Abstract
The fields of music therapy and music education each have their own developed literature and literary traditions. Rickson and McFerran position their new book innovatively in relation to these domains by addressing from the vantage point of music therapy, an area viewed typically as the preserve of music education. Their central contention is that community music therapy, as a theoretical framework for thinking about both human growth and musical development, has a great deal to offer scholastic communities of learners, educators, administrators and families. This argument is an immediately appealing one, and their ideas will be of value to anyone interested in generating inclusive musical opportunities in such settings.
In the first three chapters of Creating music cultures in the schools, the authors lay out, respectively, their project’s philosophical, political and practical underpinnings. To educationalists, many of the themes in this section will be familiar: the ecological model of Bronfenbrenner (1979); the emancipatory philosophy of Freire (2000); the notions of ‘musicking’ from Small (1998) and Elliott (1995). While Rickson and McFerran’s engagement with these ideas holds no real surprise, this introductory section provides a welcome statement of the inclusive values – mutuality, respect, empowerment and commitment (pp. 38–42) – to which they subscribe. For some readers, however, two of the authors’ key assertions may prove more controversial: first, that therapeutic programmes of the kind they advocate should address whole school communities rather than targeted individuals and, second, that such programmes ‘should be focused less on intervention and more on positive participation’ (p. 10).
Both ideas arguably signal a significant widening of the therapeutic net. Key questions emerging from this widening are anticipated by Ecclestone and Hayes in The dangerous rise of therapeutic education (2008), a text which Rickson and McFerran address directly in their first chapter. Indicative questions include whether by ‘normalising’ therapy, we teach children that they require professional assistance in order to manage their own emotions; another is whether the experiences of those young people in desperate need of therapeutic interactions are somehow devalued when therapeutic practices are cast more broadly. A yet more important and preceding question, given the interdisciplinary space in which the authors locate their work, might be whether the practices they propose are fundamentally acts of therapy at all or whether they should be categorized as acts of education.
Rickson and McFerran’s use of a vocabulary centred on the key term ‘well-being’ is congruent with their background as therapists and their conceptualization of their work as therapy. Implied in everything they write, however, is an aspiration to maximize and realize the potential of individuals and communities in and through music. And in this context, what they describe as ‘growth’ will be recognized by many education professionals as ‘learning,’ broadly defined. Similarly, their interest in engaging young people in worthwhile musical activities for a range of intrinsic and extrinsic reasons will resonate with many music educators. Readers will draw their own conclusions about what these aspirations, ambitions and activities might best be called.
Nomenclature aside, the analysis the authors offer of the distribution, availability and impact of musical opportunities in schools in developed countries is astute. They describe an elitist culture in which arbitrary ideas about talent exclude swaths of young people and in which under-confident teachers inadvertently reinforce the notion of participation in music as the ambit of a select few (p. 12). Their practical model for building more inclusive and empowering music cultures – consisting of five distinct cycles of action and reflection – establishes principles which will be valuable to therapists, specialist musicians, teachers, school leaders and parents alike. Indeed, any of these ‘players,’ to use Rickson and McFerran’s term, might initiate the proposed first cycle.
Many of the questions raised in the opening chapters find their answers implicitly in the second half of the book, which is dedicated to the presentation of seven ‘vignettes’ providing contrasting perspectives on the kinds of practices suggested by the authors. In place of conventional case studies, illustrated with quotations and commentary from key players, Rickson and McFerran take the innovative decision to write first-person narratives ‘not “true” in a literal sense’ but in which ‘real issues and experiences’ (p. 55) are highlighted. While cast in the voices of a school principal, two classroom teachers, a music teacher, an instrumental tutor, a school administrator and a teacher’s aide, the strength of these narratives is that they offer glimpses into the ways in which the authors perceive their own work and, equally interestingly, into the ways in which they believe that it is perceived by others. Although this complicated multiple hermeneutic perhaps warranted more explanation than it received, the authors’ honest reflections on the challenges and pitfalls of their work, as much as their view of its triumphs, make this second section of the book enjoyable as well as lucid and readable.
The projects described in the vignettes provide inspiration for the inclusive work that might be accomplished by all kinds of professionals working collaboratively in schools. They also encourage us to challenge a range of assumptions about our own roles, about young people’s capabilities and about the function of musical endeavour within a school culture. In so doing, Rickson and McFerran invite us, too, to reconsider the possible, and to experience what they describe as a sense of ‘I didn’t know I could do that’ (p. 162). Just as the vignettes are deliberately diverse, the audience for this book will encompass teachers, therapists, school administrators and interested others. Creating music cultures in the schools provides a tantalizing glimpse into the greater contribution that music therapeutic approaches might make in music education contexts and will no doubt prove to be a thought-provoking addition to existing literature within both disciplines.