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The present text is a revised version of a paper presented at “Commemorative Seminar. The Academic Life of Professor Tony Wigram” arranged at Aalborg University November 5, 2011. I was invited to talk about Tony Wigram’s academic contribution to the Nordic Journal of Music Therapy (NJMT) and to the Nordic music therapy research community more generally. Since Tony was such an important figure in international music therapy and since NJMT is a “sister journal” of Voices, I find it pertinent to present these reflections as a Voices column:

I want to start by thanking the organizers of this seminar for this opportunity to honor Tony Wigram’s work, and I thank you all for this beautiful commemorative seminar. How Tony has contributed to the development of Nordic music therapy could not be overestimated. This is something we have experienced very directly in Bergen, where I work. Our research community has profited very much from the fantastic job he did with the international PhD program in Aalborg. Two of our current scholars, Christian Gold and Randi Rolvsjord, are previous Aalborg candidates. Two former members of the music therapy faculty in Bergen also took their PhD in Aalborg, namely Cochavit Elefant and Rudy Garred. Tony’s tireless efforts have inspired and will continue to inspire researchers in all of the Nordic countries. He has taught us so much about hard work, good work, and shared work.

I will try to reflect on this by thinking back to the first time I met Tony. I was in bed, then. It was around midnight, in Schæffergården, a conference center in Copenhagen run by The Foundation of Danish-Norwegian Cooperation. Music therapists from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden were gathered there to talk about the possibility of establishing a Nordic research network. When I checked in the first afternoon I was told that I would share room with an Englishman called Tony Wigram, but that he had not arrived yet. I went to bed a bit before midnight. He was still not there and I assumed that he would not come. Then, just as I was about to fall asleep, there was a lot of noise. A man with loads of bags and things to carry tumbled into the room. He was in good mood and presented himself as Tony Wigram. I believed him.

We did have some interesting days together in Copenhagen, not that the two of us were a perfect match. We both realized very quickly that our styles and preferences were poles apart. Our personalities were different, indeed, and we came from very different cultures also. Still, we did enjoy each other’s company. The elegant and talkative Englishman and the more introvert and silent Norwegian at points did hit the same note, which was a fascinating process.

The second day he must have decided that he probably could trust this Norwegian, or he was desperate, I don’t know, but he asked me to represent Norway in the young association that he was building up, called EMTC (back then a committee, currently the European Music Therapy Confederation). He told me that he would build the committee by inviting selected people instead of asking each country’s association to elect somebody. That would make the group function better, he claimed. I remember thinking that this wasn’t too democratic. In my head I silently started to compare EMTC to various old men’s empires, such as the International Olympic Committee. But – he was able to convince me that this was one sensible way of getting started and that procedures could evolve in more democratic directions over time. So, I said yes and did represent Norway in EMTC for a couple of years before Gro Trondalen was elected, or selected – I don’t remember – as the Norwegian representative.

The third day in Copenhagen I must have decided that I could trust this Englishman; I told him about my plan of establishing the Nordic Journal of Music Therapy. I knew it was a bit early to establish this journal. In the Nordic context there were not too many potential journal contributors with a PhD degree in music therapy (strictly speaking only two, namely Even Ruud and Kimmo Lehtonen). I was supposed to be the editor but didn’t even have a Masters degree, even though I had published a few things. That wasn’t just my personal problem; it reflected the general situation. A Masters degree in music therapy was a rare thing in those remote times twenty years ago. There was no Masters program in music therapy in my own country, for instance. Still, my vision was to establish a peer-reviewed journal, to stimulate the development of research in our field. My “stomach” insisted on the idea and that the time was right, but I wasn’t really able to find the language to describe why that was so.

Not too many had been enthusiastic when I talked about this idea, but Tony was very curious and positive about it. Immediately he offered his help. Was there anything he could do? Hm, eh …... I wasn’t sure. This was supposed to be a Nordic journal and the idea was to have the main bulk of articles in the Scandinavian languages. How could the journal use an Englishman? Well – the editorial board had decided that the journal should allow for some articles in English too, so that we could include the Finns and some international contributions (if by any chance anyone would take any interest in this new, little journal). I ended up asking Tony if he could be the language consultant. Thinking back, I feel a bit ashamed. I was trying to establish a new peer-reviewed journal. I was sharing room with a music therapist who would make huge contributions to music therapy research internationally, and I asked him if he could be the language consultant. Well, I hope you understand some of the historical context.

