Even Ruud - Toward a sociology of music therapy : musicking as a cultural immunogen

To Pixie

List of Frames

: An alternative telling of music therapy

: Improvisation as a musical rhizome

: Music sets out lines of flight

: Evidence from the research

: Playing Chopin to overcome grief

: A listening ritual for overcoming grief and life crises

: Empowering songwriting

: The choir as a social network

: Musicking for social integration

: Health musicking in a Palestinian refugee camp

: Cultural antigens

: Transcendental experiences through music

: Transcendence in improvisation

: Collaboration

: Music as symbol

: Music as difference and intensity

: Changing consciousness through music

: Projecting personal issues into music

: Disillusioning experiences

: Normalizing expectations

: Who controls the controller?

: Health musicking under high security

FOREWORD

This book is about questioning the discipline, the profession, and the practice of music therapy. It is an effort to move the theory of music therapy in a sociological direction. After almost five decades of involvement in music therapy, I feel a need to look back, around, and toward the future. I have asked myself the following questions: What are the challenges coming from the world around us right now, and how do they affect our ways of thinking and doing musicking for health? How do I perceive the changes that have taken place in the field of music, health, and therapy? What is the nature of music therapy, and in what directions should our discipline, profession, and practices be moving?

After my last English publicationMusic Therapy: A Perspective from the HumanitiesI had no plans for any further publications in the field of music therapy. I finished editing my collected articles in two volumes and a general textbook on musicology, summing up my work as a professor in the Department of Musicology, University of Oslo. However, it has been almost impossible to stop reflecting on matters that have been of prime intellectual concern for most of my life. Meanwhile, my colleagues at the Center for Research in Music and Health (CREMAH) at the Norwegian Academy of MusicGro Trondalen, Karette Stensth, and Lars Ole Bondehave continued to invite me to their meetings and seminars and thus kept me updated on music therapyboth locally in Scandinavia and internationally. Thanks!

Then there were the invitations to write book chapters and articles. CREMAH initiated an anthologyMusical Life Stories: Narratives on Health Musickingwhich provided an opportunity to publish two of my narratives on the use of music in emotional regulation, as elaborated upon later in this book. Marie Sknland, as guest editor for the International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Well-being, invited me to write an article for a special issue on Music and Health. Here I took the opportunity to sum up some of my research based on interviews with people who had intentionally used music to influence their health. I thought the concept of music as a cultural immunogen deserved to be researched, theorized, and promoted.

Thanks also go to Karette Stensth, Jo Herstad, Birgitta Cappelen, and Anders-Petter Andersson, who let me into their RHYME project. For three years, we researched how advanced interactive technology could be utilized in work with children with varied disabilities. Thinking back upon this highly innovative project has added to my reflections on how music and new technologies increasingly will be entangled in our lives and how they possibly can enrich the lives of children and their families.

At the Norwegian Academy of Music, music educator, community musician, and colleague Vegar Storsve has for many years organized orchestras for children and youth in a Palestinian refugee camp in the south of Lebanon. I am grateful to have been invited several times during the past ten years to observe, research, and document this work through articles and photos. Thanks, Vegar!

I also have to mention how there has been an anniversarywe celebrated Forty+Thirty years of music therapy training in Norway (the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo and the Grieg Academy of Music at the University of Bergen). I have for some time observed how music therapy has become increasingly accepted by the Ministry of Health in Norway, by other health professionals, and by society at large. At the same time, we have witnessed how other professionals, musicians, and music educators, as well as musically trained health workers, have started to employ music as a health device in the community or in various institutions. In order to initiate debate about this situation, I gave a keynote at our national conference in June 2018. In my presentation, I tried to sort out which competencies were unique to music therapists and which they would have to share with other practitioners in the field. I would guess that sorting out the role, competency, or identity of a professional music therapist, as I try to do in one of the following chapters, would be of interest when discussing the role of music in improving health and life quality. This means defining the music therapist, not music therapy. Thanks to Viggo Krger and the Norwegian Association for Music Therapy for the opportunity to give this keynote.

My lifelong engagement with music therapy has also formed the background for some reflections on the history of modern musical therapies. My participation at conferences throughout the years, study visits, and lectures have led to many personal encounters with leading pioneering music therapists in my generation. I have tried to place some of these encounters in historical and political perspectives. Since I am inviting the envisioning of the future of health musicking, the practice of music therapy, and the professional roles and ways of theorizing about the field, it seems interesting to look back on our not-too-distant past.

Another source for this book comes through CREMAHs involvement in the International Consortium of Eight Music Therapy Research Universities with doctoral and research programs in music therapy. I had the privilege of being invited twice to their meetings at Temple University in Philadelphia. Many thanks to Cheryl Dileo for inviting me to the opening public sesssions and for challenging me to lecture on music therapy theory. I was invited to the first conference in 2016 to speak about The Future of Theory in Music Therapy. I thought this might make a nice concluding chapter for this book. Here I decided to predict the future of