The Field of Play:

An Ecology of Being in Music Therapy

Abstract

This text was crafted in a performative writing style. Performative

writing is often laced with auto-ethnographic elements. So, in a
way, this is a brief version of the story of my life in Music
Therapy. Ideally, I would be standing before you and offering this
text in the oral tradition. Then you would hear the sound of my
voice. You would see the expressions on my face, my body
language. You would hear the silences between words more
clearly. You would hear the music.

I began my experience in Music Therapy in a natural way at the age of 16 when I

volunteered at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Cancer Home in Atlanta, Georgia. One day, I
was doing my usual volunteer duty of sewing cancer pads and I started to hum. The
supervising nun came up to me and said, “Carolyn, Mrs. White asked me if you would
come beside her bed to hum for a while.” Before long, my cancer pad sewing days were
over and transformed into humming and singing at bedside to many patients in the
Cancer Home. This was 1962. I’d never heard of anything called Music Therapy at the
time. I only heard about Music Therapy when I was an undergraduate student at Loyola
University in New Orleans studying history, political science, and philosophy with the
Jesuits. Because I had previously studied music for most of my life and continued to
study music at Loyola, I would often go to the basement of the Music Building to play
the piano or sing. While there, I met a group of very friendly students who were in the
Music Therapy program at Loyola. They immediately captured my attention and my
heart. I had met my professional tribe!
I did complete my degree in History, Philosophy, and Political Science with a
little bit of journalism thrown into the mix in 1968. I started teaching music at St.
Michael’s School for Special Children in 1969. We had a vocal choir and a hand bell
choir at the school. In 1970, while working for the Canadian government doing
spontaneous improvisation with several different groups including First Nations children
on the reserve, I met a wonderful Musqueum Elder named Walker Stogan. One day, I
was walking with Walker beside the great Fraser River and beside the Longhouse where
we played music with the children. I asked him: “Walker, what about this thing called
Music Therapy?” Walker took a long draw on his cigarette, turned to reflect on the
flowing river, tossed his cigarette to the ground, crushed it, then looked at me and said:
“For you, in this world, that’s the one.” Thus, I returned to complete another degree in
Music Therapy at Loyola University in New Orleans and received my Music Therapy
credentials in 1973. I began my formal work as a Music Therapist.
Now as an older person myself, many years after my encounter with Walker along
the banks of the river, I often think of my Native American mother and her advice to me
while I was growing up. She always said: “Be a human being first. The rest comes
later.”
I dedicate my text to all of those Native Elders who walk this way, who stood
before me and guided me, and on whose shoulders I stand here before you now. “All my
relations!”

1
 As you listen, you can sense that there are many stories to tell. And in this short
text, I’ll tell you a few.
My topic is The Field of Play: An Ecology of Being in Music Therapy.
Sometimes, I worry that as health care providers, we respond to human suffering
only by “doing”. We want to find concrete solutions to suffering. We make our theories.
We standardize our practice. We collect our evidence about “what works”. And all the
while, we rarely pause just to “be” with our patients and clients--to pause in long silences
just to feel each other’s presence.
The Field of Play is about “being”. It is about giving our attention to the spaces
we create in Music Therapy through an intense focus on being. And it is about the
process of how we create the interplay between these spaces of creativity and wonder in
the Music Therapy experience.
We have our ethical imperatives. There are many. One ethical imperative is to
follow our medical and educational protocols and principles. Another is the aesthetic
imperative, meaning that music is a form of beauty, as any art. As Music Therapists, we
must adhere to our own ethical codes about what this beauty means and how we bring it
to those in pain and discontent. Beyond our professional tribe, we also have our own
personal and cultural imperatives.
If you take the time to peruse some of my scholarly works, you will find a very
strong theme – stay close to the Earth. This is a cultural imperative that springs from my
roots as a Native person and my love of the beauty and majesty of the natural world.
I’ll tell you another little story. After my Choctaw mother died I was adopted by
a Haida Elder. The Haida Gwaii is a magnificent group of islands just off the coast of
British Columbia near Alaska. Because our traditional territory was one of the only areas
of land in North America not touched by the ice age, we have magnificent old growth
trees in our rain forests. Perhaps you can imagine my place, my space there in the Haida
Gwaii. Whenever I return home to our islands, I often pause to experience the great
wonder and beauty of the Earth.
Let us turn to the scholarly part of the story.
In 1976 I began a program of sustained scholarship to explore new ways to
imagine and describe our music therapy experience that traveled beyond the technical
categories I perceived as limiting. At that time, having been a practicing music therapist
for seven years, I became rather disenchanted with standard terminology from related
disciplines to describe our work with clients and patients. I was inclined to explore ways
to describe our experiences that did not separate us according to categories of existence
like “disabled”, “dying”, “psychotic” and many others. I was also searching for
something innately humanistic that bound us together as human beings as opposed to
separating us – something non-hierarchical. This desire to go beyond standardized terms,
concepts, and theories also sought something beyond ill and well. I hoped that my
exploration would help to define the role of the Music Therapist within such a theory.
As a Native American, I had a wealth of traditional knowledge to access in my
discovery process. Traditional knowledge is filled with intuitive science that has been
passed down through the generations in a different way than Western science. For
example, in my Native education, I learned that music is an energy system. Traditional
knowledge is shared across the generations through practice in the oral tradition. In

