ISBN-13: 9783031862199 / Angielski / Twarda / 2025 / 288 str.
This book, which draws on the author’s 26 years as a music therapist, explores experience and evidence in music therapy. It asks which experiences count and why, and what is revealed of the cultures of music therapy when some of what is experienced is regarded as evidence and some is not. Music therapy is seen as comprising all the interactions of diverse stakeholders, such that those who need can participate in therapy. At the heart of music therapy lies a nonverbal phenomenon: the shared musical encounter. Those involved can recognise it and respond without words, as ‘insiders’. However, what this experience is, and how it relates to evidence, is not widely explored in music therapy practice and research. Furthermore, the investigations which do exist tend to be predominantly verbal, even when participants themselves are nonverbal. As an alternative, this autoethnographic book honours the arts-based encounters fundamental to music therapy by offering the reader their own arts-based experience through poems, images, artefacts, video and an improvised musical soundtrack. Through them, the reader (or ‘Collaborator’) is invited to consider the other knowing which comes from arts-based encounter, and its value. In keeping with the arts-based topic and methodology, the book is presented by different Roles, each reflecting aspects of the author’s own experience. Using phenomenological and Aesthetic Critical Realist approaches to provide an ontological framework for this shared musical experience, this work argues that such experience is indeed valuable on its own terms; that it constitutes, in fact, musically mediated, therapeutic evidence of personhood. This conclusion challenges the professional status quo which privileges knowledge-creation that is verbal and evidence that is measured by outsiders, and so should be of great value for anyone looking to revise and expand their practice as a music therapist, or other relational arts practice with people, and its research.
This book, which draws on the author’s 26 years as a music therapist, explores experience and evidence in music therapy. It asks which experiences count and why, and what is revealed of the cultures of music therapy when some of what is experienced is regarded as evidence and some is not. Music therapy is seen as comprising all the interactions of diverse stakeholders, such that those who need can participate in therapy. At the heart of music therapy lies a nonverbal phenomenon: the shared musical encounter. Those involved can recognise it and respond without words, as ‘insiders’. However, what this experience is, and how it relates to evidence, is not widely explored in music therapy practice and research. Furthermore, the investigations which do exist tend to be predominantly verbal, even when participants themselves are nonverbal. As an alternative, this autoethnographic book honours the arts-based encounters fundamental to music therapy by offering the reader their own arts-based experience through poems, images, artefacts, video and an improvised musical soundtrack. Through them, the reader (or ‘Collaborator’) is invited to consider the other knowing which comes from arts-based encounter, and its value. In keeping with the arts-based topic and methodology, the book is presented by different Roles, each reflecting aspects of the author’s own experience. Using phenomenological and Aesthetic Critical Realist approaches to provide an ontological framework for this shared musical experience, this work argues that such experience is indeed valuable on its own terms; that it constitutes, in fact, musically mediated, therapeutic evidence of personhood. This conclusion challenges the professional status quo which privileges knowledge-creation that is verbal and evidence that is measured by outsiders, and so should be of great value for anyone looking to revise and expand their practice as a music therapist, or other relational arts practice with people, and its research.