Description of sub-theme:
The rigour and systematic nature of inquiry into complex real life environments was
acknowledged in this theme. Research about practice involved really looking in depth at what you do. It required really scrutinising it, working at the materials, going back again and again to seek answers and not leaping to conclusions. This idea linked the huge effort and investment of pioneers as practitioner music therapists with current requirements for rigorous research work.
There was real recognition across participants in all site visits and focus groups that the tasks and process of researching practice (as student or qualified practitioner) involve a huge amount of ‘bloody hard work’. The sub-theme was evoked in various ways, with reminders of being stressed as students, and exhaustion and sometimes confusion in the researcher role, through the fascination and absorption and slightly obsessive qualities self-observed, to the satisfaction of ‘job-well-done’ and excitement and creativity of getting to the end of a major and difficult task.
Quentin and Eddie, lecturer-researchers in Group-E launched the idea of this theme in the analysis, by exploring the topic with specific reference to pioneer music therapists who embarked on early music therapy practice with research qualities and values implicit in everything they did. Within the focus group these two participants mirrored language and ideas, expressed at slightly different times in the conversation. The ‘hard work’ was captured in the carrying around of equipment, and making sure that work was recorded, and then sitting down for review, making notes, and returning to the material and listening again. This linked strongly, for the two participants, with music therapists’ work with a supervisor (maybe clinical and/or research supervisor) returning to the material, sitting down and ‘re- searching’ for understanding, meaning or information. If you did not understand, you would go back and listen again. The participants shared the idea that this came directly out of practice-driven values, it was the desire to explain and make sense of what they were doing inside the music therapy work with patients. But it also had a natural extension into what was needed for research.
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Virtually every participant at the two in-depth site visits identified the sustained engagement required to develop and complete research both as a professional and as a student in training. This was
particularly graphically drawn by Beatrice at Site KT who recounted an image that appeared during a Guided Imagery and Music session around her pioneer work developing the music therapy discipline through research and teaching, alongside another area of psychotherapeutic practice in which she was also passionately interested.
I was ploughing through brown earth with my elbows and I created these two absolutely parallel ditches along this brown earth as if I was going to plant seeds.…it’s really all of your body is in it. I suppose I could have done it with my feet or my knees or something. But it’s the elbow grease! That’s what it is (more laughter). It’s the hard work!
(Beatrice 211-214 & 235-7)
In her story, research came at the very start of her encounters with music therapy, alongside all the other professional disciplinary development and I really got the sense from her interview, that it was because she was constantly curious and researching, and because it absorbed her entirely, that she gained the reward for the ‘furrowing’ and elbow grease.26
In her consideration of students in training, another lecturer-researcher participant identified that the benefit for the hard work was that the new researchers got invested and empowered. This was not just a teaching exercise; they could feel part of a bigger process and that they could contribute effectively and truly achieve something worthwhile:
I think that that is the great plus is that they get to ask a question and find out how hard it is to answer it, but ultimately to answer it. It’s wonderful, to know that you can do that from my own perspective and my own experiences …That is what I think really just about justifies the huge amount of time they have to spend in doing it… (Bella 276-280)
One of the students retains her sense of value and involvement in what she is doing by thinking how practically relevant her project can be. She is ergonomic, hates waste, and sees that if there is practical value to somebody else in her topic, that the research can be applied, it will become meaningful and worth the effort. So the integration of research and the idea of practice in her imagination adds value to the process because“in terms of research topics I’m very much one for researching so it has a practical impact …research for research’s sake is also good, but if it has a practical use or it can be
applied in practice, …I find it more worthwhile doing ..”(Naomi 205-209). The other student actively
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accounts for the value of her training as a researcher as part of her music therapy journey in that it contributes to her sense of professional identity:
I think I'm more excited now about being a music therapist knowing that I can do that research as well, and kind of contribute to the body of knowledge that's there, and feel like I can actually be a worthwhile member of the music therapy profession. (Abby 591-592)
An inspiring and significant ‘mythic’ kind of explanation for why people might go on battling with the difficult topics and complex interrelationships was provided by one participant in passing:
I think that at my core is the desire to foster connections, you know, both intellectually and personally connections and patterns are the things that really intrigue me. And in my
professional work it’s my networking and my learning from other people which is, I think, my strength. (Bella 214-218)
This might be an emblem for any person who is interested in the communicative musicality (S. Malloch & Trevarthen, 2009) and desire for contact that embodies music therapy internationally – as professional researchers and practitioners we are looking for connection pattern and meaning. Looked at from this perspective, there is no incongruity, no difficulty no lack of fit between being research and practitioner.