Musical Pathways in Recovery: Community Music Therapy and Mental Wellbeing

"Music triggered a healing process from within me. I started singing for the joy of singing myself and it helped me carry my recovery beyond the state I was in before I fell ill nine years ago to a level of well-being that I haven't had perhaps for thirty years."

This book explores the experiences of people who took part in a vibrant musical community for people experiencing mental health difficulties, SMART (St Mary Abbotts Rehabilitation and Training). Ansdell (a music therapist/researcher) and DeNora (a music sociologist) describe their long-term ethnographic work with this group, charting the creation and development of a unique music project that won the 2008 Royal Society for Public Health Arts and Health Award. Ansdell and DeNora track the 'musical pathways' of a series of key people within SMART, focusing on changes in health and social status over time in relation to their musical activity. The book includes the voices and perspectives of project members and develops with them a new understanding of how music promotes their health and wellbeing. A contemporary ecological understanding of 'music and change' is outlined, drawing on and further developing theory from music sociology and Community Music Therapy. This innovative book will be of interest to anyone working in the mental health field, but also music therapists, sociologists, musicologists, music educators and ethnomusicologists. This volume completes a three part 'triptych', alongside the other volumes, Music Asylums: Wellbeing Through Music in Everyday Life, and How Music Helps: In Music Therapy and Everyday Life.

Gary Ansdell is an experienced music therapist, trainer and researcher. He has published widely in the fields of music, music therapy, and music and health/wellbeing, and is co-editor, with the music sociologist Tia DeNora, of the Ashgate series Music and Change: Ecological Perspectives.

Tia DeNora is Professor of Sociology of Music, in Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology at Exeter University, UK. She is the author of Music-in-Action, Music in Everyday Life, After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology and Beethoven and the Construction of Genius. She directs the SocArts Research Group at Exeter.