Invitation to Community Music Therapy

Invitation to Community Music Therapy by Brynjulf Stige, and Leif Edvard Aar0. Routledge, 2012. ISBN 978-0-415-89760-0 (hbk); ISBN 978-0-415-80554-0 (pbk); ISBN 978-0-203-80354-7 (ebk).

Invitation to Community Music Therapy, by Brynjulf Stige and Leif Edvard Aar0, evolved from Stige's 2003 dissertation concerning his work with a group of persons with intellectual challenges, whom he integrated into a civic performance with the town band. Thus this book is an outgrowth of Stige's long-time advocacy and commitment to developing the theory, practice, and research of community music therapy (CoMT). Aar0 is a social psychologist who teaches community psychology, and the authorial partnership of these two men has resulted in a reflective text on community music therapy that encompasses the full range of concepts related to CoMT.

This textbook has three foci: (a) theory and research, (b) practice, and (c) implications for the profession of music therapy. The clarity and breadth of this text are evident in its organization and presentation from the first to last page, making it an accessible book for scholars, students, researchers, and practising professionals alike. At the outset the authors state goals that include offering an international perspective, writing in a reflective style with discussion topics and questions, providing pedagogical features such as learning outcomes and key terms, exploring with plentiful examples the interdependent relationships between personal agency and social structure, and encouraging an inclusive role for the reader that, like the title ofthe book, invites the reader to reflect and interact with the text and with others in joint reading and discussion.

The features of this book that render it an invitation include structured formats in each chapter, which make it user-friendly for a variety of needs and purposes whether used as a classroom textbook or a practical guide to resources for theory and research. For example, each chapter has questions at the beginning that orient the reader to the general topics to be discussed; text boxes that provide examples of CoMT practices from around the world, contextualizing the theoretical and practical content; photos that provide an emotional, aesthetic, and social context for this work; discussion topics that are presented for personal reflection or group interaction; and definitions of key terms that clarify the particular meanings of words used by the authors...