Today is Tuesday, April 7th, and in this fourteenth episode we’ll be talking about Community Music Therapy.
As has now become my habit, I’ll begin with the necessary declaration of partiality.
Everything I am about to say is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth — but, of course, only my truth.
So, my light-hearted friends, remember: even truth passes.
In today’s episode, we’ll be talking about the different ways in which the term Community Music Therapy can be translated — or perhaps better, localised — into Italian.
So the question we will try to answer is this:
How can we bring this name into our language?
There are many possibilities.
Personally, I like to translate it as “public” music therapy, “neighbourhood” music therapy, “territorial” music therapy, “municipal”, social, or environmental music therapy.
In other words, something that goes beyond the room, the clinic, the hospital ward, or the private practice.
And here — I don’t know about you — I inevitably begin to reflect on our role as music therapy practitioners in this specific moment, and in the near future.
- What kind of territory will we find?
- What needs will there be at the end of the Coronavirus emergency?
- How many people will need to meet again, reconnect, and retune themselves to one another?
- What techniques will we use?
I’m thinking of collective songwriting, improvisation, drum circles, circle singing, choirs, brass bands, bands.
And all these reflections bring us back to the task from which we started: how to render the term Community Music Therapy in Italian.
Because another perspective we might consider in translation is the one that emphasises its participatory aspect.
So we might speak of a music therapy of involvement, of sharing, of solidarity.
Another possibility would be to define it more simply as community music therapy: a communal music therapy, a connective music therapy, since it seeks to lead individuals — through making music together — towards sharing and towards a state of mutual social belonging.
In any case, regardless of the name we choose to translate the term Community Music Therapy, one thing is certain.
Those who recognise themselves within this “movement” share a concept of health that is a child of 1948: the year in which the World Health Organization drew a clear line between the old idea of health as the absence of illness and a concept of health understood as a state of complete physical, mental, and social wellbeing.
This concept was then further specified by the Ottawa Charter in 1986, which reminds us that health and illness are not “immutable states”, but points at the ends of a continuum.
And — attention, attention — this mutability can be influenced by individuals themselves, who also carry responsibility for their own wellbeing.
In other words: we are the main agents of our own state of wellbeing.
I mention this because in Community Music Therapy, more than therapy, we speak of health promotion, and of health as participation.
Music is considered a social resource, and an activity that supports human wellbeing.
This brings today’s episode to an end.
As always, in these few minutes I have only touched on and introduced topics that deserve much more time and other contexts.
In the specific case of Community Music Therapy, I would suggest that anyone who feels attracted, curious, or even irritated by this strange “label” should take some time to read the book that Stefania Mattiello and I wrote in 2018, published by FrancoAngeli.
Because there, everything is explained in full detail.
We’ll meet again on Tuesday, April 14th, with an episode in which I’ll try to share some reflections on being music therapy practitioners in the time of Coronavirus.
So, something very current — while hoping that, by this time next week, my episode will already have become completely obsolete.