Development of a Music Therapy Research Culture in Denmark

When the Danish Musicological Society was founded in 1954, seventy years ago, one related field began its long journey towards establishing a new profession: the field of music therapy. Music therapy may be understood as the psychodynamic development of relationships through music in order to meet a client’s therapeutic needs. 1 The development of clinical methods was followed by the demand for accredited training, and with it the development of theory and research. Within the growing tradition of music therapy research, the field has drawn on, and integrated research from musicology and transdisciplinary areas such as music psychology, education, sociology, anthropology and philosophy, as well as a wide range of theories from psychotherapy and clinical fields. The authors of the present article (one professor and two emeritus professors of music therapy) describe the history of the field, starting with the pioneers in the mid-1950s, and explain the background for the development of a research culture in music therapy. Specifically, the international PhD research programme in music therapy at Aalborg University gave the field a solid boost, but the close connection to the clinical reality also paved the way for welcoming, embracing and developing practice-based research. The result is a research culture that in many ways transcends the well-known tension between research in medical and humanistic methodologies and calls for interdisciplinarity. To illustrate this, the article concludes with three examples of music therapy research in the fields of psychiatry, dementia, and public health.