Carolyn Kenny

I met Carolyn Kenny in 1982, at the seminal symposium in New York -Music in the Life of Man: Toward a Theory of Music Therapy -organized by Barbara Hesser.Carolyn and I shared a common interest in theory and in the next two decades we corresponded regularly, exchanged books and ideas and met at several occasions in USA, Canada and Europe where we had the opportunity to dialogue.After the New York symposium Barbara and Carolyn invited me to join Phoenicia Music Therapy Retreat Community, which met each summer in the Catskills Mountains, upstate New York.Carolyn invited me to give a seminar on 'Music and identity' in Vancouver in 1995 and we both attended the World Conference in Washington in 1999.We also attended Mechthild Langenberg's symposiums on qualitative methods in Berlin and Carolyn came to Oslo as lecturer and external examinator for Karette Stensæth's PhD. in 2008.I also contributed with a chapter to Carolyn's edited book Listening, Playing, Creating (Kenny, (ed.) 1995), and she helped me to copy edit some of my English articles.When Carolyn asked me to write a forward to her second book, The Field of Play.A Guide for the Theory and Practice of Music Therapy (1989), I felt much honored and did my best to introduce and support her effort to put forward her worldview and theories.Although, I must admit I found part of the text a bit enigmatic -and I still do.Perhaps no surprise, since Carolyn herself admits that her fields described in her book «are enigmatic and wait enduringly for the 'conditions' in each unique field of experience and engagement» (Kenny, 2000, p.67).When I now read the forward again, thirty years (sic!) after it was written I can spot this ambivalence in my honouring Carolyn's effort to engage in qualitative research and theory building.Not saying too much about the content of the book, I reinforced my view upon Carolyn as one of the first music therapists to search an alternative to the prevalent positivist hegemony in North American music therapy up till then. T Two kinds of holism wo kinds of holismIn my critical rereading of the book I have tried to both understand better what Carolyn is suggesting, as well as to look closer at some of the underlying worldviews that informs and directs her visions.It becomes evident that Kenny's quest for a better theoretical understanding of some of the basic underlying principles in a successful music therapy have to involve a kind of «wholeness».She wants to promote a «holistic theory» in contrast to what she considers as the more fragmentary and reductionist approach advocated by the natural science model behind much music therapy research.While reading the first chapters I came to remember a text written by my fellow researcher social anthropologist Odd Are Berkaak in a book on contemporary culture we published in 1992 (Berkaak & Ruud, 1992).

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