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

Music therapy scholars are always trying on new sets of theoretical clothes in an attempt to find the best fit, the one that rings true for our practice. Playing with categories is fun. And in the academy we get lots of kudos for our creative category play. Beneath this abstract proliferation of categories, one usually finds a sincere effort to come to terms with ineffable phenomenon like music or music therapy that defy many standard categories. Perhaps that's why it is hard to "land" on a set of categories that totally rings true all the time, in every situation in our music therapy worlds. The strength and the weakness of such category play is standardization.

A few music therapists, like myself, have attempted to challenge standard theoretical ideas and to create some ideas that are lightly grounded in broader ideas of thought, but generate new sets of categories that match our experiences in music therapy more authentically. These efforts meet with mixed results.

And if a scholar keeps circling back into ideas, reflecting once, twice, thrice, and more, there is a natural self-critique that engages us. In my case, I am currently reconsidering a school of thought that I had earlier rejected . That school of thought is Symbolic Interactionism. I would like to introduce you to some of the books I am reading today.

Like many American scholars, I have occasionally exercised a kind of internalized oppression by rejecting "American" theoretical ideas. When I did my doctoral studies in the 1980's many of my mentors grounded their ideas in the work of American pragmatists John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, two of the father's of Symbolic Interactionism. I have always admired Kenneth Aigen for embracing John Dewey's ideas on aesthetics and attempting to relate them to music therapy. But while I was an academic in Canada, John Dewey was not considered very special in the ranks of British philosophers/scholars tenured in our Faculty.

My interest in Symbolic Interactionism only became activated when I began to work as an academic activist in indigenous communities. This school of thought gives serious consideration to "borders" - divergent realities that trigger change processes in the society. I see how clearly the cultural practices of indigenous peoples reflect some of the core concepts of symbolic interactionism when I look through the lens of cultural studies. Norman Denzin's text entitled Symbolic Interactionism and Cultural Studies brought these two schools of thought together for me in a postmodern context, and one which could easily help to describe what is going on in contemporary indigenous communities and with indigenous sites of struggle. Howard Becker and Michal McCall also published a book with a similar title, an edited edition, which gave a prominent place to the arts. Of course much of the Cultural Studies scholarship focuses on the arts, which is another reason to include it in my category play.

These two schools of thought, largely influenced by sociological premises can contribute a great deal to the idea of "community-based music therapy", a category recently introduced into the music therapy discourse by Brynjulf Stige and Gary Ansdell.

However, my interest in these two schools of thought is viewed through a third lens, qualitative research. In Pertti Alasuutari's 1995 text Researching Culture: Qualitative Method and Cultural Studies, these three lenses seem to be coming together. Alasuutari's work has started an integrative process in my mind.

Alasuutari's treatment of "narrativity", his discussion about the place of theoretical ideas in cultural studies, his critique of quantitative methods and eventual implication of the need for "mixed methodology" are all on my mind these days.

As a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research at the University of California, I am surrounded by the worlds of Sociology and Medical Anthropology, Economics, Environmental Studies, and ;Computer Sciences. In my world, the societal questions about music therapy in the broader context must be asked along with the questions about the role of the arts in indigenous societies. These two areas of interest are not separate in my mind.

However, my work at the University is grounded by improvising with little 20-month old Garrett or singing and rocking with 4-year-old Danny and serving as an advocate for their continuing music therapy services with government bureaucrats who often do not share or understand my categories. Yet, this conversation is a site of worthy struggle and represents the bridge-building process.

Ultimately, the privacy and intimacy of music therapy with individuals and small groups into the macrocosm and we must consider the implications of our work in the broader context. This is so clearly illustrated in Stige's new book, Culture-centered Music Therapy.

So, our category play is important. As music therapists we have to keep up with the societies in which we live, their changing natures, their changing budget priorities, their changing politics.

The world of ideas continues to grow.

Resources

Aigen, Kenneth (1991). The roots of Music Therapy: Towards an Indigenous Research
Paradigm. New York University Doctoral Thesis.

Alasuutari, Pertti (1995). Researching Culture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Becker, Howard S. & McCall, Michal M. (Eds.) (1990). Symbolic Interaction and
Cultural Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Denzin, Norman K.(1990). Symbolic Interactionism and Cultural Studies: The Politics of
Interpretation. Cambridge: Blackwell.

Stige, Brynjulf (2002). Culture-centered Music Therapy. Gilsum, NH: Barcelona
Publishers.

How to cite this page

Kenny, Carolyn (2003) Music Therapy Category Play. Voices Resources. Retrieved January 15, 2015, from http://testvoices.uib.no/community/?q=fortnightly-columns/2003-music-therapy-category-play