Abstract
Community Music Therapy is by its very nature a difficult beast to tame in writing: born as a concept out of dissatisfaction with (perhaps even distaste for) apparently imposed professional norms and assumptions, it often seems easier to say what it isn’t than what it actually is. It may be considered a heuristic device which can respond to different needs at different times within different communities, including professional communities. For some audiences, it is most importantly a kind of ‘liberation theology’ for music therapy, freeing it from the hegemony of psychoanalytic, behaviourist or medical colonial rule, while for others, it is more about re-validating a wide range of musical-social practices which have always been widely practised by music therapists and others. In some circles, it is prized for its valuing of the communal on a par with the individual in recognition of contemporary understandings of the socially constructed nature of health and well-being. Still others see it as a confirmation of the validity of musical thinking across the board – thinking musically about (and working musically towards) not only individual health but the functionality and effectiveness of places and communities. This new volume from Stuart Wood emphasises the latter perspective in particular but draws to some extent on all of the above standpoints.
Many readers will remember the World Congress in Oxford in 2002 with its well-attended roundtable on Community Music Therapy and the strong reactions (and abreactions) it evoked. Since then there have been influential book publications on the subject (e.g. Pavlicevic and Ansdell, 2004; Stige, 2003; Stige and Aarø, 2012; Stige et al., 2010) as well as in what might be considered closely related fields such as Culture-Centred Music Therapy (Stige, 2002) and Resource-Oriented Music Therapy (Rolvsjord, 2010), not to mention a plethora of articles and essays on the topic. This is the evolving narrative that Wood’s book is now joining: what Wood adds here is a coherently worked-out sense of Community Music Therapy having roots in music-centred thinking as previously articulated most clearly by Aigen (1998, 2005) in relation (particularly but not exclusively) to the work of Nordoff and Robbins. Wood is not just applying this musical thinking to the actual music being made but across all aspects (including evaluation) of the working practice of a music therapist who is necessarily ecologically embedded in a particular context and working with a particular group of people (or ‘community’).
It is perhaps a sign of Community Music Therapy’s coming of age that Wood doesn’t feel the need to start by differentiating it from a more dominant agenda (compare this to Ansdell’s, 2002 references to the ‘consensus model’) instead starting more positively from what he understands Community Music Therapy to be – a flexible, pragmatic, systematic and accountable approach to working musically with people which is systematically informed by an appreciation and understanding of music’s personal and social possibilities. Wood builds on the temporal distance from those early debates by drawing on and synthesising many of the ideas from the burgeoning literature. This is done not in the form of a single dense literature review, but rather by using the literature to illustrate and reflect on his points throughout the book. In doing so, he renders the reader a major service as this literature is now becoming so sizable and varied in focus that it is hard to keep track of it all.
Wood walks a fine line here, drawing on literature that reflects a wide variety of standpoints on Community Music Therapy (including some of its critiques), on the one hand, continually acknowledging and echoing Ansdell’s earlier insistence that as an anti-model there is no need to pin it down to particular practices, and on the other hand insisting that ‘there are key features by which we can recognize Community Music Therapy both in others’ work and in our own thinking and practice’ (p. 4).
Community Music Therapy, in Wood’s view, seems to have graduated into part of the mainstream of music therapy practice and discipline – he repeatedly refers to it as ‘a subdivision of music therapy’. I’m not sure that everyone would agree with this: I don’t know many music therapists who style themselves as ‘Community Music Therapists’ even if they embrace much or all of Wood’s thinking. In some respects, the value of Community Music Therapy in the 2000s lay precisely in its offering of rupture via its highlighting of the breaking point between musically led practice and established professional rhetoric. It was about disturbing, challenging and invigorating. But Wood comes to this work as a practitioner and manager within particular settings as well as a researcher, and also as a dedicated follower (and formulator) of theory and this combination means he has something distinctive and compelling to offer.
On one level, this book is essentially a major expansion of Wood’s (2006) notion of a Community Music Therapy ‘matrix’. Whereas originally this was conceived of as a matrix of musical ‘formats’ (one-to-one sessions, open group sessions, rehearsal processes, performance events etc), here the notion is significantly extended to cover not only formats but also aims, context and evaluation. Each of these gets its own chapter, and this works very well as a structuring device for the book. Wood argues consistently for plurality of possibility, for letting music off the leash in order to open up as many opportunities for people and communities as possible. What should this or that musical possibility not be part of music therapy? Wood elaborates a truly broad musically founded conception of what it is that music therapists can consider themselves able to do (and thus responsible for doing).
