scholarly journals Music Therapy Through Irish Eyes: A Student Therapist’s Experience of Irish Traditional Music

2008 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Armstrong
Keyword(s):  
Music Therapy ◽  
Group Work ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Traditional Music ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
Music Therapists ◽  
Irish Music ◽  
Physical Response ◽  
Irish Traditional Music ◽  
Movement Activities

This article outlines my personal experience of Irish traditional music and considers how it can inform music therapy practice. The use of Irish music may be particularly meaningful for some clients and help them connect with their culture and identity. Music therapy can also draw on specific features; including the melodic, rhythmic and social aspects of the music. The melody is prominent in Irish traditional music, and its expression is very important. The word draíoght (meaning "spell" or "enchantment") is used to describe this expressivity. Music therapists can aspire to capture this quality in the music they create with their clients. Often the rhythm of dance tunes elicits a physical response, so these tunes could be used in movement activities. The relaxed and informal style of playing in sessions provides an atmosphere where the music can grow out of the interactions between players. An attempt to create a similar atmosphere may facilitate creativity and spontaneity in group work. While this article only presents a few ways in which Irish traditional music can influence music therapy practice, it is hoped that readers will be inspired to seek their own ways of relating Irish music to music therapy.

scholarly journals Choosing the Right Interpreter: Reflections on My Experience

2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Melody Schwantes
Keyword(s):  
Music Therapy ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Music Therapists ◽  
The Right

Music therapists are now frequently working outside of their own cultures with individuals who may speak a different language from them. While music can be one vehicle of connecting and communicating with clients, oftentimes an interpreter is still necessary. This article presents an overview of my personal experience working with interpreters in various settings. Benefits and challenges of working with an interpreter are discussed as well as recommendations for working with interpreters. It is hoped that this article will create a dialogue among the Voices community about working with interpreters in the music therapy setting.Keywords: music therapy, interpreter, relationships

scholarly journals An Investigation of Music Therapists' Experiences of Verbal Dialogue in Music Therapy Sessions

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Siobhán Nelligan ◽  
Tríona McCaffrey
Keyword(s):  
Clinical Practice ◽  
Music Therapy ◽  
Dyadic Relationship ◽  
Music Therapists ◽  
Professional Discourse ◽  
Individual Interviews ◽  
Irish Music ◽  
And Function ◽  
Therapy Sessions

This study presents a preliminary exploration of music therapists’ first-hand experiences of engaging in verbal dialogue with clients in their clinical practice. To the authors’ knowledge no previous studies have examined the role of verbal dialogue from the first-hand perspectives of experienced professionals working in the field.  Three individual interviews were conducted with three accredited Irish music therapists. Four central themes emerged as a result of thematic content analysis: content and function of verbal dialogue, the use of verbal dialogue may contribute to professional ambiguity, returning to the music, and the dyadic relationship between musical and verbal exchange. The findings revealed verbal dialogue to be a topic of interest for the participants in this study, one which stimulated meaningful reflections about clinical practice. The implications for professional identity and clinical practice which arose distinguished verbal dialogue as a potential area for further research and professional discourse within the wider music therapy community. Suggestions were made for additional areas of learning that may assist in preparing trainee and newly-qualified music therapists for potentially challenging verbal encounters with clients.

'Tis Like They Never Left: Locating “Home” in the Music of Sliabh Aughty's Diaspora

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 491-507
Author(s):  
TIM COLLINS
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Traditional Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
The West ◽  
Irish Music ◽  
Irish Traditional Music ◽  
West Of Ireland

AbstractThis article, which builds on research in the fields of Irish traditional music, place, and diaspora, focuses on a community of diasporic musicians from Sliabh Aughty, an upland region of approximately 250 square miles that encompasses the musical storehouses of east Clare and southeast Galway in the West of Ireland. It examines the importance of home for these musicians, who have been resident in the United States for many decades. Their personal music geographies are explored to ascertain how traditional Irish music plays a critical role in transcending their sense of dislocation and reconnecting them with “home.”

scholarly journals How Can Music Build Community? Insight from Theories and Practice of Community Music Therapy

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Ellen Steele
Keyword(s):  
Music Therapy ◽  
Matrix Theory ◽  
Traditional Music ◽  
First Century ◽  
Initial Reaction ◽  
Community Resources ◽  
Community Music ◽  
Ethical Practice ◽  
Music Therapists ◽  
Current Application

Community music therapy has emerged as a widespread approach to music therapy practice since the beginning of the twenty-first century. This article outlines its development from an initial reaction against the individualistic consensus model of traditional music therapy practice, towards its current application across diverse, international contexts. Landmark publications and key terminology will be introduced, and the acronym PREPARE (participatory, resource-oriented, ecological, performative, activist, reflective, and ethics driven) (Stige & Aarø, 2011) used as a means of outlining key qualities of community music therapy. The nature of community music therapy as a context-driven and ethical practice that builds on individual and community resources through collaborative musicking will be illustrated through examples from the literature. The emerging influence of matrix theory as a model for processes within community music therapy (Wood, 2016) and future implications for music therapists as they explore work that shifts between individual and social formats and aims are discussed.

