Proceedings, Oxford, UK (2002) - World Federation of Music Therapy

they are personal to me, and there is always a danger they will seem
obvious, or “so what?” The ideas will serve their purpose if they provoke
some thought, and perhaps clarify some of the assumptions we
sometimes make.
As a UK-trained music therapist I use improvised music as a means of
non-verbal communication. In the search for a theoretical framework for
this tradition of music therapy, (at least) two contrasting positions have
emerged. In one the importance of verbalising where appropriate or
possible is stressed, so that a model of a talking therapy, often but not
always based on psychoanalysis, is vital. The other stresses the
therapeutic value of music itself, so that it may be impossible or
undesirable to try to verbalise what has happened in the music.
In this first section I want to point out the ways in which music therapy
doesn’t quite fit into any particular theoretical framework, while in the
second section I fail to resist the temptation to provide my own
theoretical framework. Music therapy has always been a ‘practice’, and
the value of a framework will be in stimulating ideas in practitioners,
whilst the limitations of such frameworks should always be
acknowledged.
THE IMPORTANCE OF CONTEXT
By analysing the ‘context’ of a music therapy session, I hope to
understand the different expectations and preconceptions which therapist
and client bring to the experience. Clearly, there is a therapeutic context
which we as therapists hope to set. Defining this will in effect be yet
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