2
addition, a high value is placed on art, especially in the application of healing of any
kind. So, in an ideal situation, we would have a perfect balance between art and science.
In my Music Therapy practice, I had noticed similarities between the music of
patients in psychiatric units at the Health Science Center Hospital at the University of
British Columbia and Native people who were participating in music making at urban
Indian Centers and also on reserve. These similarities can be summarized as a natural
tendency to create music that emphasized tension and resolution, which I interpreted as
analogous or even metaphorically attached to a death/rebirth theme or myth.
In my first formal research project I looked through historical and clinical
perspectives. I observed the importance of the death/rebirth themes and processes in
patients and also healthy Native children, as well as other clients and patients. The
expressions of tension and resolution that I interpreted as death and rebirth themes were
never suggested and naturally occurred within the musical improvisations in both
settings.
This formal program of study became The Mythic Artery: The Magic of Music
Therapy (2006, 1982). I perceived and interpreted the theme of death and rebirth as a
primary theme in the living of human life and a critical element in the healing process.
The metaphor of the mythic artery suggests another Native traditional teaching that
healing spaces are spaces of loving and creating that join us to the great river—the artery
that flows through of all humanity and all living things.
After more years of practice, in 1984, I felt that I had to take up some new issues
to keep developing my ideas about Music Therapy, to find a new language and concepts
that more closely described my experience in the work. Because my image of Music
Therapy was not bound by particular techniques like improvisation, guided imagery and
music, song writing, or other specific methods or the nomenclature of conditions like
“disabled”, I knew that I was striving for a “general” theory for Music Therapy (Kenny,
2006, 1999).
In my own practice I had used so many different methods or techniques. I had
used vocal choirs, hand bell choirs, improvisation, performance, guided imagery with
music, improvisation or recorded music with arts, clay, collage and dance, song writing –
whatever the occasion called for. And by this time I had done Music Therapy with
people from age 3-102 in every imaginable human condition. In addition to my own
practice, I spent several years observing Nordoff/Robbins Music Therapy practice in the
United States and Great Britain and had observed and had my own experiences in Guided
Imagery and Music. Drawing from this wealth of experience, I felt that I was equipped to
launch into a general theory of Music Therapy that could be applied to many approaches.
Thus I began the process of investigating such a theory, which naturally involved creating
a new language and concepts to describe our experiences in Music Therapy. Eventually,
this theory became The Field of Play.
The Field of Play is a general theory or perhaps a pre-theory or philosophy for
Music Therapy that does not prescribe particular methods of practice like improvisation
or imagery with music or other approaches. Rather, I like to imagine that the Field of
Play is the great river that flows beneath all of our practice. In fact, it could be the river
itself – the one that Walker observed as he stood on the banks of the Fraser beside the
Longhouse those many years ago. It is about imagination, consciousness, presence,
attitude, and being. The Field of Play is all about conditions in the space, the primary

3
one being, as my mother instructed, “being” and a focus on being. It is a theory that
suggests connection to all living things. Imagine a rain forest or a field of daisies—
ecosystems just like us with conditions. A rain forest is a bioregion. The conditions in
the forest determine what will flourish there and what will die. It is the same for human
beings. We need the best possible conditions, both in nature and in nurture, to make a
good human life. There are constant modulations in all ecosystems and bioregions. We
are all in a state of dynamic flux.
At the root of all power and motion, at the burning center of existence itself,
there is music and rhythm, the play of patterened frequencies against the matrix
of time. We now know that every particle in the physical universe takes its
characteristics from the pitch and pattern and overtones of its particular
frequencies, its singing.” (Leonard, 1978)

