Voices ResourcesA website for the worldwide community around the journal Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy

I agree so easily with many of Barbara Wheeler's assertions, and concerns, in her column that listening to others voices is needed in music therapy. Listening is not just a cornerstone of our clinical work but also much needed in our wider community of interactions in the field. In addition, I think it might also be worth challenging each other to take the trouble to listen to ourselves, the way we present our ideas, the way we listen to others (and respond to them) and the way that we work to develop ideas through presentation, argument and refinement of a position or view. I think we might also benefit as music therapists from listening to our values and the way in which they affect what we listen to openly. I find it difficult to put into clear words what I mean exactly by this but reading Barbara's column brought some ideas to mind from my own experience and I want to share them briefly here.

Although I have for a long time been aware of the cycle of guilt and forgiveness as a Western construct, coming from what has been described as the Judeo-Christian tradition, it was only recently that I was introduced to the idea of a different cultural value cycle of shame and revenge. Although I knew my own ideas were from a particular value base, I am not sure that I considered that there might be other values that I could understand to inform actions of reparation.

I was walking behind a group of students in the street recently who were talking quite loudly about sexual exploits and experiences. One woman was saying to another 'I would never kiss a girl.well I have.but I wouldn't'. Although it's a kind of cute example, and I must admit I smiled hearing it said, it is this capacity for pushing aside that which we do not want to accept about ourselves and others that makes our humanness so complex and arguably so maddening. We can have a view of ourselves that does not stand up to any kind of scrutiny, and yet we hold to this view in spite of all the evidence that we are not what we say we are and are not doing as we proclaim. The recent photographs appearing in newspapers that have been so upsetting begs the far too simple question 'why is torture and humiliation so unacceptable by Westerners involved in this war when the bombing and killing of people is not?' Surely violence speaks its voice by whatever means in war? Why does it upset everyone to see these recent photos, and not upset us in the same outraged way to see the photos of children who are victims of bomb attacks lying in makeshift hospital beds with minimal medical care available to them? Who said that the first casualty of war was truth?¹ It is facing up to the truth about ourselves; what we are capable of, that is so demanding about these recent pictures. I predict we will not accept it except by making some individuals responsible for this behaviour, and consequently punished. No group mea culpa required for so easily embracing violent means to address anxieties in the world.

My own experience of trying to be understanding leads me to the view that people perhaps do not really want to know other people and their experience. Rather, our tendency is to want to be right and to make sure that we have enough other people around us who think that we are right. This is borne out for me by the realisation a few years ago that although I considered myself a liberal rather than a conservative in fact in meeting a true liberal, someone who could be interested in all ideas and their origins and tolerate others ideas they did not agree with, I found myself with the realisation that possibly I was just plain old left-wing, relatively fixed in my values and views - not so admirably open and flexible as I had thought! Always ready, for example, to roll my eyes when people espoused views about family or society that I found to be old-fashioned or sexist. This is not helped by professional life as an academic where, as Elbow has pointed out, we are expected to have highly developed skills in pointing out what is wrong with others arguments rather than considering what we can learn from them².

What helps though? How do we/I get free of the constraints of the myopic view that our own experience and values are right and correct? My attempts to learn German, not so successful, over a number of years have helped. I think that putting another language in your head and your mouth is a start at attempting an understanding of difference - and of course the emphasis on learning languages in European schools promotes this admirably in a way that attending school in Australia did not. In spite of a multicultural ethic pervading our classrooms, we did not learn others languages. My first words in Arabic were learned from some of my classmates in the month long German language class in Berlin!

Some of my clinical and community work with people from non-English speaking backgrounds has helped me to realise there are many ways to make connections with people that do not involve talking together. Listening to someone speak before the interpreter has provided a translation has usually left me with a strong feeling of having heard something of the person's experience before I have known the exact words they had said (I would like to be able to write that I was usually correct in my hunches about what had been said - not always). Since we are music therapists, have we ever learned an instrument of another culture from someone of that community? And I have to say with a very few short-term experimental exceptions the answer for me is 'no'. Maybe this is a challenge I can take up in my own quest to hear new voices in sound.

Thank you Barbara for giving consideration to this issue and for helping me to learn some more through thinking about listening.

Notes

1 I thought it was Hiram Johnson (US Senator for California) but there are other persons to whom this quote is attributed

2 Elbow, P. (1986). Embracing Contraries: Explorations in Teaching and Learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press