Things have changed. During the 1990s, music therapy grew more academic. By 1998, the editorial board decided that all articles in NJMT should be published in English. Over the years the journal grew international in its orientation and much more ambitious. As the journal evolved, so did Tony’s roles in it evolve too. After being a language consultant for several years he did a huge effort in trying to establish a culture of debate and discussion. Then, after Christian Gold took over as the editor in 2006, Tony became one of the associate editors, which of course was a role he more than qualified for from the very beginning.

I will not go into details of what Tony did in the various roles he had in NJMT but instead reflect on how he did what he did. With great enthusiasm he accepted the initial little invitation to be a language consultant. As articles came in, written in prose which could perhaps be recognized as English, he read and reread and made the best suggestions as to how people could improve their language. Some would think that being a language consultant is a peripheral role in a journal. Perhaps this is not true. If it is, Tony’s efforts remind us about how significant so-called peripheral roles can be in collaborative work.

Tony’s enthusiastic entrance into the role of being a language consultant happened at a very special time in Nordic music therapy. I find no better way of describing this time than to suggest that a community of practice was in the process of being born. A community of practice is a group of people who share visions and values as well as tools and practices in the pursuit of shared goals (Wenger, 1998). The year before I met Tony, in 1991, I had the privilege of chairing the first Nordic conference of music therapy, in the little town of Sandane in Western Norway. There was no proper community of Nordic music therapy before that conference. There were strong relationships between some of the pioneers in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, but no connections whatsoever to Iceland or Finland, for instance. When we arranged the first Nordic conference, we used weeks to identify any possible music therapists in Iceland and Finland. Iceland is not the biggest country in the world, so we found Valgerdur Jonsdottir relatively easy. We used much more time before we were able to track down the Finnish music therapists. The fact that there was a solid Finnish music therapy education in Jyväskylä was absolutely not known to any of us.

I share this, to illuminate how much things have changed the last twenty years. In the Nordic conference in Sandane in 1991 some of us met for the first time and we started to talk about possibilities of strengthening the Nordic bonds and to develop things together. Two of the ideas that we discussed were to establish a Nordic journal and a Nordic research network. All of us had limited resources so we decided for a division of labor. The year after, NJMT was established in Sandane and Aalborg University took the initiative to establish a research network. The times were fascinating. Most of us hardly knew how to spell the word research, but the Danes took leadership. In 1993 they organized a stimulating Nordic research network and out of this evolved Aalborg’s well-known international PhD program in music therapy. In this process, Tony’s role would gradually evolve from a relatively peripheral one to a central one.

Today I am intrigued by thinking back on Tony’s enthusiasm for any of the roles that he had. I think this tells us something about his significance in the creation of a Nordic community of practice in music therapy. Not just what he did (which we all know was unbelievably much) but also the way he did it, contributed to this process. I think it’s fair to say that what he did and the way he did it was non-Nordic in many ways. It is not easy to find language for description of that, but perhaps we could say that he introduced a duality by being non-native. From the anthropological literature, we know that duality is absolutely essential if we try to understand the dynamics that drive change and creativity in communities of practice (Wenger, 1998). We need experts and we need newcomers. We need enthusiasts and we need skeptics. Processes are dual too, with participation and reification, identification and negotiation, and so on. We need to have identities and roles but they also need to be negotiated and changed. Tony’s non-native presence and participation was crucial, I think, in the dynamics of change that transformed the somewhat isolated Nordic cultures of music therapy into more connected communities with shared ideas and ideals.

I therefore hope that we can honor his memory by continuing to develop communities of practice where we welcome non-native impulses that could help us create productive dynamics of duality. Of course, non-native in this context does not necessarily refer to scholars from other countries. It could also refer to scholars from other disciplines or academic traditions.

Reference

Wenger, Etienne (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. New York: Cambridge University Press.

How to cite this page

Stige, Brynjulf (2012). Reflections on Tony Wigram’s contribution to Nordic music therapy. Reflections on Tony Wigram’s contribution to Nordic music therapy. Voices Resources. Retrieved January 09, 2015, from http://testvoices.uib.no/community/?q=fortnightly-columns/2012-reflections-tony-wigram-s-contribution-nordic-music-therapy