These four areas of matricisation, together with theory, produce the acronym ‘FACET’, which then alternates with ‘matrix’ as the leitmotif of the book. The chapters on aims and context in particular are supplemented with plentiful examples of practice: these are vivid and inspiring and reason enough in themselves to read the book. They also serve as jumping off points for some of the most pertinent theorising. I particularly appreciated the discussion of aims: I remember as a trainee music therapist being struck by the contrast between music therapists who told us that it was imperative to formulate aims and work systematically towards achieving them, and others who told us that therapy of any kind could not be constrained by pre-formulated aims but had to be led by experience of the unfolding therapeutic relationship, moment by moment and session by session. Wood offers us a musically founded way of thinking about this contentious area which acknowledges both sides of this unnatural divide: his thinking here is thoroughly pragmatic and easily understood.
But perhaps Wood’s most distinctive contribution in this book comes in the chapter on evaluation – here he presents not only thinking about attitudes to evaluation which emerge from close analysis of and reflection on music-centred practice but also a specific observational assessment tool of his own devising – the ‘Functional Interaction Matrix Assessment’ (fi-ma). Like all assessment tools, it is incomplete in that it cannot anticipate all scenarios that arise in the real world and it could certainly be critiqued from a number of perspectives, but Wood has critically applied his understanding of ecologically minded music-centred practice with its implications for service users’ experience to the demand for evidencing effectiveness or progress in various ways and this in itself is also a valuable contribution to the literature.
And yet – as often happens in radical manifestos – at a certain point, there comes a detectable ‘snapping back’ to established professional assumptions. In Wood’s case, this is most noticeable in the form of the insistence that ‘the music therapist needs to oversee all the formats in a music therapy program’ (p. 23) and in the repeated references to the ‘specialist’ or ‘specialised’ nature of the work of the music therapist. This seems to contrast with the historical dissatisfaction within Community Music Therapy with such professional assertions and a certain post-colonial yearning towards democratisation. Perhaps it is the underlying attitude towards working with people which might be thought of as ‘specialised’ since it is so evidently rooted in a wide-ranging understanding of what music is and does and its consequent value to people, places and communities. But I wanted to hear more about the mechanisms and usefulness of music therapy based on detailed consideration of the musical work undertaken by all its participants (not just its ‘specialist’ paid contributors). In the accounts of practice Wood clearly honours the contributions to music therapy work made by participants, but this isn’t always so evident in the theorising.
I also wanted to hear more about the idea of community – such an idealised but politically slippery and commercially appropriated term. How can the music making of Community Music Therapy be seen or heard to create, configure or even perhaps undermine community with all of its vicissitudes as well as advantages? Wood’s doctoral work was conducted in a chain of private care homes, and he briefly considers the music therapist’s (and music’s) role in contributing to the messaging and sales of the company: I would have welcomed more on these political considerations in the light of the conflicting agendas around community and in the context of the apparently inexorable capitalist drive towards commodification of health and social care for private profit.
As a writer, Wood is articulate, well-informed and at times entertaining. He often writes as though speaking with the reader: this is generally very engaging, although some readers may find it close to sermonising. And, like a clever vicar, he offers philosophical excursions that mostly informed and delighted me but sometimes left me behind. In the course of reading the book, I learned about slime mould, the eyes of arthropods, and rhizomic systems: not at all what I was expecting!
While opponents of Community Music Therapy may dispute whether any of this is ‘therapy’ at all (since it doesn’t conform to non-musical psychoanalytic or behaviourist norms), Wood’s claim to ‘therapy’ for the practice he outlines is clear, not least thanks to the painstaking consideration of benefit via evaluation.
Clearly this book – like Community Music Therapy itself – won’t delight everyone. But for those music therapists for whom the term is valuable, whether as a descriptor of their practice, as a disruptor of externally imposed assumptions, or as a champion of musical thinking in action, this book provides useful examples of practice, an excellent overview of relevant literature, much stimulation of thinking and some useful provocation for good measure. I heartily recommend it as a worthy next link in the chain from the already established publications in this field. And for those within the profession who doubt the value of the practice or the rigour of the thinking underpinning Community Music Therapy, this book would be a fine place to start.