There are seven fields in the Field of Play that interplay and interact in this
dynamic musical dance.
I call the first one “the aesthetic”. The human being is an aesthetic – a form of
beauty. Let’s think and feel into that for one moment. When I begin my music therapy
sessions, I always focus on the beauty within the person – inside and out. What are their
qualities, their human conditions that form their beauty, even in the face of suffering and
disablement?
Once, I experienced a moment of confluence when I observed Rachael Verny, a
British Music Therapist, performing a Music Therapy session with a child at the
Nordoff/Robbins Music Therapy Centre in London, England. Rachael was creating a
field of being through which she interpreted his human conditions musically. She had an
extraordinary facility with music. I observed her creating a space, a place in the interplay
between her form of beauty and that of the child. This field of being, the coming together
of two aesthetics, reminded me of the Navajo Blessing Way:
With beauty before me, I walk
With beauty behind me, I walk
With beauty above me, I walk
With beauty below me, I walk
From the East beauty has been restored
From the West beauty has been restored
From the South beauty has been restored
From the North beauty has been restored
From the zenith in the sky beauty has been restored
From the nadir of the earth beauty has been restored
From all around me beauty has been restored (Witherspoon, 1977).
As we move more toward beauty, we move toward wholeness. This is the Navajo
way. If we adapt this Navaho ideology to Music Therapy, our premise is that our patient
is already beautiful and whole – no matter what the disability. However, we have an
opportunity to “move” into a deeper and richer beauty and wholeness in our experience
together.
Using her training in the procedures designed by Paul Nordoff and Clive Robbins,
Rachael took the lead in this interplay between two aesthetics – the Music Child and
herself. This space was open. I saw a field of existence in which musical forms came to

4
represent human existence. Rachael interpreted this child’s human conditions through
her improvisations. And the child did the same.
In my own work, I constantly nurture an open attitude to the beauty of my clients.
This is a beauty that has no bounds. My client, like the Earth, is a place, a space with
certain human conditions. My job is to get to know these conditions while we are in our
music. Each musical rendering educates me about these conditions because they
represent significant aspects of the person’s being. Music is knowledge that cannot be
translated accurately into words.
In the case of Jack, who I met at Santa Barbara Rehabilitation Hospital after he
had a serious physical injury, I came to understand his “g” tonality as an aesthetic
preference that had meaning. Perhaps I could not interpret that meaning in words or
concepts, but I knew it as one of Jack’s aesthetic preferences. And I trusted that it had
meaning for him. His senses selected “g” after a great deal of “play”. This was primary.
Any verbal or conceptual interpretation would be second order. As well, I got to know
his favorite rhythms, as he got to know mine. All of the elements of music were included
in our play. This is a relational context – the interplay of aesthetics (Kenny, 2006, 1989,
1987).
Once I get to know my patients and clients’ aesthetics, we begin to form a closed
and intimate field, which I call “the musical space”. This is a context born out of our
aesthetics, and our aesthetic experience together in the music. It emerges when we have
gotten to know each other enough to close ourselves into a musical cocoon.
One of my clients in Music Psychotherapy described the musical space like this:
“It definitely was the space. The sound took place in a space that was already created.
Maybe the kernel was created and the sound gave it more form. But the space was a
wedge of time, a sector of time which became infinite, expanded, separated from ordinary
time, ordinary reality. It was like crossing a threshold into the space, the nature of the
space was, that whatever was, was supposed to be. It was opening into this vastness that
didn’t have any structure or form to constrict and bump up against. But it was like a
padded space because there were boundaries. There is a difference between form and
boundary, and there was a sense of container. There was a web around this or basket
around this. It was loose, but it was really very much there within that boundary –
everything was infinite and there were no forms to fit or fill.”
My client Robyn and I created the boundaries or container together through our
musical forms, which had been presented through getting to know our aesthetics. Now
we could create an intimate container, a safe space, and explore this land together as it
expanded into new territory.
The music was always there –through improvisation, passive listening through my
performances or taped selections, drawing, painting, clay works, movement, and many
other approaches.
I felt such a musical space when one of my patients in a Convalescent Home,
Maggie, just wanted me to play and sing “In the Sweet By and By” over and over and
over again – no other selections. One day, while Maggie was sleeping, I took my pencils
and drawing pad into her room and sketched her beautiful face – so many lines on the
face of a woman of 102 years. After Maggie died, I gave that sketch to the family.
The musical space is a place of being that is not limited by the techniques I might
use with patients and clients. The fields of engagement change when a patient or client

