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

The last time that I wrote this column, I spoke of how we limit ourselves by paying attention to things and people that "fit" with what we know and with whom we are comfortable and of the desirability of learning about ideas and people that are out of our normal awareness (see June 18 column). In this column, I would like to develop some ideas that have evolved from my previous thoughts.

I would like to look here at ways in which we may try to understand others but are not able to achieve this understanding. I will share some thoughts about this and also examples.

Sometimes the fact that people speak different languages keeps us from understanding. This is an obvious problem for many people from the U.S., where many people speak only English. Many more people in other parts of the world speak several languages, although I am aware that many others do not. This is an issue at music therapy conferences where some people do not attend because they do not speak the language(s) in which presentations are done well enough to benefit from them.

English is the accepted language (or one of the accepted languages) at many conferences, such as the European Conference that was held in Naples in April and the World Congress of Music Therapy that will be held in Oxford in July 2002 (where some presentations will also be in Spanish) and is the language for this publication, Voices. Anyone who has attended or been a part of planning these conferences and publications knows of the problems that accompany the decision to use English as the language. At the European Music Therapy Conference, hosted by Italy, many of the Italians were concerned that they could not understand the presentations as well as they would like to, and there were even reports that some of the presentations were made in Italian rather than English. It has been a goal of the World Federation of Music Therapy to have publications and presentations in Spanish as well as English, with the knowledge that there are still many others who are not able to participate in certain functions because they cannot use either of these languages. It seems that these problems in understanding one another are clear and that we are aware of them and working to deal with them, even though we may not have perfect solutions.

Even when speaking the same language, we may have communication problems, and I think that this is an issue for music therapists. For instance, we may use different terms to mean the same thing, or the same term to mean different things. I am concerned about how this affects our communication as music therapists. Even the term "music therapy" means different things to different people. Such diversity is fine and even enriching as long as we communicate enough to clarify when we mean different things. It seems, though, that we do not always make this effort.

I am sure that when some people speak of music therapy they mean only music therapy that is based upon improvisation, that deals with psychological problems, and/or that is practiced in a clinic - these are just some examples. And I am just as sure that others who speak of music therapy refer only to therapy that has clearly defined goals, that works toward objectives that are measured to determine whether progress has been made, and/or that has been validated through experimental research methods. Are these two groups of people talking about the same thing when they speak of music therapy?

The only way that people with these differing frameworks are going to be able to communicate clearly is to spend time becoming clear about the ways in which they are not communicating, a process which may take a lot of time and effort.

Various people in our profession have done important work in helping us define what we mean when we speak of "music therapy" and various facets of it. The World Federation of Music Therapy and many music therapy associations have worked to agree upon definitions of music therapy (and other terms) that are acceptable to their constituents and also provide accurate descriptions. Books that come to my mind as helping to define music therapy are Kenneth Bruscia's Defining Music Therapy (which not only defines music therapy but also describes areas of practice and includes definitions from various countries); Cheryl Dileo Maranto's Music Therapy: International Perspectives (I think of this book because it speaks of music therapy in all of the countries which are represented in some detail and also includes what she calls a Global Perspective and Classification System); and the German book Lexikon Musiktherapie by Decker-Voigt, Knill, and Weymann, (which, of course, is not as accessible to me as are the previous books since it is written in German, for the reasons mentioned above). Each of these authors helps us to understand exactly what people mean when they speak of music therapy and of various approaches to music therapy. Their efforts might guide us in attempts to communicate clearly beyond our language difficulties as we share our perspectives on music therapy.

I have, of course, had experiences which have led me to the conclusions that I describe, and will speak of some on both ends of the spectrum (although probably not as far to both ends as they could be). I remember a discussion with a music therapist colleague in which she said that there was no point in dealing with the unconscious because it could not be observed. I am sorry to say that, at some point, I decided that there was no point in trying to communicate about the clinical aspects of music therapy with this person because it seemed that we were so far apart as to what we were looking for. On the other end, I often feel with my music therapist colleagues from Europe that improvisation is so central to the way that they think of music therapy that they do not picture my work - which combines planned music therapy experiences with improvisation, all of which is done in a free and improvisational manner - as it actually is.

I am quite sure that music therapists in some countries have worked to define the various aspects of music therapy, although I do not know if they have then shared the results of this work with others who might benefit from understanding it. I know that in Germany, for instance, there are people who might be considered in the U.S. to be doing music therapy but who are considered to be doing something else - I am unclear if it is educational music (perhaps it is called pedagogical music) or something else. It is possible that pedagogical music refers to yet something else. My point is not to show that I cannot remember the words that have been used to describe these various approaches and features (and I have chosen not to confirm the actual words with any of my German colleagues, although this is something that I have discussed with German music therapists on several occasions in the past), as I believe that I have probably paid more attention to this than most people, but that music therapists (myself included) do not take the time to ask and explain enough to truly understand what others are doing.

I do not want to understate the difficulty of the task or the amount of time that achieving this kind of understanding requires. Since we each come with our own assumptions and filters through which we perceive information, we must get through these in order to truly understand what the other person means. This can be very challenging.

And so I have come again, in a sense, to the point that I made in the earlier column - we do not take the time or make the effort to truly understand what others are doing. In my earlier column, I suggested that this was because we tend to pay attention to people and ideas that are familiar to us, for many good as well as limiting reasons. In this column I am suggesting that we do not take the time or make the effort to sort through the various problems with language and terminology in order to truly understand what our colleagues are doing and about what they are speaking. I hope that it is clear that I think that better understanding of people and ideas is a goal that is worth working toward.

I think that a publication like Voices can go far in helping us to get beyond the problems of language and different frameworks as we learn to communicate with others. And I am excited to be a part of this process, both in writing and in working to understand what others mean as they speak and write.

How to cite this page

Wheeler, Barbara (2001) The Various Problems with Language and Terminology. Voices Resources. Retrieved January 15, 2015, from http://testvoices.uib.no/community/?q=fortnightly-columns/2001-various-problems-language-and-terminology