Today is Tuesday, September 8th.
But…
Can you smell it too?
Am I the only one breathing in this miasma?
I fear I might be, because nobody talks about it.
So, as usual, I’ll take a handful of minutes to talk at myself, distract myself a little, and perhaps stop smelling it.
Nobody talks about it, I was saying.
And yet it is precisely words that feed this unhealthy vapour, this tendency that creeps subtly through the posts that populate the internet.
And I am not referring to posts in general, but to the ones I read in online social spaces dedicated to music therapy.
Sometimes the pretext is a question.
And as I say this, I realise that I myself may have contributed, unconsciously or indirectly, to feeding this chain of judgements.
After all, in this podcast I do nothing but ask questions!
Much more often, however, it is in the answers to other people’s questions that I perceive — and I repeat, this is my own feeling — a discriminatory rhetoric.
Let us be clear.
The tone is always, or almost always, within the boundaries of civil discussion.
Nobody swears.
But what comes through strongly is a judgemental impression.
Almost as if there were someone who, for the most varied reasons — curricular, generational, historiographical — had the authority to divide music therapy, and consequently music therapy practitioners, into “races”.
Races differentiated by ability, values, school, number of training hours, quality of the final qualification, teachers, previous training, competences, place of work, hierarchical role, gender, age, and so on.
And as if, consequently, it were possible to determine a music therapy hierarchy, according to which one particular, hypothetical grouping could be defined as superior, truer, more music-therapeutic than another.
Careful.
A clarification is urgently needed here.
I am not saying that everything is the same as everything else.
I am not calling for a flattening of specificities, or a levelling of the differences — which are, in fact, healthy and physiological — between the various training pathways, the various music therapy practitioners, and the various music therapies.
I am fully aware that the process of definition, the attempt to delimit what something is from what that something is not, is necessary for progress.
I know that it is precisely thanks to this effort that, as human beings, we have come to know everything we know.
What I perceive as a real form of discriminatory thinking — with something almost racist about it — is not the act of underlining the difference between one phenomenon and another.
It is, rather, those statements that, for example, imply between the lines the presumed superiority of one school over another.
Or of one subject that is present in one training programme and absent in another.
What saddens me is that these sentences endlessly feed attitudes of intolerance and deep prejudice towards those who do not belong to our own music therapy “tribe”.
Prejudices and intolerance that pass, without interruption, from those who have teaching responsibilities — music therapy teachers — to the students.
Is there still someone who thinks they can contain the vastness of the dialogue between these two systems — music and therapy — within a single label that works for everyone?
Do we feel so white, pure, and chosen that we can endlessly affirm the supremacy of our own music therapy?
As I have repeated several times in other podcasts, Kenneth Bruscia wrote an entire book dedicated to the search for a definition of music therapy: a definition broad enough to gather together all, or at least most, of the music therapies that exist.
And he rewrote it almost completely three times over the course of forty years.
Is it possible that nobody remembers this?
I’ll stop here.
We’ll meet again on Tuesday, September 15th, with a new episode of A Light-Hearted Journey Through Music Therapy.