I'm absolutely with her here, and seeing the video you see these skills in action. This is not to say however that any one theoretical model has a monopoly on the kind of 'people knowledge' that any therapist builds up through experience. This knowledge can (but need not be) 'analytic' per se. Indeed a lot of what I observed was musical knowledge-in-action: or, rather, the kind of musical/personal skill that music therapists of any persuasion develop to reconcile individual and group flow by listening, to dispel potential problems and tackle those that arise. The Community Music Therapy model I proposed never said that we stop being therapists in this work - but not 'therapists' in the loaded way that psychoanalytic theory has traditionally prescribed - the very attitude that created the problems that she had to work against! Her point that 'It was "therapy" partly because the rehearsals were as important as the performances' I don't understand. Under this logic the choir I sing with is doing covert therapy! Indeed I smell some desperation to preserve the notion of 'therapy' here!
Her second point relates to this, and is that the work she did '..does not sit uncomfortably with recent and not-so-recent trends in psychoanalytic theory' (those of 'integrative therapeutic community' theory). My thought is that in terms of music therapy as practiced it's not what psychoanalysis is, or believes, but how the model is used in any circumstance that matters - that is, what possibilities of action it admits or frustrates. For Anna this model seemed as limiting as it is for many music therapists in terms of its normative 'rules' concerning sites, roles, boundaries and attitudes5. Her working around these and her excuses for them lead me to ask how far you massage a theory and its basic assumptions before you've preserved only the name? It reminds me of the story of the Oxford don who had a dog, and the college wanted to make him master but only cats were allowed in college. So they called the dog a cat, and all was fine. Using similar logic, we can ask what's preserved if we conveniently 'spin' the basic assumptions of psychoanalysis (and in this case the limiting factors coming from these assumptions) in order to retain a cherished theory?
I come back to my perhaps rather simplistic formulation: that whilst Community Music Therapy is opening the door for a flexible practice of music therapy, psychoanalysis is still closing it. Now you can't open and shut a door at the same time without confusion or injury!
Pluralist Paradise? Theory and Practice
A word that's kept coming up in responses is 'pluralism'. Thomas Wosch felt that the 'acknowledged pluralism' in the Oxford Keynote Forum was 'a freedom', a 'lightening', with nobody claiming that Community Music Therapy is exclusively this or that. For him it gave an orientation point for many different traditions and views, with the caveat "Could Community Music Therapy become a too much light model of music therapy?". For Jane Edwards there were postmodernist resonances: "... a pluralistic approach has helped music therapy to be open to wider ways of working". Part of this for her is a move away from more 'ideological' ways of framing the processes or aims of music therapy - as for example, 'personality change' or 'transcendence'. A pluralist perspective is wary of grand theoretical claims, and "...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...".
These comments connect with some thoughts I have about the reception of my article specifically as a theoretical discussion. Especially how people take a new (or 'new/old') theoretical formulation in relationship to tradition or innovation in music therapy. One style of response comes from what could be seen as the still-dominant European ideological tradition - which views theory as an accumulating disciplinary edifice, rather like a coral reef. After construction such theory must be true because it has lasted so long! Consensus in this tradition is cosy, correct and enough! It tends to hold facts as values and to consider debate personal. Such theory tends to be modernist and anti-pluralist in its uncritical assumption that present conclusions are for all people, at all times, in all places.
Another style, in contrast to this, more resembles the American pluralist/pragmatist tradition, where ideas and beliefs are seen to be transparently and honestly in the service of (local) interests. Here theory is seen as a tool, new theoretical formulations seen as useful guides to thinking and potential action, and very much not a reflection of the 'way things really are'. The basic assumption, following the philosophical tradition of William James and John Dewey, is that almost by definition, no one way of thinking about things can be true or useful. As James wrote: "Everything is many directional, many dimensional [...] nothing includes everything, or dominates over everything. The word 'and' trails along after every sentence"6. Theory here is performative or improvisational - a way of coping, a guide to acting.
