Community Music Therapy and Its Relationship to Community Music: Where Does It End?

Abstract

A focus of the emerging discourse on Community Music Therapy (CoMT) has been to discuss its departure from the principles of the ‘consensus model’ of music therapy. This has helped to define where CoMT begins, but the question of where it ends has been less definitive. The following article addresses this question, drawing on the results of a recent qualitative study that involved a grounded theory analysis of in–depth interviews with Australian music therapists and community musicians. The three main results of this study are discussed in order to suggest new directions for music therapy practices that are simultaneously connected with and delineated from Community Music practices.

Keywords:

• Community music therapy
• community music
• health-care continuum
• boundaries
• aesthetics
• priorities