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

Periodically I fall into a pit of despair about the possibility of music therapy having a community of scholars who are actually connected to one another. Yes, I know there are pockets of small groups who work together intensively on scholarly works in music therapy. There are think tanks and special interest collectives. I have had the privilege of being in a few of those groups myself. But I'm hoping for something much more inclusive, complex, and challenging.

The statistics about the lack of interest, in general, on research in music therapy are discouraging (Wheeler, 1995). As an editor for journals and a frequent shadow reader for music therapy articles and texts, I see that often, researchers do not connect the dots between each other. As a music therapy researcher who is now a grandmother, I also become discouraged about the lack of interest in connecting ideas across the generations. "It was very important for me to build my ideas on William Sears' first thoughts about music therapy theory, " I say to myself, in a rather righteous tone.

When I'm able to put my disappointments and my righteousness on the shelf, I also consider the logical drawbacks of not building a community of connected scholars, for maintaining a strong music therapy culture, in general. In order to build our research literature effectively, we do need to connect the dots. We need to compare and contrast ideas. We need to create a foundation.

Then I remember my own theory, my own worldview, which is one of those "ecological" theories. In my particular version of the ecological theory, seven fields alternate opening and closing. So perhaps it would be good to consider the possibility that in our own human development, sometimes we want to be open and sometimes we want to be closed. Nature does inform us about this.

If something is to grow, it must be contained for a time. Ideas need to germinate and hatch, too. There might be times in our own developmental cycle of life when we want to participate in a collective research experience and others when we want to be alone, to consider things in isolation in order to come up with something we hope is original and unique.

There's also the dilemma of context. How can we actually study someone else's context or compare elements of different contexts, out of context. Very confusing. There may still be a few old school researchers amongst us who are believers in the idea of objectivity. But the new schoolers would wave the hermeneutic flag. Misinterpretation. Misappropriation. And all the rest.

There are certainly plenty of hazards in building this community.

Turning to solutions, I ask myself about the key for building a community of scholars for music therapy. I'd have to say that respect is first on the list. Connecting the dots may mean hitting and missing until we have, over time, created a natural web of connections in our discourse, in our literature. The substance of such a web is respectful consideration.

I believe that one of the biggest contemporary challenges for dot connecting is between the "new behaviorists" in music therapy, who are hard wired into strong evidence in neuroscience about how music can offer predictable results, and those of us who focus more on process than product, many of whom love the ambiguity and poetry of the creative process. Can body and soul really meet? Can predictability and ambiguity meet? Predictability helps us to feel secure. Ambiguity keeps our sense of discovery alive and immediate, always on the edge. I have to admit that when I read about "aesthetics" as a mediating stimulus for behavioral change, I'm back in 1971, in Charles Braswell's music therapy class at Loyola University, resisting the idea of using music for "control." Music is a soulful expression. Give me a break.

Yet I feel inexorably attracted to learning about how the hard sciences can teach us about how people respond to music physiologically. My fear, of course, is that the hard sciences will inevitably overshadow the poetry and mystery of a process I truly love. However, I continue to want to learn. And I do respect. At least my hard science colleagues and I are using the same term, "aesthetics," though our associations to this term might be very different.

But are they so different really? We will only find out in a community of scholars who respect each other equally, listen to each other intensively, study each others' research and writings, struggle with each others' definitions, debate each others' ideas thoroughly, collaborate on each others' projects and keep their senses of humor.

Gatherings such as the World Congress for Music Therapy can make a beginning for such endeavors. But in order to be truly effective, our conversations and debates must be sustained over time.

Maybe just having the image of a Community of Scholars in Music Therapy as a possibility helps. Let's hope so. This is something worth imagining and creating.

Reference

Wheeler, Barbara (Ed.) (1995). Music Therapy Research: Quantitative and Qualitative Perspectives. Phoenixville, PA: Barcelona Publishers.

How to cite this page

Kenny, Carolyn (2002) Music Therapy's Community of Scholars: Connecting the Dots. Voices Resources. Retrieved January 15, 2015, from http://testvoices.uib.no/community/?q=fortnightly-columns/2002-music-therapys-community-scholars-connecting-dots