Selecting the Best Music for the Moment in a Music and Imagery Session

How do we Experience the Choosing? A Trioethnography

Abstract

Music and Imagery (MI) is a receptive music therapy method within the Continuum Model of Guided Imagery and Music developed by Lisa Summer. In receptive music therapy, clients listen to music for therapeutic purposes. The unique part of the MI method is that the client’s own music can be used. Three qualified music therapists from two countries trained together in the MI method and were grouped together for supervision. Moving away from the traditional therapist-client dyad model, we worked as a trio, with the third person in our trio actively witnessing the session and sharing her perspectives and reflections during the post-session discussion. This article focuses on discussing our experiences in selecting music for our individual processes, since this selection is the new concept in the MI method, called the transition. To report our experiences, we chose to use trioethnography. Each author told her own story, whilst the others took part actively in a small intervision group as critics, friends, and colleagues. In this way, we acknowledged each other’s processes as clients, therapists, and witnesses. Our experience of using intervision to explore the new concept of transition (choosing music) and reporting on that process using trioethnography was very positive. It became clear that intervision can be meaningful for all music therapists in clinical settings, and that trioethnography should be further explored as a research approach.