Tony Wigram: An appreciation from the last EMTC Past President to the first Past President

By Jos De Backer, EMTC past president (2001 – 2010)

A few times in a lifetime you meet someone who changes your life. Professionally for me this person was Tony Wigram. I met Tony for the first time in Groesbeek , Holland in 1992 where we prepared for the European Conference in Cambridge, England. My first experience of Tony was that he was a music therapist with a wonderful personality - an emotionally open man who was full of clear ideas. During this meeting he was already dreaming of creating a Network for Music Therapists in Europe, by bringing music therapists together to broaden all our knowledge. Tony always had vision towards the future, and significantly this dreaming about the EMTC was in a period where internet was not yet born – it was an idea ahead of its time.

This was the image of Tony that I had: a man who was very dynamic, happy and full of ideas about bringing people together - bringing people into dialogue by creating possibilities and projects enabling collaboration.

Besides his professional work in London (where he developed new treatments in music therapy for autism and disabled people) he also developed the international research program in Aalborg. The EMTC was one of his most important political projects. This he started with some friends and colleagues and it was in Cambridge that we had the first meeting of the EMTC - in a café. I can still see him full of excitement about the idea that we were creating something new.

In the first period of the EMTC, when Tony was the President, I remember very well how he organised things successfully and kept the connection between different countries by writing letters to Country Representatives. How things have changed today with the internet making these links so much easier. At the same time as creating this European network, Tony was also maintaining a sense of a European identity by beginning to travel to several countries, teaching and giving workshop, and of course to meet also with EMTC Country Representatives.

As long as I knew him, Tony was always there to coordinate and to improve the scientific quality of European committees for various conferences. As with other people who instigate ideas with such enthusiasm, I would describe Tony's wonderful energy as his personal way of working as a 'functional manic'. An example of this was for the European conference in Leuven, where we worked for two days and one night without sleeping in order to create and finalise the Belgian scientific programme. The simple but essential fact that also made this possible was that Tony knew everyone. He was full of passion and curiosity to see how music therapists improved their knowledge and specialisation. Tony frequently made often very important decisions and all the scientific committee members at European conferences learnt a lot from him.

Tony always was open to help the later EMTC Presidents (Gianluigi and myself) and gave us advice about how to develop the music therapy strategically in Europe. He had a more worldwide vision about the culture and methods in music therapy than anyone else I know – he really was the first World Wide Web (WWW) for Music Therapy. He knew so many people and was networking and offering his knowledge and connections to everyone in order to develop dialogue around the world. I was always very impressed about this and so thankful to him for it.

Tony was also critical about some developments in music therapy and we discussed this a lot when we were sitting in my garden during his breaks in travels between London and Aalborg. Of course, as friends, we shared other things together of a more personal nature and this was always part of our exchanges. I also remember a very long and dynamic evening developing and discussing the minimal standards for the European Music Therapy Register (EMTR) and interrupting this by improvising together at the piano, or cycling and walking. These minimal standards of the Europe Register are the cornerstone of the identity of the quality of music therapy and Tony believed very much in this and was proud that two years ago the EMTC made this register operational.

Thanks to Tony the EMTC started to grow but there were also difficult times, and the most painful experience in his EMTC history was the death of Gianluigi Di Franco. It is strange that we lost the two past EMTC Presidents too early, for they both had much more to contribute to our profession; as well as the personal loss to so many of us, there is also the professional loss to music therapy.

I took on the important job of EMTC President together with Dr. Julie Sutton and Dr. Monika Nöcker Ribauppiere, because the EMTC needed to continue to move forward from the new structure developed by Tony and Gianluigi. In one of the last visits I made to Tony he told me that he was very proud of the EMTC and was hoping that the new generation will safeguard the quality of European music therapy and to continue developing the dialogue between music therapists in different countries.

Thank you so much Tony for coming into the life of so many people and especially into my life. I will never forget you!