5
feels secure in the musical space. All at once, there is a new freedom and sometimes a
joyful sense of discovery, experimentation, and a new energy in the play. I call this space
the field of play. Sometimes, we notice a bursting out or breaking through. So there is a
new openness in the field of play.
Clinically speaking, play is an intensely important aspect of healing. It represents
perceiving new possibilities beyond limitations and previously patterned boundaries. I
have observed this field of play in many Music Therapy situations. Music therapists who
are trained in the Nordoff/Robbins approach are particularly sensitive to these bursts of
freedom, as “The Music Child” emerges. And in Guided Imagery and Music, the field of
play and exploration are represented as the client journeys into unknown territory,
inspired by the music, only to discover new elements in a forest that comes to symbolize
new life.
These three fields – the aesthetic, the musical space, and the field of play – are
primary fields. Though I have described them in a sequence here, they are not
necessarily sequential in the Music Therapy experience. In fact, they can be present
simultaneously. The essential element is “being”. However, a critical aspect of these
three fields and the four remaining fields or concepts is that they all alternate in opening
and closing – just like breath, just like the human heart, just like the Seasons on the Earth.
This is the ecology of being and the rhythm of vitality and growth.
Within the field of play, we find four new fields – new horizons to explore.
Once particular elements of music or color or behavior within the musical
experience become constant, we have rituals that are repeatable forms making space for
innovation. These are steady and secure places for us to exist. This is an ancient and
earth-based principle. The seasons come and go. The day turns to night. We wake.
Then we sleep. We breathe. We follow the natural rhythms and textures of the Earth.
We all need our rituals, which give us closed and contained spaces for a while.
Music is full of ritualistic spaces from which to spring. And we do see this with our
clients and patients.
I have seen the melodic or rhythmic rituals or rituals of timbre or other musical
elements in my own work and the work of many Music therapists.
Previously, I mentioned my patient Maggie. Maggie’s ritual, the repetition of “In
the Sweet Bye and Bye”, helped her to create a bridge between what she knew as life and
what she feared or anticipated as death. This was the song that carried her across a
previously unknown land.
When you observe Nordoff / Robbins work, you see many musical rituals in all of
the elements of music. The repetitive patterns of ritual bring us into a particular state of
consciousness. Once we experience ritual space, our consciousness begins to fly into
another open space – a space of innovation and play of new patterns of existence, a place
of dreams and songs and new healing images of all kinds, metaphors, new behaviors, new
feelings and thoughts.
In Guided Imagery and Music, therapists are trained in an induction method to
bring their clients and patients into this space. Once our consciousness is free to travel,
more opportunities present. Once we are free to travel, we feel our power. Power is a
closed space. It builds energy over time. Then breaks free into new embodiment,
confidence, renewal, and revitalization.

