We are hosting online meetings to bring people together to explore examples and meanings of, as well as disagreements about, musical care from different disciplinary and cultural perspectives. Building on a forthcoming book, Collaborative Insights: Interdisciplinary perspectives on musical care throughout the life course, our starting point is the term musical care. We define this new term as the role of music — music listening as well as music-making — in supporting any aspect of people’s developmental or health needs, including physical and mental health, cognitive and behavioural development, and interpersonal relationships.

We invite discussion of a broad range of musical care practices, from private experiences (including informal singing between caregivers and infants or formal music therapy sessions) to public ones (such as group music making and music in health campaigns), from all over the world.

We welcome practitioners and researchers from a broad range of disciplines and practices, including but not limited to community music, ethnomusicology, medical humanities, medicine, music anthropology, music in health, music education, music psychology, music sociology, and music therapy.

The meetings will mainly consist of discussion groups which will focus on examples of musical care in different contexts. There’s limited space so if you are interested, please register here by the 1st of December 2021. We will then send you further information by mid-December 2021.

Details about the meeting

We plan to hold meetings on Tuesday 18th January and on Friday 21st January. We have had such a high level of interest that in order to include as many participants as possible, we will hold up to six sessions on the opening topic, one in the morning and one in the afternoon UK time and one in Canberra, Australia morning time. We will assign sessions that suits your availability.

If you have any questions, please contact Neta (neta.spiro@rcm.ac.uk).  If you are interested in participating but feel there is a barrier to your joining this meeting (e.g., English language, connecting online), please let me know. We will do what we can do support attendance.

We look forward to hearing from you,

Neta Spiro, Centre for Performance Science, Royal College of Music, London, UK
Bonnie B. McConnell, Australian National University, Australia, and
Katie Rose Sanfilippo, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

Register for the event here.