Conceptualizing Music Therapy: Five Areas that Frame the Field

Abstract

Answering the question "what is music therapy?" briefly and comprehensively can be challenging for new students entering training. Most seasoned practitioners can present a few short sentences to sum up their work but when starting out it can feel awkward and confronting having chosen a wonderful profession to encounter difficulty in explaining it to others. Loewy (2001) has advised that responding to questions is part of our everyday lives as music therapists. She wrote, "we have to explain and show rather than roll our eyes, hide or become introverted" (p. 4) reflecting that many practitioners learn how to explain music therapy to others by describing a recent event from their practice in which the use of music made a difference; supporting or helping a client in some way.