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

I have been thinking about the title of this column, "How Do We Hear All of the Voices?," in relation to several situations in my professional life. Writing this column gives me an opportunity to share a few of my thoughts.

Being in charge of a music therapy program in a School of Music in a University presents opportunities to help other music faculty to hear and accept the "voices" that represent the needs of music therapists. We have just passed an important curriculum revision at my university, which will allow our music therapy students to reallocate some of their applied music requirements (the study of their main instrument) to courses where they will use their music skills more improvisationally and in other was that are more directly related to how they will use them in music therapy. In getting this curriculum change passed, it was very important-and also very difficult-to help the other music faculty understand and hear the different voices of the music therapy students-the ways in which they need to learn to express themselves musically, and the skills that they need to build, but that are not those traditionally thought to be part of the music study of a music major. I am thankful that we were able to help the other faculty hear our needs-our voices-as different in some ways from those of other music majors.

Another opportunity to think about this comes as I work in my role as Vice President of the American Music Therapy Association (AMTA) to plan our next national conference, which will be in Austin, TX, November 18-21, 2004. I hope that this conference will be comprised of fine presentations that will stimulate those in attendance and help them develop their knowledge of music therapy. I also hope to have a diverse program that will bring in various voices-people using various approaches and philosophies and coming from various countries and cultures. One of the steps in developing such a program has been my selection of a program committee, whose members give me feedback on the proposals that we have received. We have completed the initial review process and it has been fascinating to see the variety of responses that the members of the program committee have had to the proposals-it has emphasized for me the reasons for such a committee. I am grateful as I read the feedback for the variety of reviewers as each of them brings their unique perspective to the program. Now my task is to put together a conference program that will reflect the diversity that I hope to reflect for those who attend. (Maybe some readers can attend this conference!! More information can be found at www.musictherapy.org)

I have also had some experiences in which music therapists from various international music therapy cultures have come together to work together to deepen their understanding of various issues related to music therapy. I have been aware that each person brings his or her own understanding-from his or her own music therapy culture-to these gatherings. One step in working together, then, involves coming to some common understanding of the topic. This can be difficult since we each have an idea of a particular topic that is formed from our own experiences and our own culture. For example, as people read in the first paragraph of this column that my university was adding more emphasis on improvisation, I am sure that they had different ideas of what this meant-I am sure that some pictured piano-based improvisation while others saw improvisation on many instruments; some pictured tonal improvisation, others atonal; some saw improvisation in a piano laboratory focusing on improvisational techniques, others saw clinical improvisation with clients. (I wrote about something similar in Voices in 2001, see http://www.voices.no/columnist/colwheeler240901.html). In order to hear all of our voices in this kind of setting, we must make real efforts to communicate and be open to the ideas of others. This is not an easy process.

Another level of hearing all of the voices, and one that can easily be overlooked, is to truly take in the breadth that is our music therapy community. That involves the Latin American voices, many of whom speak Spanish or Portuguese but not English., thus making some of the communication even more difficult. It involves the Asian voices, of which there are many. It includes the African voices, some of whom are heard in Voices but whom I have a more difficult time identifying. It includes voices from Eastern Europe where some of the music therapy traditions are quite different from those in the west or where music therapy is just beginning. These are added to the many voices from Australia, Western Europe, and North American with which I am more familiar but which still have many things to be discovered. The recent emphasis in Voices on the different is a special effort to hear the many voices.

I think that it is very important to be aware of all of these voices that are there to be heard. In some cases, we need to make special efforts to hear them (Voices is one of these efforts) but our efforts will be rewarded. If we are to understand the world of music therapy, it seems to me that we must make efforts to hear all of these voices.

How to cite this page

Wheeler, Barbara (2004). How Do We Hear All of the Voices? . Voices Resources. Retrieved January 09, 2015, from http://testvoices.uib.no/community/?q=fortnightly-columns/2004-how-do-we-hear-all-voices