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

I attended the European Music Therapy Conference in Naples in April and had a wonderful time! I found the conference to be stimulating, the presentations to be excellent, the setting to be serene, and the company - old and new friends and colleagues - to be delightful.

But as I have reflected on the conference and the presentations that I attended and the people with whom I spent time, I have become aware that I attended sessions that dealt with topics in which I am interested and presented approaches with which I have some affinity. I also know that I spent time with people with whom I have a lot in common, although many are from other countries. Of course, making such selections of both presentations and social/professional contacts is normal and is how we expand our knowledge in some areas and avoid becoming overwhelmed with information that is peripheral to our interests. But the thing that I have been thinking of - and I have thought of it before - is how we limit ourselves by paying attention to things that "fit" with what we know and with which we are comfortable.

Of course, there is far more information in the world and even in music therapy than any of us can absorb, and we need to choose the areas on which we focus. So making choices is essential. But how do I limit myself by doing this? Isn't it possible that I am also missing out on something that might be worthwhile? And that what I might gain from reaching out might be more important than what I gain from my more narrow focus, particularly in this world of expanded opportunities for learning about diverse cultures?

I am particularly aware of divisions that people make in music therapy in several areas - and know that others will have their own areas of sensitivity in this regard. One is in people's interest in qualitative or quantitative research. Many people find only one of these paradigms to be useful. My concern is that those people usually do not pay any attention to the paradigm which they do not accept and that, in many cases, they therefore do not know anything about the type of research that they ignore. I find it frustrating when I hear people speak inaccurately of one or the other, particularly when I sense that their information is incorrect because they have ignored opportunities to learn correct information. (There are also perfectly legitimate and well-considered reasons that people reject one or another paradigm, or choose one over the other. These are not the choices to which I am referring.)

I notice similar things with the approaches to music therapy in which people are interested. In the U.S., where people use many diverse approaches to music therapy, I notice that music therapists with psychodynamic or other depth-oriented approaches are not interested in learning about the music therapy of people who use behavior- or educationally-oriented approaches. And people who use the latter types of approaches tend to ignore or not accept as legitimate the work of those using the depth-oriented approaches. They would not be among attendees at workshops at which they might experience these approaches, and thus maintain their views that those approaches are not legitimate without having accurate information on what it is that they are rejecting.

For many years, there were two music therapy organizations in the U.S. Thanks to foresight and hard work by a number of people, there is now only one organization. My perception is that one of the reasons that it took so long for this to occur is that members of both associations held onto their views about people in the other association without having accurate information. And the reason that they did not have accurate information was that they did not take advantage of opportunities that were available to learn about the other organization - they did not read the journals, they did not attend the conferences, they did not have social relationships. (There were also other important divisions and differences of philosophy between the two organizations that needed to be dealt with before the unification could occur.) I am grateful that music therapy in the U.S. is moving forward with only one organization but also believe that this could have happened many years earlier if people had made the effort to cross over boundaries and learn about the other association - the one that was different.

When I was younger, I was aware of actively reaching out to people who were different than I - socially, educationally, ethnically, culturally. At a young age, I sought out people who would introduce me to new experiences and treasured these times greatly. I had some wonderful experiences with people who were very different than I and in situations into which my normal life would not have led me. At some point, I began to focus my energy on other things and came to value people with whom I had things in common and long-term relationships. I suppose that this shift from expanding my horizons with all sorts of unique experiences and people to focusing more narrowly is part of maturing. If I had not done it, I would not have had the stability in my life that I have had, or been able to accomplish what I have accomplished.

I would like to share events from my recent personal life in which I again placed myself (or perhaps I should say, "took the opportunity to be") among people who seemed very different from me. A year ago, after 25 years in at Montclair State University in New Jersey, I moved to the
University of Louisville in Kentucky. For those who are not familiar with these locations in the U.S., New Jersey is a densely populated state and the area in which I lived, northern New Jersey, is just 12-15 miles west of New York City, where I spent lots of time. Kentucky is much more rural - Louisville is a city but a much much smaller city than New York - and certain parts of Louisville are culturally and socially either southern or midwestern. (The University of Louisville is a fine, cosmopolitan university and none of what I am saying about the area applies to the University.)

