Afterword: Knock knock…

Depending on context, responses to the well-known (and at times tedious) opening range from:

Many, many years ago, as part of an ‘audition’ for an undergraduate music degree, I found myself under headphones, being asked to distinguish electronic beeps from one another: longer, slower, higher, louder – as part of a ‘musical aptitude test.’ Having prepared Bach, Mozart and Fauré, this was a curious detour.

Some years later, as part of my doctoral data work, and with a cursory nod to the Luria Nebraska rhythm test, I asked around 80 people with chronic schizophrenia to imitate a variety of taps on a drum, left handed, right handed, parallel handed and alternate handed – before engaging in a free-flow co-improvisation.

Fast forward to a PhD seminar at Nordoff Robbins some weeks ago, and we’re discussing how to navigate between experiencing, sensing, knowing, thinking, studying and discoursing the dynamic experiences in music therapy; how to retain context while studying detail; how to link while also separating.

In the first scenario, the collection of disembodied sounds was the portal to deciding whether the ‘musical’ aptitude score warranted further music training. The second scenario tested the perception, receptivity, assimilation, coordination and integration of the motor functioning of people labouring under intense medication for chronic mental illness. In both scenarios, responses to sounds and patterns were taken to convey ‘something’ about music and people, neatly sealed in the psycho/neuro/music frames of those times and places. The activities fulfilled their functions. The third scenario is closer to the spirit of the conference and of the articles in this special issue: questioning and dismantling the filters through which music psychologists and music therapists know, ‘make sense of,’ and explain music and communication, communication and music.

At the risk of caricaturing professional endeavours, here are some attitudes that, I respectfully suggest, face music therapists and psychologists, when listening to one another speak. When music therapists’ music-talk includes descriptions of emotional, behavioural, relational musical enactments with clients through discourses that at times meld, and at times switch between, musical, therapeutic and workplace conventions, psychologists may well scratch their heads at the soft, multiple, misty-focussed language. When music psychologists speak of entrainment, MRIs, emotion, interaction, intentionality and communication, music therapists may well ask: where’s the person? Where’s the relationship? Where’s everyday life? How can such crucial contexts be side-lined?

Could these – and other – fault-lines be reconfigured? To divert for a moment: There is a pressing and rather ominous knock at the doorstep of the arts. Whether music is understood and studied inside brains, between players, between a player and a beep, among the ensemble, or between a recording and a healthcare practitioner, the articles here need urgent and direct linking to the messy life contexts outside the laboratory or the music therapy room, and beyond that, to the depressing realities of funding for the arts. It is time, also, to advocate. In the recent Arts Council England Literature Review (Carnwath & Brown, 2014) entitled Understanding the value of cultural experiences for all, the opening paragraph by Alan Davey, the Chief Executive of ACE is apposite: ‘“who is asking about value?”, and “what does value mean?”’ (p. 2). While the ACE review acknowledges the impact of the arts on the economy, health & wellbeing, and society and education, the intellectual, cultural and social currencies offered by this special issue apparently remain invisible to policy-makers. The Arts & Health Research Community – which includes music therapists – is responding vigorously (though one suspects, rather pointlessly), and we need music psychologists to get on board. Music therapy is a perfect portal for arguing forcefully for the social and cultural value of music. The convenient economic dismissal of artistic value – whether in health care, education, or concert halls – adds urgency to ensuring that researchers’ and practitioners’ interests are strongly linked and informed by everyday applications. While this issue focusses the attention of scholars and practitioners who have music and communication in common, some further transposing and translating might be a next step. Studies about entrainment, brain activities, musical relationships, honest signals and social uncertainties need to now convey a joined-up, unambiguous signal: that individual and collective engagements in music may well help to alleviate costs to healthcare and the criminal justice systems, and that musicians’ focused communicative skills may transpose well to educators, community workers, economists and politicians.

But, to return to this special issue on music and communication.

Music, in this issue, is underpinned by distinctive ontologies, studied through distinctive methodological filters, through the endeavours of researchers and practitioners with different urgencies and priorities. These distinctions help to detect and enrich conceptual misalignments, and more usefully perhaps, to raise vigilance at apparent alignments of language and meaning. Some of the misalignments emerge from differences in the scale of the musical enactment or event being studied and presented (between moments and months). Others are evident in explanations of how the extra-musical links with – or remains separate from – the events being studied.

Could some misalignments be both retained and addressed concurrently – in real time and real places? For instance, researchers from both disciplines could agree to coordinate scale: from the seemingly all-inclusive everyday music-worlds scale, to considering the minutiae of musical actions. Thus, for example, researchers from music psychology and music therapy might direct their respective expertise and techniques to subtle inter-musical enactments in a range of settings – in the interest of sharpening methodologies, discourses and advocacy. These settings might range from the uncontrolled, unscripted, everyday co-improvisation moments in music therapy, alongside the scripted, controlled laboratory research situation, alongside the scripted but less controllable performance moments in the concert hall. While assembling diverse research methods on a common phenomenon, they would also undertake to retain the link with that phenomenon’s distinctive, real-world context (the concert performance, the class-room, the music therapy improvisation, the research laboratory). And keep an eye on movements of policy-makers and health economies. And – what’s more – researchers and practitioners would hold one another to account: testing and checking one another’s assumptions and discourses.

This special issue is a start in exploring how the activities of music-practitioners (in this instance, music therapists) and music-researchers can inform one another, at the very least, but also help to identify what it is that respective disciplines and practices (those of music therapy and music psychology) need to know more about, and for what purpose. That is the plus in the conference on music and communication. Research and practice belong together and don’t need to wait for policies or funding crises. For music therapists, constantly faced with the spectre of translating their work into evidence, impact and value for money, the study – and possible dismantling – of assumptions from allies who are passionate about music is urgent. For research-psychologists, needing to justify time and endeavours, music therapy is a perfect prism: a culturally sanctioned (if endangered) activity based on the premise that music helps people.