Voices ResourcesA website for the worldwide community around the journal Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy

I had the great pleasure of attending the European Music Therapy Conference in Oslo, Norway in early August 2013 and have some reflections to share.[1] It intrigues me that participants at a large disciplinary conference all steer an uniquely improvised path through the event. Together the attendees create a mosaic of living moments, encountering the work and personalities of our friends and colleagues and admired professionals. However, individually we may have very different perceptions depending on the way we pass the unfolding time. In my experience we go to hear somebody’s work which evokes strong interest - “ I really want to hear that paper, I’ve read about this work and am excited by it”; we possibly want to support a friend or supervisee who is nervously gathering himself before a presentation; or perhaps we meet a new colleague by chance in the bathroom or a lunch queue and through conversing, spontaneously decide to go to take part in her workshop or paper; or just take potluck and go to something unusual because we happen to be in the vicinity and get really inspired (or perhaps, dare I say, a bit bored) – but that is the chance factor at work. It is the mixture of planned "route-taking" and delightful randomness of it all which make the myriad pathways through the conference forest so diverse.

In attending a conference, we are forced into a social-communicative mode about our discipline and the interactive changeable nature of ideas and practices is emphasised. It also interplays the roles of learner and teacher in a fluid way amongst peers - admittedly at different levels of experience and authority - but in a well-run conference such as Oslo, this becomes natural, desirable and very levelling. Quite a number of the sessions at this EMTC conference were discursive roundtables and had a focus on the questions after a shorter talk, and so the inquiring audience and the responding presenters could shift and develop their thinking. The excellent conference keynotes, by Even Ruud, Mari Tervaniem, Kat McFerran, Sue Hadley also had prepared "replies" from a second speaker, which further encouraged the idea of encounter and dialogue. I found myself feeling persuaded by some ideas and wishing to challenge others when I got back home, and this felt involving and created opportunities for follow-up. As part of professional development this is ideal I think, and am sure it was part of the intention of the conference organisers.

Some of the "improvised" or unforeseen things that happened on my conference journey were as follows:

Chairing a Workshop Using Free Improvisation

I was honoured to be asked to chair some sessions at the conference and enjoyed the encounter with each of the speakers and hearing their presentations from Serbia, Vienna and Germany. By chance the original sessions I was to chair clashed with my own research presentation, so I undertook to support some other workshops and papers in need of moderation. My very first experience of conference sessions, after the opening keynote on day one, was to chair a workshop using free improvisation "A music therapeutic approach to supervision", offered by Tonius Timmerman, Hans Ulrich Schmidt and Johanne Bosse, and it was profound for me to be plunged into the powerful role that non-directive improvisation can weave in a large group and how instantaneous can be our emotional responses. People played-out and explored the workshop topic and helped to structure the opportunities for analysis and reflection in the manner of an analytic working group. I was quickly linked back to ten years of work in a probation centre in London, directed by a group analytic-trained senior probation officer. How music facilitated our communication and reflection was intriguing. It was very well-boundaried by the facilitators, disarming, uncomfortable at times, revealing and uplifting – possibly not for everyone - but a reminder of an influential tradition in music therapy that formed a large part of my own working life in London in the 1980s and 90s. During the course of workshop, I connected a number of times in the music with Sonja, a Dutch music therapist, and we had a number of lovely conversations afterwards, and shared emails for future connection. [2]

Meeting My Previously Unknown Distant Cousin

At the same workshop I was amazed and delighted to be approached by my distant cousin Katherine Walters, whom I had never met before, but who knew we were in the same profession. I have not been at any events in Europe since Katherine trained at the Guildhall School, so our paths have not crossed, but we worked out that Katherine’s grandmother and my late dad shared a grandfather, and thus have some interesting links. It is not often that you find a new relative at a conference, but this was a cool discovery and a new connectedness that totally surprised me.

An Inspiring Argumentative Dinner About Psychodynamic Versus Community Music Therapy

During the conference I was really pleased to share a Chinese dinner out with my dear long-term friends from the UK, with whom I worked as close colleagues in various capacities, particularly in supervising student placements in mental health, Helen Odell Miller, Rachel Darnley Smith and David John. We were joined by my more recent NZ friend and colleague Daphne Rickson and together we developed a vigorous debate about the virtues and challenges of psychoanalytically-informed theories and community music therapy theory in music therapy. This really felt like the ‘stuff of conferences’ - heated debate about how the concepts fitted or did not fit our experiences of music therapy. I sensed how my thinking and conceptualising has changed in the last eight years, firstly just because times change, but also witnessing old and new friends together and noticing how context has shaped me, both sides of the globe.

