Has anyone seen it? A snapshot of Community Music Therapy in Italy, eight years on

It happens to all of us, I think: you open a file, focus on a subject… write things… maybe even a book, and then, for a thousand reasons, you put that interest on hold, channel your energy into other things and almost forget what had once occupied so much of your life.

That is what happened to me with Community Music Therapy. In 2018, together with Stefania Mattiello, I published a book titled Community Music Therapy. Itinerari, principi e pratiche per un'altra musicoterapia (FrancoAngeli). Great enthusiasm, a great deal of interest from the Italian music therapy world, which was not yet familiar with that approach, and then it all stopped there.

Then, when you least expect it, something happens and you find yourself back in that world… when you least expect it, you are invited to a conference precisely to talk about Community Music Therapy, and that becomes the excuse to pick up work that had been standing still for eight years and give it a new start.

Thanks to the opportunity of L'AquilARTHE, the conference in L'Aquila, I decided to update the map we had put in our book. Nobody, ourselves included, had gone back to count.

So I am happy to tell you that the new map is online, updated as of today, here: the census of Community Music Therapy in Italy (the page is in Italian).

And the short answer, in numbers, is this: today in Italy there are at least 168 groups in which people with disabilities, with mental distress or with other vulnerabilities make music together with others and take it out into the world, with a dated trace from 2024 onwards. Forty-five of them are in the South and the islands. In 2018 there were two.

If the name Community Music Therapy is new to you, I talked about it in an old podcast episode. Here I will try to tell you where to find it.

How did this map come about?

The map in the 2018 book listed 63 Italian groups: orchestras, bands, choirs and festivals.

Reopening the file meant going back over those 63 groups one by one, looking for a dated trace, and looking for new ones region by region. The criterion is this: "a stable group in which people with disabilities, with mental distress or with other vulnerabilities make music together with others and take it out into the world". And to call a group active you need a dated trace from 2024 onwards: the announcement of a concert counts too, as do documented rehearsals or a list that shows it as active.

Of the 63 in the book, 32 have a trace from 2024. Of the other 30 there are no recent traces: some will have closed, others play without leaving a trace on the web, and from a desk you cannot tell the difference. (The count comes to 62 because the sixty-third, Sistema italiano, is a national network and does not belong to a single region.) These are my "has anyone seen them?" cases: it is not the groups that disappear, it is their trace on the web.

Alongside them there are 136 groups that were not in the book. Some were born later. Others were already there, and we had not seen them: that is the most uncomfortable part to admit.

That makes 168 groups active today. The full list has 263 names, because it also includes those without recent traces, the festivals and the circles. Counting festivals and circles too, among the groups with a trace from 2024 there are 71 choirs, 48 orchestras and 44 bands; then come 17 festivals, 5 workshops and 3 circles.

What has changed in the South?

In 2018 four groups out of five were in the North, and the South was practically absent. Today 45 of the 168 active groups, more than one in four, are in the South and the islands (following the groupings of ISTAT, the Italian national statistics office, which count Abruzzo and Molise as part of the South). Campania goes from one to twelve, Abruzzo from zero to seven, Sicily from zero to eight, Sardinia from zero to four. The rest of Italy is moving too: Lombardy goes from 19 to 26, Tuscany from 2 to 15, Trentino-Alto Adige from 2 to 8.

Since the census was born in L'Aquila, Abruzzo deserves a couple of extra lines. Three of its groups share a feature that is particularly clear here: a choir of vulnerable people singing together with a choir from the town. In L'Aquila, Corale 24, born in a day centre, sings with L'Aquila Incanto. In Vasto, L'Ottava Nota of Anffas, coordinated by a music therapist, sings with I Cantori della Torre. In Teramo, the Mani Bianche ("White Hands") choir sings with the town's children's choir.

It is not the group climbing onto a stage on its own: it is the community welcoming it onto its own stage.

The Norwegian music therapist and scholar Brynjulf Stige was already asking for this in 2002: those who work in Community Music Therapy have to consider carefully the amateur music-making traditions of the place where they work, because "these traditions represent the cultural and social capital of the community". The town choir that welcomes the day-centre choir is exactly that capital. A music therapist who wanted to work in that community should start from there.

But are they all Community Music Therapy?

Let me give you one fact straight away: in the whole map, no group calls itself Community Music Therapy. The name circulates: at a conference, in an offer of services, in a thesis, in an announcement. But the people who play still do not use it for themselves. In 2018 nobody said it; today those who write about it say it, but not those who do it. Perhaps a choice we made in the book also plays a part: not translating the name into Italian, so as not to lose the word that mattered, community. Eight years later, among those who play, the name has remained foreign.

