Insights Fom Music Therapy Practice and Research

This book, drawing on the author’s 26 years as a music therapist, explores experience and evidence in music therapy. It asks which experiences count, why, and what is revealed of the cultures of music therapy when some experience is regarded as evidence and some is not. At the heart of music therapy lies a nonverbal phenomenon: 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 verbal, even when participants 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, and more. Through them, the reader (or ‘Collaborator’) is invited to consider the other knowing which comes from arts-based encounter, and its value. Using phenomenological and Aesthetic Critical Realist approaches, this work argues that relational, musical experience central to music therapy is valuable on its own terms as musically mediated, therapeutic evidence of personhood. This challenges the professional status quo which privileges verbal knowledge-creation and evidence measured by outsiders.

Jessica trained as a classical musician and linguist and was always puzzled by the distance from stage to audience. As a student, she discovered the writings of Nordoff and Robbins, pioneers in music therapy, and longed to think about people and music in the ways they did. This led to music therapy training and over the last twenty five years she has met and worked with participants who experience learning difficulties, life-limiting illness, emotional difficulties, bereavement, traumatic injury, physical disabilities and more. Jessica began research in order to understand better the nonverbal and arts-based knowing which lies at the heart of music therapy encounters. She completed her PhD at King’s College London, UK.