I'm not trying to compare two modes of two continents here. What I am contrasting is two modes that any individual, group or national tradition might hold, or cultivate (and I've received examples of both of these). This has led me to think what music therapy could achieve were it to integrate more its cardinal principles of practice into its theoretical life; namely, theory as provisional, improvisational, context-bound, risky, challenging, sometimes confrontational, always dialogical and in-the-making. What's old somewhere is new somewhere else; we sometimes need old formulations for new circumstances; global comparisons with local; local with global. People have said most things before; sometimes we just need to say them again, in a different way, standing on a new street corner.
Naming and Dividing? Conflict and Companionship
This brings me to a last point concerning the 'community of music therapists', which delegates at the Community Music Therapy Keynote Forum in Oxford asked us not to forget. Thomas Wosch was impressed by the community organization of Leslie Bunt's 'MusicSpace' organization, which fosters a spirit of community amongst music therapists. Others have suggested that broader thinking about the communal aspects of music therapy may lead us to think more about our own communal needs as music therapists.
On the other hand, I think that a sub-text lies beneath this theme (and some of the comments I've received) concerning the role of conflict and consensus in our discipline. People are concerned that 'Community Music Therapy' is an unnecessary re-naming, and that such re-naming threatens a hard-won consensus. Jane Edwards, for example, writes: "I am just not comfortable with adding a word to Music Therapy [...] I prefer a separate identity when working in the same department as Community Music lecturers" (though Jane is very much for dialoguing between these two traditions). Others respondents have communicated more general concern about the wisdom of the kind of theoretical debate and dispute which relies on establishing difference over what is shared in common within the discipline. The threat I suppose is schism. I think it's very important that both fears are openly discussed.
It seems to me that re-naming has always been part of the process of theoretical elaboration within our discipline, as part of the necessary critical method of making distinctions. First there was 'music', then 'music therapy' - then, when a suitable measure of stability had been attained, came 'music psychotherapy', 'Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy', 'psychodynamically-informed music therapy', 'GIM' etc. Notice that re-naming is mostly additive - a further defining by forging cross-disciplinary alliances and syntheses. Technically such re-namings construct different discourses of music therapy: ways of talking which actively represent and construct ways of thinking, which are in turn responses to contexts of time, place and action. Seen this way, re-naming is a sign of a practice and discipline not stagnating.
I indeed meant my heuristic characterization of the 'consensus model' to challenge - since for me the current consensus in some quarters is working against possibilities of action - for clients, clinical contexts and therapists. Characteristic of pluralism is such a space for critique and dissent within a wider consensus - but also with the view that antagonism is a temporary stage on the route to a common goal. Ironically, this is actually the message of psychoanalysis - that antagonism be given a creative space. As the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has ruefully commented, it's very odd that therapists ever lament the antagonism or schismatic tendencies of therapeutic movements - given this process is central to their basic understanding of human dynamic life.
Yet we do have more in common than not as music therapists of whatever variety. I came across this passage of Rumi the other day:
I think of the long tables in those beautiful dining halls at Oxford, where just this happened. Names and distinctions serve a purpose, but there's also time to drop them. I'll be only too happy when we can drop 'Community' from the name again - whether this is sooner or later... Not before, however, it's said whatever it has to say.
Notes
1 A summary account of this will be published with the Conference Proceedings.
2 Stige, Brynjulf (2002). The Relentless Roots of Community Music Therapy [online] Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy retrieved from https://normt.uib.no/index.php/voices/article/view/98/75.
3 Benedikte Scheiby (2002) - 'Caring for the Caregiver: trauma, improvised music and transformation of terror into meaning through Community Music Therapy Training. In: Loewy, J. & Hara, Andrea Frisch (Ed.) Caring for the Caregiver: the Use of Music Therapy in Grief & Trauma, American Music Therapy Association.
4 One answer here of course is that it's simply that some of us are not looking far enough; the literature is there if you know where. Here Stige's new survey is invaluable in completing this multi-faceted picture.
5 See section "Discussion: Community Music Therapy and the Consensus Model" in my original article.
6 In Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club. (Flamingo 2002).
7 Rumi (2002). "The Indian Tree". In: Barks, Coleman (Ed.) The Soul of Rumi, HarperCollins.