So the question has to be asked, because someone is already asking it: does it make sense to put a day-centre choir, an Esagramma orchestra and a neighbourhood band on the same map? Are they all Community Music Therapy?

No, and the census says so with a number. Among the active groups, a documented music therapist works or has worked in thirty-four. In twenty-eight there is no record of one. In the others we do not know.

That is why I do not present the map to you as a list of Community Music Therapy, but as three rings, one inside the other. At the centre are the groups in which a music therapist works: Community Music Therapy in the strict sense. Around them are the groups of people with disabilities or mental distress who make music together without a music therapist, or where we have found no trace of one: the territory we share with education. On the edge, where the vulnerability is only social, as in the orchestras born from the Venezuelan model, we are already in Community Music.

That is what the map is for: to see where music therapy already is, where it could be, and where it borders on something else.

Then there is a column we had not foreseen in 2018. The criterion of our book was the stage; today the map also includes circles: drum circles, circle singing, body music, practices with no audience, where the circle is the community. With a trace from 2024, so far, I have found only three. They too would sit on more than one ring: in some a music therapist leads, in others not, and most of these practices are not called music therapy. Which brings us straight back to the eternal question, "is it music therapy?" I bet you are asking it again right now, as you read.

Who applauds, and why?

There is also a new question, and it concerns the stage. Bringing people onto the stage was our achievement: from the protected setting to the town square. Today we also have to ask what the audience sees. Does it applaud an orchestra because it plays, or because "they're good, in spite of everything"?

It is the question disability studies put to us, and it has no answer given once and for all.

I don't know how the hall of the Buonconsiglio applauded on Saturday morning in Trento, at the conference "La Musica che Accoglie": I had not arrived yet. But the question was certainly in that audience: it is in every hall where one of the groups on this map goes on stage. The map says who plays; how we listen to them is still up to us.

What is missing from the map?

Like any research, this one has its limits, and they must be stated. The web is not the world. Apart from one exception, I did not read Facebook or Instagram, and I did not phone anyone. I searched the North and the South with the same methods, but some areas remain uncovered: in the North the bands of the mental health services, in the South Calabria and Basilicata.

Today, searching from a desk, I found 168 active groups. And I am sure I have missed some.

How do you report a missing group?

What has not changed in eight years? That the door does not open by itself. Every group on this map, those of 2018 and those of today, exists because someone opened a door and a community agreed to let itself be opened.

Fabio Dovigo, an education scholar, edited with Rossi and Sciammarella Tutta un'altra musica (FrancoAngeli, 2017), a book on AllegroModerato's integrated music workshops in paediatrics. In his chapter, devoted to the community music therapy approach, he recalls that for Derrida the key word of living together is not community but hospitality: because every community, even the most welcoming, has an inside and an outside. The town choir that has the day-centre choir sing with it has not stopped being a town choir: it has opened the door. And it is work that never ends, because every year there is someone new on the threshold.

What I am asking you

The census, after all, is also this: a door. So I am asking you for something concrete. Open the map, tap your region and look at who is there. If you know an orchestra, a choir, a band, a festival or a circle, whether it calls itself music therapy or not, and it is not on the map, write to me: paolo.caneva@conservatorioverona.it. Corrections are welcome too: if a group you know is marked "senza tracce recenti" (no recent traces) and is in fact playing, tell me, preferably with a link to a dated trace. The census stays open and is updated with your reports.

In 2018 sixty-three groups were doing Community Music Therapy, in the strict or broad sense, without knowing it. I have no reason to believe there are fewer today, and some reason to believe there are many more.

The map is there. The door, as in L'Aquila, I am leaving open.

Sources

• Caneva, P. A., & Mattiello, S. (2018). Community Music Therapy. Itinerari, principi e pratiche per un'altra musicoterapia [Community Music Therapy: Paths, principles and practices for another music therapy]. FrancoAngeli. https://www.francoangeli.it/Libro?id=25334
• Dovigo, F. (2017). Lavorare in una prospettiva inclusiva: l'approccio della musicoterapia di comunità [Working from an inclusive perspective: The community music therapy approach]. In F. Dovigo, M. Rossi, & M. Sciammarella (Eds.), Tutta un'altra musica. I laboratori musicali integrati in pediatria di AllegroModerato [A whole other music: AllegroModerato's integrated music workshops in paediatrics] (pp. 13–32). FrancoAngeli. https://www.francoangeli.it/Libro?id=24542
• Stige, B. (2002). The relentless roots of community music therapy. Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy, 2(3). https://doi.org/10.15845/voices.v2i3.98