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

You do not read very much about political changes in music therapy journals. For me, and for my point of view in music therapy, such changes have been very important.

I was born in East Germany. So 1989, the year when the wall came down, gave new perspectives to the world of music therapy and to my own music therapy work, which I had just started a short time earlier. This perspective was not only one that came from books and movies. No, we could have real contacts with West German and other music therapists. It was no longer an illusion of something very distant and idealised that helped us to understand Western music therapy. We could touch it with our own hands, hear it with our ears, and see it with our eyes - with all of our senses.

But there were also new problems connected with this big event: e.g. the only one music therapy school of East Germany - with a tradition of more then 40 years - had to find a place among the many music therapy schools of West German music therapy. The world became bigger and bigger on the one side, but also very small on the other side. You can compare this situation a little bit with a very important phase in developmental psychology, when in puberty and adolescence the meaning of one's own family, of one's family's perspective, of one's own roots, and of the sense of things in the world, will be re-evaluated. A step of the philosophical de-ontologism and of the physical theory of relativity makes all things new and gives so many questions to one's own positions, which were the truth of one's thinking and acting. It gives also the possibility that there exist more than one truth about the world. This fact brings a lack of self-confidence and of the relativity of one's own high position in the little and the big world.

However: I remembered this too, thinking about the sometimes strange discussions between different schools of music therapy, e.g., the psychodynamic or depth-oriented approaches and the behaviour-oriented approaches of music therapy in U.S., or the sometimes strange general assessments of one school of music therapy about another one in Germany. I remembered this too, thinking about the column here in Voices by Barbara Wheeler in the middle of June, where she describes a similar observation in the field of music therapy in the U.S.: People of different approaches are usually not interested in learning about the other approaches and they also "tend to ignore or not accept as legitimate" the work of other approaches. And last but not least, I remembered this too, thinking of one journalist whom I told about five music therapy organisations in Germany, who said that he had never heard about music therapy and why are there so many organisations in such a small professional field. He meant so small compared with other much larger professional groups, such as psychologists. To make a long story short, the problems that I have mentioned are not only some of my experiences between East and West German music therapy, they are also some issues of the European and world-wide development of our field and maybe even of every new professional field.

Then again; if you look just in these times at the field of music therapy and if you also look into the history of music therapy, you can see new chances to solve the problems that I have mentioned. Music therapy has now become an adult!!!

In our days the second generation of music therapists is teaching at universities and private institutes. So, for instance, the East German music therapy school that I mentioned, which since the 1950ies is very strongly connected with the name of Christoph Schwabe, is now taught at two private institutes and two universities in Germany. One is the University of Applied Sciences Magdeburg-Stendal. There I can use a wide variety of fundamental literature and of research studies about this approach of music therapy and, of course, a very big "store" of clinical experiences. One important difference from the first generation from my point of view is that this approach is not my - or our - own child. We got it from the first generation and we work with it, we watch it grow up and have to further develop it. We have not such a personal relationship to it in the way of procreation. It may be then that we can work with it a little bit more factually and normalised (in the sense of normalisation). So it may be that we also can accept and maybe learn from each other in our days to be more accepting, like in the European Music Therapy Confederation of our days.

I had this feeling, also, two years ago in Washington, DC, where Ronaldo Benenzon, Helen Bonny, Clifford Madsen, Clive Robbins and followers of Mary Priestley (Johannes Eschen) sat at one table and spoke with the audience, but I couldn't see that they spoke with each other. Maybe I didn't see the meetings or times when these fathers and mothers of different approaches to music therapy met. But maybe also such meetings are more possible in the following generations. - So I see in the last five years some changes even in music therapy books. There are, for instance, Barbara Wheeler, Kenneth Bruscia, and Tony Wigram, who have published books in which there are united different approaches to music therapy research and of music therapy practice. Every approach is accepted and has its special field and its special possibilities. You can use them and you can learn about them in these specialised ways. Similarly Klaus Drieschner from Holland has developed a research design to explore different focuses of music therapy in different practice fields, despite the differences in the approaches. I have myself explored emotional micro-processes in music therapy, and David Aldridge builds up a very big research-archive of music therapy; the Music-Therapy-World.

In Germany the different organisations of music therapy finally sit at one table. The third generation of future music therapists - our students - have organised international students' meetings, where students of quite different approaches from all over Europe (including Eastern-Europe) are very excited and interested to learn more about the other students and also about the other approaches. Such meetings have been held in Vienna/Austria, Sittard/Holland, Leuven/Belgium, Magdeburg/Germany and, in autumn of this year, in Heidelberg/Germany. So they hear the different voices of the many songs of music therapy. It is becoming more and more normal - as it has been in other disciplines for a long time - that some students want to know different approaches in their own countries or even in foreign countries in the world. The world becomes bigger and smaller at the same time, also in music therapy; the profession has a common kernel while at the same time also very many different faces.

We should use the new opportunities for our profession, so that we can hear the different Voices of one profession with different techniques in different fields of practice and in different countries of the world. It may also be a chance to become a more accepted profession in countries where the acknowledgement of our profession has been a problem until today (like in Germany); to get more ears to be heard by the public of each country in the public life of each country and also in the context of other established professions. So, music therapy can become a "normal" profession with its unusual ways.

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

How to cite this page

Wosch, Thomas (2001). New Chances for a New Generation of Music Therapists. Voices Resources. Retrieved January 11, 2015, from http://testvoices.uib.no/community/?q=fortnightly-columns/2001-new-chances-new-generation-music-therapists