I decided that, since I was making such a big change at this point in my life, I wanted to experience a different lifestyle. So I bought a house that is totally different and in a very different area from any house that I have ever had before. It is much newer and larger than my earlier houses and I have a fish pond and a forest behind the house. I perceived my neighbors (accurately, I still believe) as being primarily people who are in "business" - with different interests than those of people with whom I have normally socialized, who are more likely to have been in the arts, helping professions, and education. (This is, of course, a very large stereotype which does not apply to everyone.)

I found the move to be much more difficult than I had imagined it would be and, when I first moved here, did indeed feel that I had moved to a different culture. The southern and rural aspects of Louisville contributed to this - many people's accents are different from what I was used to and there is a much greater interest by some in guns and farming, for instance - but part of the culture shock was definitely due to where I was living. I loved my new home, but knew that its location and the choices that I had made were contributing to my feeling uprooted and unsettled. A few weeks after I had moved here, I was having coffee in another part of Louisville - a part that felt much more like the town in New Jersey where I had lived and taught - and wondering what had possessed me to move to an area that felt so strange - indeed, in which I felt like a stranger. I was suffering, I know, from having put myself in a situation in which thing were "too different" for my comfort. A year later, I am much better adjusted and my lovely home feels like home - but I am still aware of many differences, including many in my neighborhood. My friends in Louisville are from other aspects of my life, not from my neighborhood. I love my home and the life that is evolving here in Louisville, and know that it would be quite different if I had not been willing to put myself in a setting in which I was NOT so comfortable. I am glad that I took the risks to experience things that were different!

I would like to return to the European Music Therapy Conference and my initial point and look at what is lost by our narrowing focus, particularly as it applies to music therapy. Because I attended presentations at the European Conference that fit with what I already knew or at least matched what I thought I wanted to learn, I missed out on learning about aspects of music therapy that would have broadened my horizons. It would seem as though at least some of these divergent views were what I was seeking when I went to the European Conference, which had the potential to expose me to approaches to music therapy that were different from those that I normally encounter. (In all fairness, I should say that I learned many new things at this conference, met people who held different views than my own, attended sessions by people who presented viewpoints that were not part of my normal way of thinking, and gained a number of new perspectives. But I am focusing here on the areas beyond these and looking at what else might have been available.)

Since the conference was in Southern Italy, there was a unique opportunity to learn more about Italian music therapy, which seems to me to be somewhat different both philosophically and practically than most of the music therapy that I encounter. Because of the differences, these sessions would probably have been more difficult for me to understand and apply to my usual way of thinking about music therapy. So perhaps I would have had to attend several sessions - or more than several - in order to really grasp aspects of what was being presented. (I did attend one session by Italian music therapists and found their work to be very interesting.) But perhaps that exposure would have pushed me beyond my normal boundaries in a way that would have been very good for me, particularly since I had made the effort to put myself in this international setting that was not so normal for me.

Of course, we do the same thing when we read; watch television, movies, or the theatre; listen to music - with everything, we seek out what we enjoy, what is comfortable, what reinforces our preconceptions or at least expands them only as far as or in what ways with which we are comfortable.

As music therapists, we make an effort to learn music that is not necessarily comfortable for us - to make it our own. We know from research on musical preference that, as we learn more about certain styles of music and listen to them more, we learn to like them better. We have reasons as music therapists to do this. We also learn to deal with people - our clients - whom we would not necessarily seek out. It is essential to our ability to do our work that we learn to meet people who are different than we are and to relate to them and help them.

Perhaps these things from our professional lives - the way that we use music to which we may not initially relate and the way that we learn to care about and work with people who are different than we are - can offer us guidance in reaching out in other areas. Maybe there are just as good reasons for learning about approaches to music therapy that are significantly different from our own as there are for learning music that we do not already know. Maybe we could find similar rewards in this diversity as we do in the diversity of our clients.

We are at an exciting time in music therapy, particularly with regard to chances of learning about music therapy worldwide. Part of this opportunity is to learn things that we did not know we wanted to learn, or perhaps may not even particularly welcome. There is great variety in our discipline of music therapy, and this variety offers us opportunities that we may not want to let pass us by.

How to cite this page

Wheeler, Barbara (2001) Expanding my Horizons. Voices Resources. Retrieved January 15, 2015, from http://testvoices.uib.no/community/?q=fortnightly-columns/2001-expanding-my-horizons