Music

Music

The concept of musical identity has long been of interest to me. It was the starting place and central theme in my research and is a cornerstone in my approach to teaching music therapy students. More recently it has led to a niche in my private therapeutic practice of working with injured musicians. Not surprisingly, it is also a notion that figures prominently in my own sense of identity.

As my turn to write this column approached I have reflected on ways that music has impacted me lately. Of course there are the explicit ways that music has, and continues to provide meaning and structure to my existence: as a music therapy clinician and instructor, music teacher and musician. But very recently I have become aware of a sense of the overarching story of music in my life and of a kind of symmetry currently running through the roadmap by which I construe my musical identity.

This awareness was cued by the photograph of myself I have included with this column. It was through a recent music therapy experience that my attention was brought to this particular photo, for I am writing this text rather fresh from attending a weekend Group Analytic Music Psychotherapy workshop. The process oriented group was led by Finnish music therapist and group analyst Heidi Ahonen- Eerikäinen (who currently teaches and practices in Ontario, Canada). The workshop was attended by six other music therapists from Vancouver, Canada, where a number of us in the group teach music therapy at Capilano College.

Once I began to contemplate the image it became clear that it represented a pivotal time of real freedom and possibility. The photo was taken on a beautiful summer day at a Music Therapy Association picnic at a beachside park. I was twenty four; at what now seems about ...