Emerging from the Preliminary Study – Pointing Forward

At the close of the previous chapter, I posed a question as to the ontological validity of the music therapy trio: can the configuration of child, parent, and therapist be

understood as a trio at all; could there be a shared understanding; and if so, by whom and of what? I offered a graphic representation of the complex layers through which the trio could be seen to appear between individuals, within pairs, and between pairs and individuals (Fig. 3:5). This graphic also proposed the trio’s fluid permeability, marked by the inward and outward movement of people, place, and activity. I argued that the trio may prove to be an inadequate tool for describing this particular music therapy phenomenon, not least because it constrained it to both person and place. In order to understand the enactment of music therapy with a child and parent in this healthcare context the intention was to remove some of those constraints, and use a wider investigative lens.

What, then, of the heuristic of the trio? In the study’s next phase I intentionally set the notion of the trio as a focal point to one side. This enabled the freer exploration necessary at this point in following music therapy ‘out of’ the therapy room to the places and people suggested in the Preliminary Study. I will return to the

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aside. On reflection, I wondered if I, as a practitioner, had become unhelpfully attached as a practitioner to the trio as a concept, and whether this brought with it influencing assumptions (Stige et al, 2009). Turning the interrogatory spotlight away from the trio as a discrete unit allowed me a critical distance, testing it as a concept further through its absence while open to reconsidering its value at a later date. While, in the following chapters I still occasionally use the term ‘trio’, I do so openly as a writing shorthand. As such, it should be taken simply to indicate reference to the grouping of child, therapist, and parent.

Turning aside from the detail of the trio was necessary in order to pursue the further ‘opening up’ suggested at this point. This expansion can be understood in two key ways. First, the phenomenon itself – that is, music therapy with a child when a parent is present – had revealed itself as complex and interwoven. It appeared as both contained within, but also uncontained by, the time, place, and person of the music therapy session. The permeability suggested by the study warranted further

investigation in order to explore the extent and nature of the interconnections with other people, places, and events. How, if the trails of the trio were followed, might a

complexified understanding of music therapy with a child and parent emerge? And how might such an understanding be used to address the practical and theoretical problems presented in this enquiry?

Second, expanding the area of research interest necessitated extending the

methodological frame. The focus on individual experience within the Preliminary Study had made IPA an appropriate investigative approach. This required fresh

consideration given the expanded scale of the next phase. I deal with specific methodological decisions in the following chapter, but mention here two orienting principles that anchored the design of the subsequent phase.

From its inception the study was practice-led, concerned with what people did with each other in a particular music therapy service. The focus was on the processes of everyday music therapy and the mechanisms through which it was accomplished. Social science researcher Sarah Pink describes an approach to researching the everyday which conveys this intention vividly:

The goal of the scholar of everyday life and activism is not to find ways to cut across places and practices where everyday life and activism are played out and examine the flat surface that is left…Rather, she or he should find her or his way

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through its unevenness, following those whose lives, actions and things she or he seeks to understand. It is indeed by following people, things, representation and narratives that we encounter the very trails that are important and arrive at the intersections where meanings and changes are made. (Pink, 2010, p. 34)

Pink’s call to embrace the ‘unevenness’ of the terrain of practice aligned with my own epistemological understanding and methodological intentions. I set out consciously to complexify the picture of music therapy; to make it, as it were, ‘messy’, by pursuing the trails of action and knowledge that those within and around music therapy generated.

Reading Pink generated a trail of its own, leading me towards the work and ideas of anthropologist Tim Ingold. Ingold (2000, 2007, 2008a) has a predominant interest in the relationships between human beings and their environments (2000, 2007, 2008a, 2010). He argues for a dynamic interdependence in terms of how both evolve, proposing an approach that considers:

[…] the organism-person, undergoing growth and development in an environment furnished by the work and presence of others. (Ingold, 2000, p. 4)

The lives of people, and the environments within and through which those lives are lived are created in mutually influencing processes of generative activity. Neither, Ingold (2008a, p. 1796) argues, are people and environments to be seen as ‘bounded entities’; rather they comprise an ‘entanglements of lines’ (2007, 2014). Such lines and their entanglements constitute what Ingold terms the ‘meshwork’ (2007, 2008a). As he describes it:

The lines of the meshwork are the trails along which life is lived. (Ingold, 2007, p. 81, italics author’s own)

Ingold’s italics emphasise the significance of the trails themselves in an understanding of the way lives are lived. In placing this emphasis, he makes a clear distinction between the notion of lines in the meshwork and the network. In the latter, he argues, lines have come to be seen as ‘connectors’, linking dot to dot, entity to entity (2007, p. 80). The lines of which Ingold speaks are active, intertwining, and, generative. These are the trails of which Pink (2010) speaks, and which I was concerned with following here. Given the intertwined nature of music therapy as it had shown itself to this point in the study, how might the phenomenon be understood in terms of a meshwork of

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interlinking trails? How far might such a meshwork extend, whose trails might be drawn into it, and how might the interweaving of lines show itself?

These questions found a further echo in DeNora’s notion of ‘slow sociology’ as a research approach. She describes this as:

[…] devoted to the cultivation of intimate forms of knowledge and to the detailed features of what happens locally, here and now. (DeNora, 2014, p. 3)

A clear focus on the meshwork as it showed itself locally, in its unevenness, became the backbone of the next phase of study. The commitment to the people, places, and events of the local, however, needed to be understood in relation to the broader political landscape of public involvement in healthcare.

4.3 Testing out Approaches