Personal Reflections on working as a Music Therapist, Music Therapy Groups and Music Making

Abstract

This paper explores how studying clinical work can be a rich experience and lead to personal and musical development. In this paper I describe completing a master’s project on group work for children who have autism. This paper describes how analysing a group in detail (using music and video coding analysis) and reading literature on music therapy and group work, led to a personal prompting to reflect on my own musical experiences and identity and to develop more as a musician. It explores how the roles of music therapist, student and musician can influence each other an be blurred together, and how I experienced cross-over in my personal and musical life.

Keywords

• groups
• autism
• music therapy