This summer marks ten years since I completed my training at the Guildhall and became a qualified Music Therapist. For a while I’ve been thinking that I really want to do something, develop something or change something at this milestone in my career. Why this couldn’t happen at the nine or eleven year mark is a question I don’t have a sensible answer to (ten is a fairly arbitrary number after all), but I just felt like something was brewing.
And so to this new series of blogs, which I thought could be a helpful starting point; a way to think about where I’m at professionally and a way to potentially better understand what I might want to do next. Initially I planned to just do one extended piece to capture ten things I’ve learnt; ten short, sharp points, succinctly explained and easy to read.
It turns out I don’t do short or sharp very well.
So, whilst I feel genuinely nauseous at the thought of having a big ‘content’ push, social media not being my thing, I’m going to make a series of ten (hopefully digestible) blogs and post them periodically over the next six months. And then, well, I’ll see where I’ve got to.
Here goes with number one:
1. Defining Music Therapy is (still) really hard.
Somehow I imagined that after ten years of clinical experience I might be able to rattle off an insightful overview of what Music Therapy is at the drop of a hat. It wouldn’t matter who was asking or what the context was (a school, a hospital or down the pub), I could cut straight to the heart of what Music Therapy is and do myself and the profession justice.
The truth is, it’s still incredibly hard! If anything, I was probably more primed ten years ago, with my master’s degree in hand and the training fresh in my mind, to articulate something pithy and pertinent. Since then, if this was ever in doubt, it’s continually hit home that Music Therapy is so many different things to different people at different times. As expressed in the The Handbook of Music Therapy, “the issue of definition of the field of Music Therapy practice is a contested one”!
A group session with teenagers at an SEMH* school looks and feels completely different to an individual session with a four year old who has global developmental delay. An online group for neurodivergent young adults has an entirely different identity to an in-person community group for older adults with dementia. And those examples are just within the relatively narrow field of my own professional practice.
What about those Music Therapists based in hospitals on neuro-rehabilitation programmes? Or Music Therapists working with teenage asylum seekers living in emergency accommodation? What does Music Therapy look like there? And how would those people accessing Music Therapy (most commonly referred to as clients, but also patients, service users and other terms depending on the context) describe it differently to their therapist? What about Music Therapy in different countries across the world, using different medical, cultural and historical frameworks to guide their practices?
Herein lies the dilemma. There’s no easy way to capture all those elements of the profession in a cosy description, yet it’s really crying out for a short, clear, all-encompassing definition. Is it any wonder that despite being an NHS-recognised and HCPC** certified healthcare provision in the UK, Music Therapy is still often misunderstood or misrepresented?
After ten years, I really feel in a bind about all of this. If I try to define the profession in simple terms, I only really scratch the surface, missing out on really important nuances. If I contextualise, qualify, expand, and situate this continually evolving profession with more detailed cultural and historical references, I end up sounding overcomplicated, unclear and I risk losing a sense of its core principles and what can happen within a session.
Faced with this predicament, perhaps I can just try to articulate how I perceive Music Therapy and the way I work. I can’t speak for the whole profession, but I can at least speak for myself. It’s worth looking at my blogs here and here for some of that context and explanation. Case studies and vignettes of sessions (which I’ll draw on later in this blog series) can really help bring this to life too. And if pushed into a corner, I would always come back to a few core principles that I keep in mind:
I believe Music Therapy is about facilitating a safe, inclusive, flexible space where an individual (or group) can get to know themselves more, can feel connected to someone else through an attentively developed therapeutic relationship, can develop their creative and communicative potential, all in a way that contributes to broader benefits for their mental health and relationships.
There. That’s something. It’s not everything, but it’s something. It’s definitely not the pithy, punchy definition I would like to be able to recite at any given moment and there’s lots of things I’d ideally like to clarify and add, to refer to and put into perspective. After ten years, defining Music Therapy is (still) hard. It can be hugely frustrating at times, but on the whole I think the profession is all the better and all the richer for it.
*SEMH: A type of Special Educational Needs (SEN) school for young people who have particular difficulties around the social, emotional and mental health aspects of education.
**HCPC: Health & Care Professions Council
