An Ecology of Love: Aspects of Music Therapy in the Pediatric Oncology Environment

This paper explores how music therapy can assist patients and relatives in the processes of making friendship and love audible in a child cancer ward. Four short patient histories are presented to illustrate a health-oriented, ecological music therapy practice. Two histories describe how texts, made by patients, become songs, and how the songs are performed and used. Another two histories deal with musical communication with dying children and their parents. The paper indicates that these interventions may involve more than palliation (making a disease less severe and unpleasant without removing its cause). Not least, such activities can make it possible for the sick child to expand from being “just a patient” into playing, if only for a moment, a more active social role. The processes of artistic interplay, in- and outside the sickroom, influence various relationships in the child's social environment.