Therapeutic Songwriting: Developments in Theory, Methods, and Practice

Therapeutic Songwriting: Developments in Theory, Methods, and Practice by Felicity A. Baker. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. ISBN: 978-1-137-49921-9 (hbk), 978-1-137-49922-6 (pbk), available in Kindle version.With Therapeutic Songwriting: Developments in Theory, Methods, and Practice, Felicity Baker offers the music therapy profession a landmark work on the topic of songwriting as used as a therapeutic intervention. This book is the result of several years of research Baker conducted with therapists in 11 countries, which included Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Norway, South Korea, Qatar, Korea, Iceland, Finland, and Denmark. This foundational research involved three separate studies: indepth personal and social media interviews; interviews and songwriting exercises with groups of university students and retired citizens; and an extensive series of songwriting sessions with clients living with neurological injuries.My own experiences with the therapeutic use of songwriting began with my final music therapy practicum in 1999, a time when there was much less awareness of the potential extent of the clinical application of songwriting than there is now. Songwriting as a clinical tool was touched upon briefly during training at that time, usually offered cursorily as something of an engagement tool, particularly when working with very young children. Without use of a formal guide I began to use therapeutic songwriting during student practicum placements, and I continued to use songwriting into my internship and then in my professional clinical life. A few years into my practice, during the writing of my thesis (Hatcher, 2004), I discovered a growing number of studies about therapeutic songwriting published 1990 onward (e.g., Cordobes, 1997; Edgarton, 1990). Prior to that, Ficken (1976) and Freed (1987) had been the only authors to address this topic.In Therapeutic Songwriting, Baker remarks on this rise in the number of published papers on the use of therapeutic songwriting, noting the publication of more than 50 papers or chapters between 2010 and 2014. She also observes that the literature is maturing, having shifted gradually in approach over two decades case studies to descriptions of methods to understanding songwriting's role-a trajectory from observation . . . to exploratory . . . to explanatory (p. 15), suggesting that the clinical use of this technique is coming into its own. This, Baker's own addition to the literature, is a remarkably comprehensive work. She outlines the elements surrounding songwriting when used therapeutically: the multitude of influences such as environmental, individual, and sociocultural; the various methods of therapeutic song construction; and the models of therapeutic songwriting. She also provides an extensive reference list.In the final section of the book, Baker divides the models of therapeutic songwriting into outcome-oriented, experience-oriented, and context-oriented classifications, providing a thorough list with a wealth of variations and extrapolations. Music therapists could, as a result, form a new relationship between themselves and their use of the song generation process in clinical settings. In my own early uses of therapeutic songwriting, I would have welcomed a discussion of the differences in the models, as Baker provides here. I see now that I, as undoubtedly has been the case with many other therapists, was often moving back and forth between interventions that were oriented to outcome, experience, and context, not always aware of the shift in orientation as I proceeded. Lastly, I note that within this segment of the book Baker makes an especially valuable contribution to the literature in her exploration of feminist music therapy, in which she brings readers up to date on current interpretations of feminism, and which is timely and welcome. …

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.