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Thoughts / The craft

What does a name do?

October 29, 2026 · Thoughts / The craft

On 8 August, in the middle of summer, a decree comes into force. The part that concerns us is in article 6, in a text whose title speaks of public administration, local authorities and civil protection: not exactly where you would go looking for music therapy. On 5 October it is converted into law, and in recent weeks people have begun to think about what it really changes.

Here is what it says. As of 8 August, Italian conservatories no longer award "first- and second-level academic diplomas". They award "lauree and lauree magistrali", the same words Italian universities use for bachelor's and master's degrees. This is laid down in Decree-Law no. 144 of 7 August 2026, converted by Law no. 174 of 5 October 2026. The decree changes the wording of the law on Higher Education in Art, Music and Dance, the AFAM sector, and asks for the laws already in force to be read the same way. That goes for us too: the two-year programme in Theories and techniques of music therapy, taught today at sixteen conservatories, awards a master's degree.

So what changes? The Government says so itself, in the report accompanying the decree: the provision "does not change the course of study, nor the curricular requirements, but concerns only the name of the qualification".

Only the name. The name, and nothing else. That "nothing else" is worth pausing on.

What does a name mean?

The gesture is ancient. In the Institutes, the law textbook published in 533, the emperor Justinian tells how he found a "gift before marriage" that his predecessor had already allowed to be increased even after the wedding. The name, he writes, was still unsuitable. So he goes one step further: from then on that gift may also be made after the wedding, and it will be called a "gift on account of marriage". He states the reason himself: he took care that names should follow from things (consequentia nomina rebus esse studentes, Institutes 2.7.3). More than seven centuries later the same idea returns in Dante, in the Vita nuova, as a maxim: Nomina sunt consequentia rerum.

The August decree repeats half of that gesture: it leaves the thing alone and changes only the name. The thing was already there, a two-year programme with its exams, its placement, its thesis. The name comes afterwards, chasing after it.

But if the thing was the same all along, does the name really matter? Juliet, from her balcony, would say no: "What's in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet" (Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, II.2). The rose smells sweet under any name, and Romeo would keep his perfection even "without that title". Beautiful. A pity, then, that the whole tragedy springs from a name, of all things.

And sometimes the rose keeps its name. In 1999 the reform law declared the conservatories "transformed into Higher Institutes of Music and Dance Studies". Nearly twenty-seven years later we still call them all conservatories. Me first of all, right here in these lines.

The weight of a name, after all, is something I have spent a lifetime on. I confessed it on a TEDx stage in June 2025: "after 35 years in this profession, I still can't explain to you what music therapy is. But I can tell you what it means to spend a lifetime trying to become a word". And what a word! Presumptuous, because it holds two galaxies together, music and therapy. And back to front: physiotherapy is therapy for the body, but music therapy is not therapy for music. For a long time, inside that word, I felt neither a serious musician nor a real therapist.

Does a name define us, bind us or frame us?

Kenneth Bruscia, one of the masters of American music therapy, devoted a whole book to the definitions of our discipline, and lined up more than a hundred of them. He says it plainly: "every definition of music therapy sets boundaries for the field" (Bruscia, 2014, p. 5). And those boundaries are needed. They say which goals and methods are legitimate, they make it possible to design training programmes and to set the requirements for earning a credential, and they protect the people we work with, because they mark the limits of those who accompany them. A definition binds us, yes, and among other things it binds us to answer for what we do. A name is something else: it is shorter, and it says much less.

Then Bruscia asks a half-ironic question: might we be a little obsessed with defining who we are? He borrows from Gary Ansdell the expression "definition anxiety": perhaps we don't feel legitimate enough until we find just the right words. And he sets its opposite beside it, "definition phobia", the fear of any word that puts a boundary on what we do (p. 7). My TEDx talk has both: thirty-five years spent looking for the right word and, in the end, the invitation to go beyond the limit of rigid definitions, to inhabit the IN-BETWEEN.

And the frame? A frame does not paint the picture. But it holds it together and shows it to whoever passes by: a family, a doctor reading a CV, a team that needs to understand who it is working with. The picture, meanwhile, remains something else. I said it already in episode #06 of the podcast: we ARE something different from, and better than, what we DO. And, I would add today, from what we are called, too.

So a name changes nothing? I wouldn't say that. A name doesn't say who we are or what we do. But it decides where we can get in: which call for applications, which ranking list, which box on a form. And for those coming out of a conservatory, for more than twenty years, the right box was often not there.

What did it mean, until yesterday, to say "my qualification is a degree"?

It meant explaining. Filippo Sica, head of AFAM matters for the FLC CGIL union in Naples, who commented on the decree in the magazine Articolo 33, writes that with the new name AFAM students will be able to present their studies "without having to keep explaining that the studies completed belong to the same level of higher education".

To understand why, you only need to look at the words of the laws.

Until this summer, the word laurea was never used in Italian law as the name of a conservatory qualification. The 1999 reform law speaks of "specific first- and second-level academic diplomas": a name that keeps them apart from university ones. Laurea appears only as a term of comparison, and always with a limit. In 2002 the old conservatory diplomas, together with the secondary school leaving certificate, are "equated with degrees", but "for the purpose of access to public competitions". In 2012 academic diplomas become "equivalent" to degrees, but "for the sole purpose" of public competitions (and, for the first level, of access to master's degrees). And for conservatories there is only one reference master's degree, whatever the programme: the one in Musicology and musical heritage. Music therapy graduates included.

