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This week is a very special one for me - I started my first online internet lectures in music therapy with Ukrainian students. The "setting" is following: I stay in a studio in our university in Magdeburg, Germany and Ukrainian students in Zaporizhzhe, a city on the river Dnepr with one million inhabitants, can see and hear me and ask questions or can comment on-line in a chatroom that I see on a screen in front of me. It's quite an unusual experience. - I am familiar with working with a chatroom. We did this last year once a week in an open discussion forum with interested students from all over Germany and even one from France. But giving lectures before a camera is quite different. There is something "unknown." The unknown part is the reaction of the other side - the not real "audience." But, after the first hour when I received the first questions from the Ukrainian side, this unknown part wasn't there at all. The questions were very specific to what I had spoken about earlier and I could also read names of students whom I know very well from my real contacts in the Ukraine. After that the camera was not longer a liveless thing or object, it became more and more a medium of communication.

It may be that the unknown point of the first hour of these lectures was the same as in music therapy. I remember a lot of music therapy hours, especially the first hour of a music therapy session. All opportunities of music therapy seem to be possible when I start to work with a client. The first reaction or action of a client I can't predict. Michele Forinash and Diego Shapira also wrote about this unknown in this column. I have to feel the client, to experience her or him. She or he is for me like an unknown black box and step by step I can see more and more details in that black box. I remember a lot of questions from clients in the first hours of music therapy: How would I interpret their music improvisations in music therapy etc. I answered, I can't give an interpretation and I even don't know one. You, the client, can give the best one. I can only give opportunities or a frame of a development for deeper and deeper and differentiated perceptions of yourself and others in a group. That means that, first of all, the client has the potential to explore the black box of personal handicaps in psyche and relationship to other people, of his or her own development, and of course also of his or her own potential. This is the way of Active Group Music Therapy (AGMT), which is also the theme of my lectures with Ukrainian students and also was a question of Brynjulf Stige when he read my last column in voices (What is AGMT?). Of course, that is a very, very short description of that method and I will have to write more about it at another time. But, also in AGMT music is for most of the clients in the first steps something unknown, something like chaos, like not being trained etc. And in the way of AGMT - and also other models of music therapy - music will become a medium of communication, of expression, of aesthetic joy or a product, and the clients are proud about, of making it. Can I compare a camera and the "holy" medium of music? I wrote that both became a medium of communication.

The theoretical language of AGMT, which was first published by Christoph Schwabe in the sixties, after that as book-publication in the 80-ies, and most recently in the most current revision in the end of the 90's, is in some parts very technical. In particular, it tries to present a system for all the actions of the therapist, for instance. It tries to give the therapist some type of training. But, on the other side, no training in AGMT consists only of reading books. The understanding of its principles needs a lot of experiences - then it will work. If you read only the books, you will practice some systematic steps, which are not adequate for therapeutic situations. The words are only words - they have not enough "social" meaning, despite the meaning that I knew before, my own meaning. So learning music therapy and doing it is every time a change of one's own inner meanings. The "not-known" becomes known. To go this step, I get more knowledge and experience about something. So I know more and more about the way of contacting the not known. To have the basics for that could be the first step, to start the own career of a music therapist - to be experienced and known/"not-known" and to be interested in going further and further in that direction. - Of course music therapy is a very special profession - but on the other side a lot of professions have to go that way toward the known and unknown. And so, may be, I can compare a camera and our special music therapy medium "music" - or?

(Thanks a lot to Barbara Wheeler for "language-support".)

How to cite this page

Wosch, Thomas (2001). Internetseminar with Ukraine or Unknown: Intercultural experiences in music therapy II. Voices Resources. Retrieved January 20, 2015, from http://testvoices.uib.no/community/?q=fortnightly-columns/2001-internetseminar-ukraine-or-unknown-intercultural-experiences-music-therapy-