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

Since 1972, music therapy has been a special subject for health and special education professionals in Colombia.

Only in 1998, did a music therapy socializing process begin. This movement emphasized its importance in health a education fields, thanks to the enterprise of the Corporación Sonido Arte Ciencia.

Since then, two Jornadas Colombianas de Musicoterapia have been carried out with the participation of music therapists from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, German, Japan, Spain and the United States. The first one was in October of 1998 and the second one in March of 2001. Different Colombian institutions and specialists participated and different approaches and research implications were presented. These demonstrated the rising development of music therapy around the world and also the influences that have discouraged its practice, research and academic development.

In Colombia there are just a few professionals (less than ten) who have had the opportunity to attend post graduate studies in music therapy in Europe and North America. These music therapists are working in an isolated way giving to music therapy a support role in many cases, and a complementary role in others.

The preventive and the educative fields have received the biggest influence of music therapy while the clinical fields are the object of empirical works realized basically by medicial students who are finishing their studies.

Some public universities have a relative interest in incorporating a course in music therapy in study programs.

This interest is the result of the direct sonorous musical influences and academic motivations of the student community which makes, each time with a strong influence, references and proposals about the role of the arts in preventive health and educational processes in the human being.

The complex economic, political and social situations that affect Colombia encourage all of the different institutions in our society to look for ways to make possible dialogue and a peaceful co-existence. Facing these factors from a music therapy perspective could help us to convert our difficult situation into an appropriate moment for the definitive development of music therapy in this region which continues to be at a loss because of its problems.

See the information about the Segundas Jornadas Colombianas de Musicoterapia in www.facartes.unal.edu.co/musicoterapia

How to cite this page

Tirado, Edgar Blanco (2002). The Music Therapy: An Urgent Need for the Colombian Society. Voices Resources. Retrieved January 15, 2015, from http://testvoices.uib.no/community/?q=country-of-the-month/2002-music-therapy-urgent-need-colombian-society