Dear friends and colleagues, an era has come to an end. This is the final edition of Music Therapy Today. I have failed to secure financing and so the journal has reached its final resting place. It is linked to the closure of the Institute for Music Therapy at the University of Witten Herdecke and my Chair of Qualitative Research in Medicine. The music and art therapy landscape is changing, as is the financing structure for training courses within Europe, and we have failed to convince the University that further support is necessary.

Jörg Fachner is taking leave of absence from his post as my assistant and will be moving to the University of Jyväskylä in Finland. His contact details will remain the same and I am sure all our readers will thank him for his editorial work in helping them achieve the publication of their papers in the past.

When I started the journal, my intention was to provide a web portal that offered research support, in terms of databases and information, which was also coupled to a journal offering new researchers an opportunity to pre-publish their material. As I saw it at the time, while we had an encouraging amount of exciting work going on, many practitioners and researchers had little experience of writing. My intention was to provide a platform for neophyte writers and a forum for presenting new work that maybe would not be initially considered by the main stream journals. In addition, the journal was independent from any professional or institutional influence and intended to offer broader contributions than from the field of music therapy alone. A colleague in nursing asked about my writing concerning spirituality and I told her that these had been published in a book called “Spirituality, healing and medicine”. “What a pity” she replied “If it the title had been ‘Spirituality, healing and nursing’, I would have read it”. And so it has sometimes been in music therapy, we fail to look across the borders of the discipline. So we made an effort to go beyond music as therapy and look at music as it is used in everyday life.

One feature of music therapy today has been the inclusion of multi-media. A constant argument of mine has been that the best way to present music therapy is with audio and visual material and this is linked to the need for an e-learning platform for music education, music therapy and applied music studies. My conviction remains the same but I have failed to convince sponsors. Interestingly, when I speak to music therapy educators about using multi-media and the internet, they are often sceptical and say that teaching can only take place directly in a personal relationship. First, this implies that I had not thought of this myself - and believe me over the years, I have also experienced teaching students at different academic levels, some aspects can only take place directly. Second, that the teaching relationship is the only place where learning can take place. This is evidently not so. The internet is a primary learning resource for young students and we as educators have a responsibility to organize with them those learning resources. For those sceptical about the internet, may be considering the web as an incredibly big library connected to a resource centre may help. However, we still have to know what is worth looking at. It is discernment that is the essential tool of learning.

In this final edition compiled from the 2007 conference in Eindhoven, the reader will find a selection of articles. The symposium related to researching music and altered states had its grounding in my book spirituality, healing and medicine. I realised that we were potentially ignoring an important field of music as used in healing rituals. This anthropological aspect was seen, and I still regard it so, as a balance to the over medicalization of music therapy that concentrates predominantly on functionality and as a widening of musical considerations to include other cultures. I am often contacted by European writers who insist on trying to impose a European standard on cultures with a rich tradition of music healing. For me this is another attempt at cultural colonialism as restrictive as the modern fad of evidence–based medicine that restricts the evidence to narrow bands of knowledge. From this basis, we developed a series of symposia that encouraged other perspectives on music healing and a book (see Aldridge, D and Fachner, J. 2005 Music and Altered States http://www.jkp.com/catalogue/book.php/isbn/9781843103738)

I hope that you enjoy the final issue. My thanks go to all the contributors over the years who have responded to the call for something new, and in particular to Petra Kern who rallied to the call and made a series of audio interviews that are available in the archive. As the reader will see, the issue is rich in content and the accompanying newsletter reflects how vital and vivid the world of music therapy has become.

The website musictherapyworld will remain online for the time being as a resource.

Until we are truly, to quote George Clinton, "One Nation Under A Groove"

back to the Funk
David Aldridge