Encountering Folk Violin (my instrument) in New and Reassuring Ways

The use of violin as an expression of culture and musicianship in Norway was another connecting experience for me. I have made a modest study of some Scandinavian fiddle tunes in the past few years, and it was really interesting to see the place of the violin for dancing and social life on a visit to the Norsk Folksmuseum in the centre of Oslo in the few days before the conference. An ethnomusicology student was spending her vacation playing for visitors with some young friends dancing, and I really enjoyed comparing these dance interludes with my own experience of folk dancing at school and playing Celtic fiddle in the years since. Daphne and I also shared a lovely exchange back at the conference with the young traditional violinist and his Danish wife, who played in a weaving inspirational way at the conference opening. With characteristic generosity of the many young music therapists we met, he gave us each a recording each of his band Hjemve, playing polskas and other lively dances as a great souvenir of a musical visit to Oslo.

Connecting with Avi Gilboa as Researcher and Session Moderator

A recent graduate of our NZ programme did her MMus Therapy research study on work with young children with cerebral palsy in a centre for conductive education in Aotearoa New Zealand. One of the most useful studies she found relating to her work was by Gilboa and Roginsky (2010) and I was made aware of their study in the Nordic Journal through my student’s research. I also have an active teaching interest in intercultural practice in music therapy and attended an inspiring talk by Avi Gilboa at the conference about the mediating role that music therapy might play in Israel – between Arabs and Jews. It was then my privilege to have Avi as moderator of my own paper; he was engaging, informative and very considerate as a chair, and I valued the way that we begin to trace our connections and associations with people’s work through this delicate web of interlinking, facilitated by a conference environment.

My experiences at this event were profound and it was a beautifully organised and richly stimulating mixture of the practical, artistic, theoretical, speculative, research-focussed and plain entertaining aspects of our profession. Relating and reflecting were definitely centre stage for me. It was great to participate in a dinner meeting and subsequent roundtable of the Voices editors, at which we took part in some highly valuable exchange with conference participants about the role and contributions of Voices now and for the future. I was also personally charmed by the role of humour between current Norwegian students and their tutors, and about the discipline itself (for example observing the Viking music therapist who was not allowed to show empathy and the playful story of Professor Even Ruud spreading music for everyday folk on the chimes over Oslo). This gentle teasing was exemplified at various places in the conference entertainment, on MTTV (Music Therapy TV) and appeared to indicate a mature and secure professional identity for music therapy in Norway. Thank you Norwegian music therapists, and the organising and scientific committees of the conference for an excellent and inspiring week of friendship and exchange. No accident I think that this is the home and an important seedbed of Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy.

Notes

[1] 9th European Music Therapy Congress (2013) Setting the tone: cultures of relating and reflecting in music therapy was hosted by the Norwegian Music Therapy Association and the European Music Therapy Confederation, Oslo Norway 7-10 August 2013. For further information follow this link: http://www.musikkterapi.no/emtc2013

[2] Some images of the large group session are illustrated in one of the conference bulletins http://www.musikkterapi.no/sfiles/0/42/14/66/5/file/bulletin_friday.pdf )

References

Gilboa, A., & Roginsky, E. (2010). Examining the Dyadic Music Therapy Treatment (DUET): The Case of a CP Child and His Mother. Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, 19(2), 103-132.

Gilboa, A. & Hanna, R. (2013) Communication between Arabs and Jews in Israel: can music help? Paper presented at the 9th European Music Therapy Congress (2013) Setting the tone: cultures of relating and reflecting in music therapy. Oslo Norway 7-10 August 2013.

Hjemve (2005) KVARTS CD-Production http://www.kvarts.no/en/html/cdproduksjon/

Timmerman, T., Schmidt, H.U., Bosse, J. (2013). A music therapeutic approach to supervision. Workshop presented at the 9th European Music Therapy Congress (2013) Setting the tone: cultures of relating and reflecting in music therapy. Oslo Norway 7-10 August 2013.

How to cite this page

Hoskyns, Sarah (2013). Improvising a Pathway to Valuable Connections at the 9th European Music Therapy Conference, Oslo Improvising a Pathway to Valuable Connections at the 9th European Music Therapy Conference, Oslo. Voices Resources. Retrieved January 11, 2015, from http://testvoices.uib.no/community/?q=fortnightly-columns/2013-improvising-pathway-valuable-connections-9th-european-music-therapy-confere