Muti Music - In search of suspicion

Authors

  • Mercédès Pavlicevic Nordoff Robbins Music Therapy London UK; School of Oriental and African Studies, London UK; University of Pretoria, South Africa.
  • Charlotte Cripps Nordoff Robbins Music Therapy, London, UK; MUSICWORKS, Cape Town.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15845/voices.v15i3.836

Keywords:

medical ethnomusicology, music therapy, health, healing rituals, South Africa, cultural spaces, music healing narratives,

Abstract

Our playful title, "Muti Music", emblematises our stance of deliberate and cultivated suspicion towards medical ethnomusicology, for this special issue. Positioned within and between music therapy, medical anthropology and ethnomusicology, this paper considers how these disciplinary discourses and practices might engage with Medical Ethnomusicology, and what that prism might offer music therapy in particular. Muti Music proposes messy hybridity, which we suggest reflects the social-cultural and cosmological fusions necessary for contemporary practices whether in, or of, the South, East, North or West. Straddling the South and the Global North, we propose that Western (and at times bio-medically informed) healing and health practices might well consider reclaiming and re-sourcing their own, and other, traditional and indigenous healing cosmologies, whatever their respective and situated ideologies and ontologies. Despite apparent (and possibly intellectual and ideological) segmentations and separations of disciplines by Western scholarship and economics, we propose that "the ancestors" and "the aspirin" need to embrace rather than view one another with suspicion. Just possibly, each might become enriched (and discomforted) by the silenced coincidences of one another’s desires to know and experience our common humanity through music.

Author Biographies

Mercédès Pavlicevic, Nordoff Robbins Music Therapy London UK; School of Oriental and African Studies, London UK; University of Pretoria, South Africa.

Mercédès Pavlicevic is Research Director at Nordoff Robbins Music Therapy, and an Associate of SOAS, University of London.

Charlotte Cripps, Nordoff Robbins Music Therapy, London, UK; MUSICWORKS, Cape Town.

Charlotte Cripps is a graduate of SOAS, and is currently a researcher based at MUSICWORKS, Cape Town, and with Nordoff Robbins Music Therapy  in London.

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Published

2015-11-09

How to Cite

Pavlicevic, M., & Cripps, C. (2015). Muti Music - In search of suspicion. Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy, 15(3). https://doi.org/10.15845/voices.v15i3.836