In practice? A few examples, among those on record.

Many people, after all, had asked for the new name. For 19 December 2023 the student councils of conservatories and academies called a rally in Rome, under a slogan: "Art up to degree standard". In 2024 an association and a union of AFAM teachers asked the Chamber of Deputies for it. In one of those documents, the submission by the UNAMS union, we read that students, "precisely because of the different name", end up suffering discrimination "on the basis of misleading interpretations of the literal wording".

Nor was it the first time a single word had been changed: in 2021 a decree-law had already turned the AFAM institutions' "training in research" into a "research doctorate".

And those who studied music therapy?

For us the story of the name is even more tangled. Let's line up the names and the stages the music therapy programme of the Verona Conservatory has gone through in twenty years:

1. 2005, in the annex to the decree that authorises it, the subtitle: "Two-Year Course for the Training of Music Workers for Well-Being"; 2. 2005, the qualification: "specialisation diploma in Music therapy"; 3. 2020: by law, that diploma becomes equivalent to a second-level academic diploma; 4. 2021: the programme becomes a regular course like the others, and the qualification takes the name of second-level academic diploma in Theories and techniques of music therapy; 5. 2026: master's degree.

The sore point lies between the second and the third stage. In 2016 a regulation redraws the subject areas for school teaching competitions, and lists by name the qualifications that give access. The table includes a "DA-Musicoterapia": a second-level academic diploma. The specialisation diploma of Verona and L'Aquila does not. A different name, and a door that stayed shut.

The door opens in the summer of 2020: Law no. 77 of 17 July 2020 makes those diplomas "equivalent, also for the purposes of competitions, to second-level academic diplomas". On 18 July the L'Aquila Conservatory hands out its specialisation diplomas in music therapy in person, and its announcement speaks of a "querelle" that had lasted more than a decade.

Where does the reform of the conservatories begin?

With that turn-of-the-millennium law we have already met: Law no. 508 of 21 December 1999. With that law the conservatories enter the "system of higher education and specialisation in art and music". They become "primary seats of higher education, specialisation and research", with an autonomy of their own, teaching and scientific autonomy included. And they award new qualifications, on two levels.

That law, however, leaves almost everything to later regulations. For years the Ministry's decrees open with the same refrain: conservatories are authorised to run experimental courses "pending the definition of the new course structures". The three-year programmes get their course structures in 2009; the structures of the two-year programmes arrive in 2018. This summer the Ministry wrote that the decree completes the reform of the AFAM system, "awaited for more than 25 years". And Parliament's research services write that implementation "has been long and complex, and questions still remain open".

What did it mean? That the conservatory was no longer only the place where you become a musician, but also a place of research. And where there is research, there is room for new questions: music therapy included.

Was music therapy born in the reformed conservatories?

Almost. The first experiences come one step before the law: in 1998 in Foggia, with a preparatory course, and in 1999 in Pescara, with an experimental higher course that included a music therapy pathway. Small signs, tied to a person, a director, a season. The qualifications, on the other hand, are born inside the reform. And the story of the two-year programme, the one that now awards a master's degree, starts in Verona, together with L'Aquila.

In Verona, at the Conservatory, people begin talking about music therapy in the spring of 1999, when Law 508 does not yet exist. Years of projects with the University follow, and a first draft of a training pathway. In 2004 the Conservatory sounds out the Ministry about an experimental music therapy pathway. On 20 October 2005 Verona and L'Aquila are called together before the National Council for Higher Education in Art and Music.

On 23 November 2005 Ministerial Decree no. 484 authorises the Verona Conservatory, together with the University, to launch the experimental two-year programme leading to the specialisation diploma in music therapy. And that decree rests precisely on Law 508: the experiment, it reads, "responds to the specific provisions of art. 2 of Law no. 508/99 encouraging collaboration between institutions in the art and music sector and the Universities".

Then come sixteen years of experimentation and other locations, up to Ministerial Decree no. 2905 of 2021, which makes the two-year programme a regular course. Today the locations stretch from Milan to Trapani.

What is still to be done?

First of all, a question: what about those who graduated before? The law changes the name of the qualifications and the way laws are read, but contains no explicit rule for qualifications already awarded. And the Ministry, so far, has not clarified.

Then the unfinished business we already know about. There is no regular three-year music therapy programme. The profession remains among those not organised into professional orders or boards, under Law no. 4 of 2013. And for the AFAM system as a whole, Sica names the "pieces" still to be completed: consolidating doctorates, implementing the habilitation system and recruitment, valuing staff, guaranteeing the right to study and building continuity in artistic education.

And there is one thing no decree can rename: the work. The qualification says where we studied. The craft shows elsewhere: in the team we join, in the goals we share, in the rigour with which we observe and assess. There, the name on the certificate counts for little.

So, what is it called?

The name of my profession has been debated forever: musicoterapista or musicoterapeuta? As for the qualification of those who study it, this summer the law settled its name: master's degree.

On the profession, though, I still think what I said in episode #06: nobody IS a music therapist. Someone, every day, DOES music therapy. And those who study it at a conservatory, from this summer on, come out with a degree in their pocket.

Translations of quotations from Italian and Latin sources are our own.

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