Expansion of our Editorial Team

I am excited to announce that we recently expanded our editorial team. After reviewing many stellar applications for the call for Associate Editors, we selected four new Associate Editors: Bolette Daniels Beck, Imogen Clark, Susan Gardstrom and Bill Matney. I would like to thank Even Ruud for his time and valuable feedback as external member of our search committee. We also appointed an Associate Editor of Communications, Beth Pickard, and an additional Assistant Editor, Harald Lexander. Allow me to briefly introduce them to you.

Bolette Daniels Beck is Associate Professor at Aalborg University (Denmark). She brings to the team expertise in Guided Imagery and Music, music therapy with refugees and trauma, and the use of micro-analysis. Imogen Clark is Lecturer and Research Fellow in Music Therapy at the University of Melbourne (Australia). She served as the Editor-in-Chief for the Australian Journal of Music Therapy prior to accepting the Associate Editor position. She brings significant research expertise in music therapy with older adults, people with dementia and their caregivers, and rehabilitation. Imogen also brings expertise in statistics and psychometric testing. Susan Gardstrom is Professor and Coordinator of the Graduate Music Therapy Program at the University of Dayton (USA). Susan contributes expertise in improvisational music therapy as well as music therapy with adolescents and people with addiction. Bill Matney is Assistant Professor at the University of Kansas (USA). Bill has expertise in philosophy, music therapy theory and epistemology as well as survey research, content analysis, and improvisational music therapy. Bill serves as our Associate Editor for Book Reviews. He recently developed, in collaboration with our Managing Editor, Monika Geretsegger, revised guidelines for book review submissions which can be located in our journal’s Instructions for the Authors. These new guidelines emphasize the importance for book review authors to demonstrate critical engagement with the book content and to discuss implications and/or applications to the field of music therapy.

Beth Pickard is Course Leader and Senior Lecturer at the University of South Wales. Her specialty is in working with clients with learning disabilities and profound and multiple learning disabilities. Her PhD is focused on exploring interpretations of disability and how these may be constructed and perpetuated by creative arts practices, arts therapies and higher education pedagogy. As Associate Editor of Communications, Beth is tasked with promoting the visibility of our journal inside and outside the field of music therapy. Finally, Harald Lexander joined our team as Assistant Editor as I was writing Editorial. Good timing, Harald! Harald is a music therapist from Bergen (Norway). He obtained his Master’s degree at the Grieg Academy, University of Bergen. His clinical experience is mostly within the contexts of elderly care, child and youth welfare, and in special education. I am thrilled to welcome each of them to our dynamic team and thank them for their willingness to serve the profession in this capacity.

Speaking of Bill Matney’s expertise in philosophy, this first issue of 2021 starts off with an article by Bill about music therapy as multiplicity. In this article, he takes the reader on an interesting journey to re-envision Ken Bruscia’s construction of music therapy as a multiplicity through applying Gilles Deleuze’s multiplicity concept. By doing so, he encourages an openness to new ways of thinking and invites our field to shift from a predominant focus on defining “what is” to spending more time on designing “what if,” (p. 3). This issue also includes an article by an international group of researchers, Sarah Janus, Annemieke Vink, Hanne Mette Ridder, Monika Geretsegger, Brynjulf Stige, Christian Gold, and Sytse Zuidema (p. 24). Using a Delphi consensus procedure, they involved music therapists from eight countries to develop a consent statement about person-centered group music therapy with people with dementia. Research like this is invaluable to enhance the scientific rigor of multisite research, especially when involving sites from different countries, and ultimately the recognition of music therapy as an effective non-pharmacological intervention with this population. Tríona McCaffrey, Paula Higgins, Clara Monahan, Sinéad Moloney, Siobhán Nelligan, Aoife Clancy & Pui Sze Cheung used song-writing focus groups to explore questions surrounding the role and impact of group songwriting with multiple stakeholders in recovery-oriented mental health services in Ireland (p. 41). In this innovative study, songwriting was primarily employed as an arts-based method of data collection and to support collaboration between focus group members. In their pluralistic qualitative research study, Efrat Roginsky and Cochavit Elefant explored the communicability and musicality of nonverbal individuals with cerebral palsies and multiple disabilities (CPMD) (p. 61). They used Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis combined with Grounded Theory to analyze interviews with the parents of children with CPMD in Israel as well as music home videos. Given that this is an under-researched area in the field of music therapy, this study lays important groundwork for the building of a systematic research program focused on the use of music therapy with this population. Finally, Katrien Foubert, Satinder Gill and Jos De Backer (p. 79) present a musical improvisation framework for Shaping Interpersonal Trust (SIT). The SIT framework is based on their work with people with Personality Disorder and consists of four levels of developing and shaping interpersonal trust between therapist and patient so that the patient develops a sense of safety and confidence to improvise. We thank Gitta Strehlow for writing a thoughtful commentary on this article (p. 97). Gitta suggested that it would be interesting to relate the SIT framework to group music therapy. This reminded me of the article by Kenner et al. (2020) in which people with borderline personality disorder spoke specifically about becoming more confident playing instruments and making choices in the group music therapy sessions. This is an example of how through publication, clinicians and scholars can find each other and hopefully connect and exchange thoughts, even if living at opposite ends of the world.