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

This time we have to fight a lot for our music therapy course in Magdeburg. However, this fight starts for me and us a new thinking about academic music therapy training in Germany and in many other places around the world.

The starting point of our fight is that we have to change all study courses in Germany from 4-year fulltime University-of-applied-sciences-study courses, 5-year fulltime University-courses and three-year-second-graduate-certification-courses to 3-year Bachelors and 2-year Masters courses because of the standardisation of academic grades all over Europe. In the old system we had in Germany two 4-year-fulltime-University-of-applied-sciences-study courses and about five 3-year-second-graduate-certification-courses which were only used by graduates from other subjects like music, psychology, social pedagogy, etc. and not from the above mentioned music therapy courses (see also country of the month Germany). The recommendation for our 4-year-fulltime-University-of-applied-sciences-study course was that we should change it to a 2-year Masters-course.

From one point of view it could be a developement. However, we are just fighting for a three year Bachelors-course (in Germany you go to a bachelor course after a minimum of 12 years of school education). Why?

From my and our point of view the BA of music therapy is very necessary for the music therapy practice, music therapy profession and music therapy research. For the first time in Germany, when this can happen, a real MA in music therapy can be offered to music therapists holding a BA in music therapy and not for specialists of other professions. So, in the end, such MA-students are not foreigners to music therapy, and don't just start to think and act in music therapy (like with a subject of an undergraduate study course). And: these MA-students get a better basis for entering PhD-study-courses of music therapy. This will be of special importance for outstanding music therapy research, because the PhD will be their third and not only the second step in their academic music therapy training. Such models in music therapy training are working successfully in Europe at Aalborg University in Denmark and in the USA at Temple University in Philadelphia (and all of you know i.e., how many leading research colleagues of our worldwide scientific community who did study in one of these two universities).

Also for the profession of music therapy this model is a step towards "normalization". In all other related professions of music therapy, i.e. psychology, medicine or musicology, this is a way to study a subject from the very beginning of the training, and is the normal route. This also gives e.g. the psychologists a very clear identification with their profession. This clear identification, beside the acknowledgement of music therapy in everyday practice, is often a problem in the field of clinical practice of music therapy (who am I? - first a musician and then a music therapists or first a music therapist and then a social worker?). Also these psyche developments of professional identification need time. And: at this time we have enough material to teach and learn and develop even 8 years (or more) full time courses in music therapy (BA + MA + PhD). Another reason for our fight is that the clinical practice in music therapy looks for BAs in music therapy. This is a very practical need that we also can and have to serve in the academic training of music therapist.

These are some thoughts of mine and of our group about the general structure of academic music therapy education. Of course, also in this field we just now have thousand of ways of becoming a music therapist. However, some decades have passed since the early childhood of this academic subject and as in all of our related professions and sciences which also works academically and professionally with and about human being, a "normal" academic route could now become more and more common.

I would enjoy very much, if some others have ideas, comments or critical remarks about this or if someone could start a discussion about these thoughts, which touches the same way clinical music therapists and music therapy teachers and researches, and give feedbacks from other academic educational systems all over the world.

How to cite this page

Wosch, Thomas (2005). Which Academic Education in Music Therapy Do We Need. Voices Resources. Retrieved January 12, 2015, from http://testvoices.uib.no/community/?q=fortnightly-columns/2005-which-academic-education-music-therapy-do-we-need