We (Gary and Tia) are exploring the uses of poetry in ethnographic research. This is different from writing, for its own sake, poetry about what happens in, or outside of, the field. This is also different from seeking to share ‘research poems’ with readers or listeners as part of a process of ‘public engagement’. We …
Author Archives: gamutexe
The music stopped. Then it started again.
I started working as a music therapist at Hill House four years ago. Almost every week since there has been live music for a couple of hours on a Thursday afternoon. It involves anyone who’s there at the time: residents, family members, staff coming in for ten minutes, or simply dancing through to the kitchen. …
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World Federation of Music Therapy
The theme of this World Federation Congress is Polyrhythms of Music Therapy. Nice. We recorded our contribution for the conference on Friday. None of us are too clued up with zoom so it’s been a learning curve. But in a way, that made it more fun – at least in the recording and we laughed …
What Can Music Do?
Music is there for us. It keeps us company. It puts us in mind of others. It can help to shift our mood. So much uncertainty. Inevitable anxiety. Much in upheaval. The NHS enduring tremendous strain. And all of us, if we are lucky, at home (that is, if we have homes). And something new …
Poetry of Departures
Health/illness experience has been a rich seam for poetry and there are some wonderful precedents – we’re thinking of Auden’s famous ‘Care Home’ poem, Larkin’s ‘The Old Fools’ or ‘The Building’ or ‘Ambulances’, Sharon Old’s The Father, and all those beautiful, bitter-sweet ‘cancer poems’ which you can read about here Cancer Poetry, by Ian Twiddy, …
The Social Value of Music
Over the last 15 years music therapists and community musicians have increasingly used the word ‘wellbeing’ to talk about their work. ‘Wellbeing’ – instead of the seemingly more ‘objective’ term, ‘health’. While the term wellbeing raises many complex issues, it also captures the multiple senses of what it means to be at ease, secure, or …
The Power of Music
Nottingham University: One of the sponsors was the Room 217 Foundation from Canada. The title of Gary’s talk was ‘Taking an improvisational attitude to music’s help’. He described how how music can foster second-by-second change (of energy, mood, intensity, movement, focus). Music practitioners can use improvisational methods in ways that create connection with (and between) …
The High Road and the Low Road in Care for Music
Micro analysis of musical engagement takes time. It often dwells on split second interaction. The kind of things that, literally, if you blink, you will miss. Sometimes small things have large effects. In popular culture we speak of things like the ‘final straw’, of ‘tipping points’, of how sometimes things can, and have to ‘turn …
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Memory, and Contested Memory
Memory Studies at University of Rome, III. Professoressa Annalisa Tota and her team at Roma III are specialists in ‘technologies of memory’, by which they mean cultural media. They study how memory is always collective – it takes shape in relation to available cultural images, narratives, and structured arrangements of sensory materials – such as …
Care for a Revolution?
Our Project Partner, Mountbatten Hospice hosted a wonderful conference entitled Care for a Revolution? Some striking talks and keynotes from Adam Kay, Tracey Bleakley, Dame Barbara Monroe, Barbara Gale, Sam Kyeremateng and (member of the Care for Music Advisory Board) Nigel Hartley. Two days discussing how to enrich our languages of death and dying, how …
Care for Music 