Playing With Chaos: Broadening Possibilities for How Music Therapist’s Consider Chaos in Group Work With Young People

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Oosthuizen ◽  
Katrina McFerran
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Music Therapy ◽  
South African ◽  
Group Work ◽  
Group Process ◽  
Therapy Group ◽  
Organizational Studies ◽  
Music Therapists ◽  
The Arts ◽  
African Context

Abstract Many music therapists have alluded to challenges in their work with groups of young people. However, chaos, incorporating experiences of disintegration and destruction, is a construct often overlooked in music therapy literature. Some music therapy authors have related experiences of chaos to the struggles faced by young people referred for therapy. These experiences require management, modification, or resolution. The authors of this article synthesized broader understandings and approaches towards chaos described in literature from fields including music therapy group work, drama therapy, the arts, psychoanalysis, organizational studies, and philosophy. Chaos is positioned as an inherent and necessary aspect of music therapy groups with young people, situated within a mutually potentiating relationship with more ordered features of a group process. From this paradoxical perspective, therapeutic transformation is enabled through creativity that holds the tension between order and the destructiveness of chaos. When chaos is welcomed in music therapy groups and framed within appropriate boundaries, the authors argue that experiences of chaos can be harnessed to support engagement with the paradoxes of creativity and destructiveness. The provision of a space to play with chaos supports young people who are required to flourish within adverse, chaotic life circumstances. The significance of this position for a group of young people who have committed offences in the South African context is highlighted.

Group Music Therapy Reconsidered

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mercedes Pavlicevic
Keyword(s):  
Service Delivery ◽  
Music Therapy ◽  
Group Work ◽  
Health Centers ◽  
Care Homes ◽  
Community Centers ◽  
Music Therapists ◽  
Group Music Therapy

Group music therapy, while acknowledged professionally as a powerful therapeutic format, remains relatively undocumented and untheorized in the literature. This historical scarcity is puzzling, given that music therapists do group work in a range of formats as part of their service delivery in schools, care homes, health centers, hospitals, cafes, and community centers. In this chapter a range of approaches to group work in music therapy will be presented. Four key texts providing information about group work in music therapy are reviewed and discussed in order to show how group work offers opportunities for differences, opportunities for attachment, for different kinds of simultaneous roles, relationships, and transferences, and different combinations of self-and-others, with larger groups, and with offering opportunities for the person to become themselves by contributing to the group.

Elias Howe, William Bradbury Ryan, and Irish Music in Nineteenth-Century Boston

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 401-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
PAUL F. WELLS
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Traditional Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Irish Music ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Irish Traditional Music ◽  
Fiddle Tunes

AbstractRyan's Mammoth Collection is a compendium of fiddle tunes assembled by William Bradbury Ryan. Originally published in Boston in 1883 by Elias Howe, Jr., it has remained in print in one form or another ever since. It has been used as a source of tunes by many generations of fiddlers in different stylistic traditions, but its value as a descriptive document of the repertoire of late-nineteenth-century Boston, particularly the Irish community in that city, has largely been overlooked. Ryan, rather than Capt. Francis O'Neill of Chicago, should be regarded as the first great documentarian of Irish traditional music in the United States.

Features of Irish Dance Music

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 89-98
Author(s):  
Alexandra Belibou
Keyword(s):  
Traditional Music ◽  
Dance Music ◽  
Musical Characteristics ◽  
Irish Music ◽  
Irish Traditional Music ◽  
Irish Folklore

"The focus of this paper is to bring into light the traditional categories of Irish dance music, emphasizing the musical characteristics that differentiate them. Energetic and effervescent, Irish dance music is rarely analyzed, with Irish folklore lacking a school of dedicated musicologists. The topic of this article is important in the context of the tensions related to globalization, commodification, and transformations in Irish Traditional Music, that scholars are examining. The paper includes musical examples of the traditional Irish dance music categories, for a better view of the phenomenon. Keywords: Irish music, dance music, ethnomusicology. "

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