6
 I’m quite sure that if you have experienced a drumming circle, you have
experienced such power. And we can observe this phenomenon in many clinical settings
around the world. Ritual creates a particular state of consciousness creates power. This
power is often referred to as “empowerment”. And it can be held individually or within
the group. It is also held in cultures around the world.
The last field in the Field of Play is the creative process. The process is the
product. This takes a lot of trust. But if we choose to join the river on its journey, we
understand that the river embraces all things. Does the river know the end point of its
journey? Does it know what joys and sorrows it will meet along the way to its
destination? We feel the animation of the world and our place in it. We know that we
are all connected and related. When we focus on the process, the outcomes or products
are not predictable. However, we can feel secure in our authenticity, our being, and the
value for presence as core to the healing process.
In our work, we are most concerned with quality of life. And the many
procedures that Music Therapists have created to mediate the sorrow of human conditions
are elaborate and effective. Yet, this river that flows beneath all of our procedures,
protocols, and principles in Music Therapy is a river of great strength and commitment.
We cannot deny the ontological significance of “being” and presence of all living things.
The Field of Play is not a theory about how “to do”. Rather it is a theory about
how “to be” and how to notice shifts in particular states of consciousness and fields of
existence—-shifts that carry us along the currents and tides of the great river. It
challenges our perception to notice these shifts while simultaneously following our
prescribed systems or techniques of practice in Music Therapy, our layers of abstract
theories, our cultural mandates, and our personal and professional ethical codes.
In a sustained program of research, one carries core ideas from one discovery
process and time to the next. The primary bridge between the Mythic Artery and the Field
of Play is ecology. As human beings, we are bioregions, just as the earth we inhabit. In
these bioregions we have conditions just like any other living thing on this earth. Our
beings are in a state of dynamic flux. Elements of our being are dying and being reborn
constantly. Music is one of the sensory elements that permeate our consciousness to
ground us in this ecology. In the Field of Play we experience the interplay between these
essential components of our existence: our senses/body, and our consciousness/mind,
heart and soul.
What does it mean to participate in an ecology of being in Music Therapy? There
are no standard answers here. The answer to this question is only found by finding your
place on the river, by returning to a kind of Aboriginal continuity in which we do not
separate ourselves from one another and the Earth through categories of existence. Such
an approach requires elements of complexity. Being aware of our own being in a deep
and meaningful way must accompany myriad sets of concrete practices in our discipline,
our profession.
Ceremony, Ritual, and Play
In traditional societies, there are three mechanisms that serve as containers and
guides to the spiritual principle of interdependence. These mechanisms nurture an
attitude that embraces the principle of interconnectivity. They are ceremony, ritual, and
play. Though technology has offered us a bounty of solutions to human problems, we
must ask the question what have we given up in return? This question is thoroughly

7
explored by Jose Arguëlles (1975). Arguëlles frames the dilemma as a continuum –
technological advance on the one hand, and Aboriginal continuity on the other. His
concern is that we are losing our sense of Aboriginal continuity in the face of our rapid
technological advancements. As we enter this part of my text, it is important to
remember that all people have tribal roots. Modern Indigenous peoples represent this
tribal identity. But is there a possibility of re-membering the essential spiritual principle
of the interdependence of all things embedded in our ancient tribal memory? Are we
here to control or to “sustain” and “be with”?
Music therapists have an opportunity to explore these questions by embodying an
attitude of ceremony, ritual, and play in our practice. Ken Bruscia approached this issue
through his 1995 text on modes of consciousness while reflecting on the notion of “being
there”: “It seems significant that we describe the experience as a way of “being” rather
than a mode of “doing” or “having”. Moreover, this way of being seems to be spatial
rather than temporal” (167).
I begin my Music Therapy sessions the night before I see patients and clients
through imagining them. They come to occupy my heart, mind, soul and very being. I
appreciate their beauty, their specific qualities, their human conditions, their musical
preferences, the colors they like, the shape and tone of their bodies. Thus I enter a sacred
space well before we begin our formal session. Perhaps I dream about them. My
preparations begin in the night.
This preparation brings me into a ceremonial attitude. My being is permeated
with ceremony.
Once we begin our session, I trust that the ritual forms will emerge. Perhaps my
patient will begin with a familiar tonality or rhythm. Or they may begin with silence. In
any case, I am always anticipating the rituals – the repeatable forms will constitute our
musical expressions. After all, in the field of play these rituals make space for
innovations, for new opportunities to expand our beauty and our wholeness. All the
while, we play. Winnicott (1971) claims that play is the one human activity that provides
the most opportunity for authenticity. Could it be that through playing, we find the depth
of ourselves, those hidden crevices of being that are too afraid to be experienced in any
other time?
In fact, Raven teased the humans into existence through his playful song. The
myth goes that tiny humans were hiding in a giant clamshell on the beach, afraid to come
into being. Raven was flying around and flying around. Then he saw the clamshell and
heard their sighs. He landed on top of the shell and began to sing to these little creatures.
Gradually, they emerged from their hiding place in the clamshell to become human
beings. Maybe Music Therapists can be like Raven. And even more significantly,
maybe Music Therapists can access that part of our patients that is Raven, too. Perhaps
our patients can learn to play of their own accord.
Forgive me for asking so much. Yes, yes, in addition to our Music Therapy
sessions, we have charts to fill, instruments to store, meetings to attend, articles to read,
trainings to take. We have more and more layers of responsibility as health professionals.
All of these responsibilities are very important. How can I ask you to also take the time
to just be? Yet, how can we not? And how can we not be a part of the great river that
flows connecting all things? Arguelles’ “aboriginal continuity” is for everyone. Ken

