Synthesis Sunday: Finding Textbooks In the Stacks...

If you have been reading this week, then you already know that I am on a quest to organize things as much as possible in the two weeks that I have in my first break (one week is done, one week left of this break!!). I have been tackling the library room first of all because it is the space that is the most coordinated. I already had bookshelves ready for that room...but, they were too tall and very floppy. I cut those down, tried several ways of propping them up on the wall without success, and then I got brave and anchored them to the wall - they were still up this morning when I awoke, so SUCCESS! I have been moving books from one place to another over the past two days, and I found a box of music therapy stuff. I found four texts to start exploring.

The first book that I have is one that I have read a couple of times over the years - Music Therapy in the Treatment of Adults with Mental Disorders: Theoretical Bases and Clinical Interventions. My edition was edited by Robert F. Unkefer and Michael H. Thaut, so it is a bit out of date, but it still has some valuable information in it, so I will review some of the chapters to see what I can glean. I am most interested in the clinical interventions part of the book, but I am often disappointed with the interventions that make it to books like these. We will see.

I found a book that I ordered a long time ago when I was working on an audacious project with many other music therapists, Feminist Perspectives in Music Therapy, edited by Susan Hadley. Published in 2006, I bought this book to read up on a specific contributor. I have not been able to delve more into the book or the perspectives, but it may be time to get this reading going. I seek understanding, not a donnybrook.

Viggo Kruger wrote the next text that I found, Music Therapy in Child Welfare: Bridging Provision, Protection, and Participation. This was one of the books that I bought several years ago when Barcelona Publishers was having a sale of older texts. I have not even opened this book yet, so it is WAY past time to start looking into these ideas. One of the other books from that book binge was Sounding the Self: Analogy in Improvisational Music Therapy by Henk Smeijsters. (Interesting, my spell check doesn't flag Smeijsters...it didn't like Unkefer, Thaut, or Viggo). I am not exactly sure why I originally went for this text, but I was definitely reaching outside of my music therapy comfort zone when I went shopping.

My reading of music therapy texts is not as robust as I would like to pretend at times. I get very bored very quickly when I am reading about music therapy. I'm not sure why, but that's just the way I am. I love reading things for fun, but reading for work or for professional enrichment is a challenge for me. When I read things that are out of my common view of what music therapy is and should be (goblin!), I tend to spend more time arguing with the author than really learning what is being said. I continue to work on that, but I also embrace the argument that happens in my brain - I try to work on it and seek understanding about why I react so strongly to specific thoughts. I also take what works for me and lose what doesn't work in all of this reading and synthesis.

So, I will start reading some of these texts in the next several weeks, months...hopefully, NOT years! Do you have a preference for what I read first? I am totally open to suggestion now that I have found some new books to try to understand...

Let me know your preference in the comments!