How music helps: the ecology of music therapy

Dr. Gary Ansdell, a prominent music therapist and researcher internationally, visits the Grieg Academy and presents his influential ideas about music therapy theory, with reference to his latest book, How Music Helps: In Music Therapy & Everyday Life, published in 2014. The lecture will include several examples from practice, presented with audio-visual material.

Bio: Dr Gary Ansdell trained as a music therapist at the Nordoff-Robbins Centre in London in 1987, and later at the Institut für Musiktherapie, Universität Witten-Herdecke, Germany. He has worked with many client groups in the UK and Germany (currently in adult psychiatry), and has been involved in developing and researching Nordoff Robbins music therapy and its broader growth within the Community Music Therapy movement. From 1994-7 he was Research Fellow in Music Therapy at City University, London, during which time he completed his doctoral thesis: ‘Music Therapy as Discourse and Discipline’. In 2002 he established the Research Department at the Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy Centre in London, and is currently Director of Education for Nordoff Robbins. He designed the first music therapy doctoral programme in the UK (also at Nordoff-Robbins), and also the new MA in Music Therapy (Community Music Therapy / Nordoff-Robbins) which launched in 2008, hosted at the Royal Northern College of Music. He is Honorary Research Fellow in Community Music Therapy at the University of Sheffield, and a member of the advisory editorial board of three journals: British Journal of Music Therapy, Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, Music & Arts in Action. In 2008 he was awarded the Royal Society for Public Health Arts & Health Award. He has published widely in the fields of music, music therapy and music & health/wellbeing. His latest book, How Music Helps: In Music Therapy & Everyday Life was published in 2014. Ansdell and the music sociologist Tia DeNora are the editors of the new Ashgate Series Music and Change.