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

In Japan, the school semester starts in April and ends in March. In April I started to use Voices for one of my classes in Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. This class is Special Study of Applied Musicology, which, for all practical purposes, is a class for music therapy. The main target students are the graduate musicology students who focus on music therapy, but it is quite open for anybody who wishes to as well as capable of participating in it.

This year, 7 students met in this class. Among them, two are preparing for the graduate thesis focused on music therapy (among them, one is a student from China), two are preparing for a bachelor project focused on music therapy, (one is hoping to study aesthetics in graduate school next year), one is a doctoral student majoring in cognitive music psychology, and one is a master's student majoring in baroque organ performance and also working as a professional music therapist in an hospice.

For this diverse and unique group of students, I suggested several plans in April, from which they chose the idea of reading Voices and utilizing it for the discussion.

So I created the following procedures. Each student is supposed to pick one column and one main issue during this semester and to lead the class in a discussion of these topics. This includes:

1) Summarizing the article.

2) Leading the class towards deepening and processing their thoughts. Here, the student has to: Quote at least one related text from the literature; Involve the class members in the discussion (which means that it is not enough to merely present the content of the article).

3) Integrating (not necessarily concluding) the discussion in one way or another.

4) Communicating with the articles author on the net about our response to the article.

So far this class is going well, and I look forward to Wednesday mornings when we meet. The students seem to enjoy the free but structured debates, and the opportunity to touch the on-going real world of music therapy, although the presenter suffers from a restless night before his/her presentation. In many cases, the discussion goes into big and essential questions that cannot be fully discussed within the class time, so we continue to discuss them on the net by using the electric bulletin board.

Here are three reasons why I find it beneficial to use Voices in this class:

1) The Geographical Diversity: The live voices from different parts of the world give us the open view for music therapy. The discussion about music therapy often ends up in a complicated mental maze, but when we look at it through a different social context, there is a new discovery. For example, the column "Moments" by Mercédès Pavlicevic raised a big question for us, Can we really declare that music therapy is called for in extreme poverty? What concrete contribution can we make as a music therapist in such situation? This kind of basic/essential question is often forgotten in Japanese students' and musicians' minds who are used to moderate materialistic wealth.

2) The Liberal Capacity of Voices to Accept Different Approaches and Ideas. By majoring in any field as a specialty, we often start to think similarly, speak similarly and write similarly. But when we read the articles from Voices, each writer makes his/her own unique world and insists what (s)he has to. (It is as if walking on the Roppong street in Tokyo in this month of the World Cup in Soccer: supporters from the different countries are releasing their heated up energy everywhere!) This diversity in a way of thinking is also reflected in a way of expressing it. It is very interesting to taste how each writer constructs his/her papers in order to best express their opinions. Some are logical, some are sensuous, some are repetitious, some are diary-like.... This is in contrast to the situation in most academic journals, which usually consist of the same pattern in terminology, phrasing, and structuring.

3) Simultaneity and Communicability. The students seem to enjoy the simultaneity between the lives of the authors and of themselves. We can read the Voices articles as the opinions of people who share the same world news we watch in the daily TV news, for example the NY terror in September 2001. This week we read Carolyn Kenny's "Time of Tribes: Can We Sing This Song?," and the discussion went into the essential question for music therapists: What is the metaphor of client for us? Why do we choose to work with the people who are handicapped/hurt/sick? Another effect of the simultaneity is that it opens up our minds to speak freely, which is not always the case when we read the great Classics. And Simultaneity makes it possible to communicate in a practical way too. As we study the Classics, the questions or the opinions conceived in the readers mind will be left up in the air forever unanswered, but with Voices, we can actually try to communicate with the authors and the other readers. This communicability will also be helpful to overcome the backside of diversity, which could become just fragmental speaking-out.

From these merits, the students (and I) feel as if we are breathing the fresh air in music therapy study. This experience must be nurturing for them, because they need to expand/cultivate their understanding of music therapy as well as to create their original view related to their background. And the above-mentioned three merits seem to be essential for today's music therapy field itself.

To the editors and authors: Please be generous to respond, if my students try to communicate with you on the net!

How to cite this page

Ikuno, Rika (2002) Using Voices for the Graduate Class Discussion in Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. Voices Resources. Retrieved January 16, 2015, from http://testvoices.uib.no/community/?q=fortnightly-columns/2002-using-voices-graduate-class-discussion-tokyo-national-university-fine-arts-