07/30/2023
After 6 days of the World Congress of Music Therapy in Vancouver, I want to say something pithy and summative and/but, having 18 000 thoughts and feelings about this week (someone else's validating estimate) makes it difficult. Being precise is important to me, and/but, has to exist of course in a constant lovely tension with the non-concrete, and the uncertainty inherent in so much of the field of music therapy. I'm so grateful I could be here and to so many brilliant, warm, and brave people.
I know most folks reading have no idea how fu**in' cool and alive the field of music therapy research and practice is but it is a field with a bottomlessly interesting diversity of what is being examined, applied or investigated within the framework of existing music therapy theory and high quality research, especially, for me, the qualitative. I go through the pictures I took of presenters' slides on my phone, thinking maybe I can use one of them to go with what I write here and give it focus. I review bits I wanted to capture from the, what, maybe 20 presentations by international music therapists I have been a part of in the last week. I look at the notes I scribbled, recording generous wisdom and trying to keep up with my own reactions and curiosities about them while still listening to the next thing said. I revisit seeds in my brain, some planted in moments of stillness, some of them already bursting forth with new green. How can I pick just one?
The beauty and power of interpersonal "recognition" as integral to being and experiencing ourselves as human, and music/music therapy's capacity to facilitate it; we know this, but I want to linger with this idea more often. The internationally codified rights of children to communicate nonverbally and the implications for music therapy and allied health professionals. The "majestic soundwave" of a carefully mistuned gamelan, rejecting the lifelessness of the pure tone, and the collage of this idea with the new-to-me concept of agonism: how we can accept and maybe embrace conflict in our work to grow our caring spaces. The egregiously “long way to go” that we have in creating an anti-ableist and truly trauma-informed practice in healthcare fields including our own. The beauty of embracing uncertainty as a part of finding and building knowledge. Knowledge and certainty aren't the same thing! That's beautiful. It's so important to stay connected to that, I think. And also, music. When there were music therapists singing or making music together, those were some of my favourite moments.
The dynamics of being at an international conference like this is beautiful too, in the way that reckoning with truth and reality can be. International colleagues, plural, in separate one-on-one conversations expressed to me their horror at the abandonment of humanity on display in Vancouver, the people in states of immense suffering next to people and institutions of immense wealth and apparently total disinterest. I walked an hour one evening at dusk through the biggest crowds I have ever seen, all moving in an eerie mass on their way to watch wealth be incinerated in the sky along with the sound of explosions, bombs, gunfire. With my back finally to the fireworks and crowds when they began I couldn't see them anymore, so it was only a deafening, relentless intrusion of brain-numbing aural violence; this after a day of talking about what it means to be trauma-informed. I am grateful to have noted how many of my music therapist colleagues and allies feel similarly about the bangs and booms. My nervous system was wound up by this unexpected barrage, and I didn't know what it was all for or about... and I have never lived through war. Are we really trauma-informed practitioners if we sleep on interfering with norms in our communities that retraumatise our neighbours? What are our responsibilities as people in care work? As people at all? I'm grateful for the zoom-out and the opportunity to show an international audience the more hideous hidden face of so-called Canada.
Brilliant people stood up this week and said to a healthcare discipline, hey, your ways of being here are not the norm, they're just your norm. How does what we do here leave or leave out or support allies in other experiences of the world we share? And how do we need to give ourselves a shake from our narrow gaze? “But how is this funded?!” asked someone in a workshop about music therapy programming for displaced youth in Norway and the beautiful work that the youth did with music there. “Well. It's child protection. So it is funded by child protection,” said the presenter, visibly, I think, wondering how far to go into explaining why supporting the mental health of children was necessary to protect their present and future health and vulnerability. I'm so moved by the sharing of perspectives and I think I am grieving a little for all of us going back to our silos, and committing internally to fight that.
Finally: I'm also moved by what I'll call more of an ego-focused part of my experience this week, and if you've read this far, maybe you'll indulge it: the part about me and my own identity. The bottom pictures show me in relation to the place where my foundational training as a music therapist took place (over there! across the water from the conference centre, in North Vancouver) and this conference marks a coming home in a way. My heart finds so many feelings here. I try to come home to compassion inside myself; being with the joy of connecting with friends and allies, the comfort of beautiful moments, also being with the suffering of some of coming back being painful, including reminders of losses, growing pains, and the pain of seeing where I still want to grow and do better. The agonism, maybe, of such overwhelming beauty in my luminous friends and colleagues and the brilliant minds in our field with, at the same time, a reckoning with the weight, in this space of connecting and sharing, of some of our common human suffering, and with all the ways I know that we can and must do better in this country, in healthcare, in our professions, in my own work. Coming to this “home” gives me appreciation for the way I have finally trained myself to have compassion for all the different versions of me I've been in the time since I first visited Vancouver, young and with such a long way to go, and since I later lived here and learned here and set out from here to be the therapist I am for now. Appreciation for the way I do know a path to a stable place inside that knows how to see beauty in a landscape of harshness; the grounded gaze when seeing a lot that doesn't matter tells me what is really precious.
I am full of gratefulness to my mentors who have helped me and so many others learn to find the way to be grounded in that “home,” being connected, even when angry, even when grieving. I'm grateful for the sacrifice others make in building a field that generates so much care. I'm grateful that I know the way to that gift so that I can better access and share it. And I'm mobilized by awe at what can and might be built when brave and devoted human beings work together to create the space for learning to grow. My heart and ears and the street and the forest are full of music. And I love this place full of crows yelling jaggedly from the magnificent trees and they make me want to raise my fist in solidarity with them. I'm grateful to be a music therapist.
World Federation of Music Therapy
