I'm a Music Therapist

Once again, I’m sitting in a coffeehouse on a rainy Tuesday morning, Bluetooth keyboard out and ready to catch up on one of my multiple writing projects that are perpetually in-progress. This is Portland, so of course I’m seated in a one-of-kind driftwood chair that makes me feel extra cool (picture above). This description is one of the more picturesque moments that I use to rationalize myself as a music therapy “academic.” My self-given title wasn’t completely snatched out of thin air: I teach music therapy students, I’ve spoken at the last five conferences I’ve attended, and I have grand plans for elevating music therapy research in my future. Essentially, I want my career focus to be translational research that deepens our understanding of the mechanisms (i.e., underlying reasons) for music’s impact on behavior with one foot in music psychology and one foot in clinical practice.

My desire to develop myself as an academic and researcher seems to parallel the American Music Therapy Association’s priorities focusing on the need for more researchers/academics in the music therapy field. There was the Music Therapy Research 2025 initiative over the summer of 2015, and the association has been building bridges with the NIH via snazzily-titled workshops like “Music and the Brain: Research Across the Lifespan.” Despite these high-profile initiatives, I still feel relatively afloat as to how to grow as a researcher. To be honest, there’s a lack of practical resources and support for us early-career academics within music therapy.

From my perspective, the type of mentorship that will help me be competitive on a national research stage is lacking in both quantity of mentors and the quality of that mentorship. This perception has led me to seriously question whether I should even pursue a doctorate in music therapy and whether a PhD in a different field (e.g., rehabilitative sciences, music cognition, cognitive psychology) would serve me better. Music therapy doctorates seem to focus on training music therapy professors, whose main responsibility is to train the next generation of music therapy clinicians. I’ve even heard music therapy PhDs programs called “faculty finishing school” by one of the rockstars of music therapy, which seemed to imply that these degrees may be somewhat of a formality. I personally feel like this phrase is true to some degree, although I’m still working out the specifics of why I feel this way. I’m already teaching music therapy at the university level; for me, wouldn’t getting a music therapy doctorate be somewhat ceremonial? Yes, I definitely have much more to learn as a teacher and clinician, having only been a professional for five years, but is a music therapy doctorate my best bet for my ultimate research aspirations?

Part of my pessimistic outlook comes from a scientific writing class I took during my master’s degree. The other nine students were psychology PhD students who were being groomed into researchers. While my writing definitely improved, the most valuable aspect of that class was witnessing how their development as independent researchers unfolded and was integrated into the culture of the degree programs. First, these psych PhD students were being taught how to get governmental funding grants for their research from institutes such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Once in this governmental “funding pipeline” (either on the application of a more senior advisor or through strategic use of grant funding for minorities and/or early career researchers), these psych students would have an easier time getting more funding in the future in a “the rich get richer” sort of way. In short, these students were learning to navigate a complex process that had the potential to fund their entire careers into the millions of dollars.

In contrast, when I went to my faculty advisors in music therapy for their recommendations on grant writing, none had ever submitted a governmental grant. One faculty member had received a Grammy-foundation grant, and the other faculty members’ research had been funded via internal grants funded by the university. But, when compared to NIH grant pipeline, these one-off grant submissions felt like a ceiling of sorts. Are music therapists being held back from conducting more powerful and impactful research studies by not pursuing these high-level funding opportunities? Granted, there are a handful of music therapists who are starting to receive support from these funding streams like Joke Bradt’s studies surrounding pain management. However, without more music therapy faculty providing those initial funding sponsorships for PhD students, my field is missing out on the chance to build sustainable music therapy research that cascades across “generations” of mentor/mentee relationships.

This scientific writing class also revealed other tricks and strategies that the psych PhD students were being taught to maximize their research in a way I don’t see in music therapy. For example, the psych students:

1. Had lots of experience with experimental research and statistics in their mentors’ labs
2. Were coached to build a systematic line of inquiry that built upon previous studies they had done, and
3. Were taught and encouraged to submit manuscripts for journal publication.

The music therapy field, in contrast,

1. Does not have many research labs integrated into graduate programs
2. Has, in my opinion, too many studies that are vague and unconnected to meaningful clinical implementation. (Don’t get me started on the dozens of studies that conduct surveys about the music therapy workforce rather than experimental research…)
3. Does not teach grad students to understand the journal-submission process. There are few resources coaching music therapists to be productive scientific writers.

These and other discrepancies I noticed in the training of doctoral-minded music therapists seem to compound across decades of one’s academic career. Music therapists are constantly advocating for our research to be seen as “legitimate”, but our field isn’t providing the infrastructure for the next generation of music therapy researchers to be competitive with other disciplines.

Perhaps I am being too hard on my field. Music therapy professors, like all academics, are working hard and our field is essentially a clinician-based field. Too few music therapy doctoral students are graduating to fill the growing need for music therapy professors as the number of music therapy college programs has expanded to over 80 in the past year. When music therapy PhDs are all focused on teaching the clinicians, fewer are able to have a research focus. Still, I think the field could benefit from a cultural shift that carves out and nurtures those of us that want to focus on research.

While I’m still figuring out what this all means for my next career move, here are some starting ideas that I think would help cultivate more researchers in music therapy:

• Music therapy doctoral programs with an interdisciplinary focus, with students doing rotations in psych or neuroscience labs
• MT doctoral programs that require grant submissions to governmental funding sources (e.g., NIH, NIMH, etc.)
• MT teaching assistantships with a focus on assisting with research
• Creation of music therapy post-doc positions
• Funding opportunities for MT students/researchers who attend or present at non-music therapy conferences
• Encouragement of diversifying MT PhD students’ skill sets so they can be competitive with other disciplines. These skill sets may include: coding, advanced statistics, grant writing

In the meantime, here are some steps I’ve been taking to keep current as a music therapy academic:

• Set aside to work on my writing every week (because being published feels underrated in music therapy)
• Watch introduction videos to statistical tests like factor analysis and multiple regression (it helps me be more fluent when reading research articles)
• Go to non-music therapy conferences (e.g., Society for Music Perception and Cognition)
• Follow non-music therapy researchers and labs on Twitter (especially those that give tips for scientific writing, academic career-building resources)
• At least scan every JMT and MTP issue I receive (rather than automatically filing it away on my bookshelf)
• Listen to research-inclined podcasts to keep updated with research trends and discussions

At the end of the day, every academic’s career is going to look a little different, with each of us prioritizing the balance of teaching, research, and other side hustles that are important to us. Still, music therapy has so much potential for growth to support the amazing early-career researchers in our field!