8
Aigen offers an example of our dilemma on the continuum between technological
advance and aboriginal continuity:
Once, flying over the American Midwest, I was struck by the contrast between the
straight and direct lines of the man made plowed fields, and the curved, indirect
meanderings of the rivers crossing these fields. My initial reaction was to
denigrate the linear, “shortest distance between two points,” logically produced
lines, and to elevate the “natural,” curved lines that seemed to flow the whims of
the river, unguided by any utilitarian purpose.
Yes, I soon realized that the lines described by the flow of the rivers were
themselves guided by an inner logic, and remembered that geologist have actually
devised formulae for describing the various curves and paths of rivers. The river
is also guided by logic, though it is not a logic that is inflexibly direct and rigid,
but instead, follows, helps to shape and mutually transform the contours of the
land in which the river flows (44).

We each have different ways of nurturing our attitudes. And if we are to nurture
an attitude of ceremony, ritual, and play, there will be myriad ways to cultivate these
three important elements. The essential question is how do we come to a greater
awareness of just being? And in an ecology of being, our second question must be how
do we come to a greater awareness of the principle of the interconnectivity between all
things?
For the most part, we no longer have the concrete tribal mechanisms of ceremony,
ritual, and play, as enacted in ancient times. But many people do have these mechanisms
planted in their daily lives. So this is where the awareness begins. Some Music
Therapists have a meditation practice. And, surely, this is an excellent way of honoring
one’s being-ness, as well as a good way to practice the principle of interconnectivity. For
others, there may be the simple acts of bringing greater awareness to entering a room,
arranging instruments, greeting a patient in a certain way. In a sense, these are modern
ceremonies.
Once we begin our sessions, we can anticipate the rituals, the repeatable forms of
gesture, sounds, rhythm, color, shape timbre, texture, silence, and all of the elements of
aesthetic engagement. As Music therapists, we know so well those patterns and forms.
These are the maps that guide our practice.
How about play? Perhaps this is an area that we do not reserve only for our
patients. We must play ourselves as human beings. Play is core to our existence not only
as human beings, but also as whole systems like cultures. This point was made so clearly
by Dutch scholar, John Huizinga, who claimed that play transcends the immediate needs
of life and brings meaning to actions. Huizinga understood the importance of aesthetics
and indicated that the only category that we can link to play is the aesthetic because it
tends to assume important elements of beauty. (1955). In our playfulness, we find our
authenticity, innovation, enjoyment, pleasure, and joy. If we are playful beings, we
exude our playfulness in our experiences with patients not only in the music, but also in
our very being.
Now is the time to remember old Walker Stogan. His face was very brown and
full of wrinkles. How could he stare at the river so long before answering my question?
What did he see down there in the water? Maybe he saw the movement of life because

9
he was still enough to become part of it. He embodied an ecology of being, an
embodiment that I have seen in many Native Elders. And now that I am getting there
myself, perhaps I can, too.

References
Aigen, K. (1991). The voices of the forest: A conception of music for music therapy.
Music Therapy, 10, 77-98.
Arguëlles, J. (1975). The transformative vision. Boulder and London: Shambhala.
Bruscia, K.E. (1995). Consciousness in Guided Imagery and Music (GIM): A therapist’s
experience of the guiding process. In. C.B. Kenny, Listening, playing, creating:
Essays of the power of sound. (pp. 165-197). New York: State University of
New York Press.
Huizinga, J. (1955). Homo ludens: A study of the play element in culture. Boston:
Beacon Press.
Author. (2006). Music and life in the field of play: An anthology. Gilsum, NH:
Barcelona Publishing Company.
Author. (1999). Beyond this point there be dragons: Developing concepts for general
theory in music therapy. Nordic Journal of Music Therapy. (pp. 127-136).
Author. (1987). The field of play: A theoretical study of music therapy process.
Dissertation, The Fielding Institute.
Author. (1989). The field of play: A guide for the theory and practice of music
therapy. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Company.
Author .(1982). The mythic artery: The magic of music therapy. Atascadero, CA:
Ridgeview Publishing Company.
Leonard, G. (1978). The silent pulse. New York: E.P. Dutton.
Winnicott, D.W. (1971). Playing and reality. New York: Basic Books.
Witherspoon, G. (1977). Language and art in the Navaho universe. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press.

###

I would like to acknowledge with gratitude the help of my colleagues Ken Bruscia, Ken Aigen, Brian
Abrams, Barbara Wheeler, and Jane Edwards in crafting this text.

10