Collaborative Insights: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Musical Care Throughout the Life Course

Collaborative Insights provides new perspectives informed by interdisciplinary thinking on musical care throughout the life course. In this book, volume editors Katie Rose M. Sanfilippo and Neta Spiro define musical care as the role that music - music listening as well as music-making - plays in supporting any aspect of people's developmental or health needs, for example physical and mental health, cognitive and behavioural development, and interpersonal relationships. Musical care is relevant to several types of music, approach, and setting, and through the introduction of that new term musical care, the authors prioritise the element of care that is shared among these otherwise diverse contexts and musical activities, celebrating the nuanced interweaving of theory and practice.

The multifaceted nature of musical care requires reconciling perspectives and expertise from different fields and disciplines. This book shows interdisciplinary collaboration in action by bringing together music practitioners and researchers to write each chapter collaboratively to discuss musical care from an interdisciplinary perspective and offer directions for future work. The life course structure, from infancy to end of life, highlights the connections and themes present in approach, context, and practices throughout our lives. Thus, the book represents both the start of a conversation and a call to action, inspiring new collaborations that provide new insights to musical care in its many facets.

Katie Rose M. Sanfilippo is currently a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London in the UK. She is also an associated lecturer in music at University of Cambridge. Her current research is exploring the application of music-based interventions to support maternal mental health across different cultural contexts in Africa and the UK. She has worked with various policymakers, charities, and health organisations to promote maternal mental health in the educational and health policy agendas. She also worked for two years as a research assistant in the research team at Nordoff Robbins Music Therapy Charity.

Neta Spiro is a Reader in Performance Science at the Royal College of Music and an honorary Research Fellow at Imperial College London. She was previously Head of Research at Nordoff Robbins, London. She was Research Fellow at the New School for Social Research, New York and Royal Holloway, University of London. Neta taught at the Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge. Neta explores the potential role of music in peoples' health and wellbeing and the levels of shared understanding possible across a variety of forms of music making.