Music Therapy Conversations

In episode 60, Davina Vencatasamy talks to Helen Minors. Helen Julia Minors is School Head of Performing Arts and Associate Professor of Music at Kingston University, London. She is also a Visiting Professor in Artistic Research at Luleå University of Technology, Sweden. She has published books:  Music, Text and Translation  (2013);  Building Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Bridges: Where Theo...

Kiz Bangerh (now Manley) is the founder of Hip Hop Heals. Here's how she describes herself on her website: " I lost my older sister, Promila, in a car accident in 2000. After, I suffered a delayed traumatised grief reaction. I was an English Literature graduate and keen writer but experienced a creative block that lasted ten years. During this time, I trained as a secondary English teacher, and en...

Davina Vencatasamy spoke to Sandra Schembri, the CEO of Nordoff Robbins, UK, continuing her sequence of interviews exploring diversity, race and representation in music therapy. Sandra describes herself as follows: "Over the course of my 26+ year career so far I have had the pleasure of working with some amazing organisations including Bloomberg, The Royal Academy of Arts, Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club...

Nsamu is a music therapist and psychotherapist born and raised in Zambia. Nsamu earned a BA in Psychological Counselling from the University of South Africa and MMus in Music Therapy from the University of Pretoria. A therapist grounded in holistic anti-oppressive practice, Nsamu works with people exploring health and lifestyle choices, medical complications, human sexualities and gender, spiritua...

Wendy Magee has a background in practice and scholarship concerning music interventions for brain injury rehabilitation. She moved to Philadelphia in 2011, a city with the fourth largest African American population and the highest rate of deep poverty in the US. Navigating the evident inequities for marginalized people in her new home city has offered her opportunities to learn about social justic...

Luke talked to Barbara Wheeler about her wide ranging experience in music therapy as a researcher, clinician, educator, and author. Barbara L. Wheeler, PhD, MT-BC, holds the designation of Professor Emeritus from Montclair State University, where she taught from 1975-2000. She initiated the music therapy program at the University of Louisville in 2000, retiring in 2011. She presents and teaches in...

In Episode 54, Davina Wilson talks to Michaela de Cruz. Michaela qualified in 2019 and is relatively new to music therapy but is not new to music activism. Over her 20 years as a jazz and soul performer, musician and songwriter, she has championed and contributed to causes as varied as racial awareness, gender and sexual equality and animal rights. As an activist in the music therapy scene, Michae...

Episode 53 features Francis Myerscough, who was part of the panel discussion on diversity chaired by Wendy Magee at the 2021 BAMT conference. Francis Myerscough qualified as a music therapist from the University of South Wales in 2018. They work in a number of different settings, with a background in adoption support and more recently in a local children's services harmful sexual behaviour team. O...

Dr. Pasiali received a BA Honors in Music Performance, from the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. Subsequently, she worked as a public school music teacher and a freelance flute performer in Cyprus. She completed her equivalency/Master's degree in Music Therapy at the University of Kansas. Upon graduation, she worked as a music therapist in private practice (Ohio, US) and at the Music School...

Dr. Diane Austin DA, LCAT is the Director of the Music Psychotherapy Center in New York City where she offers a two-year post-graduate certificate program in Vocal Psychotherapy. She teaches in the graduate music therapy department at New York University. Dr. Austin has maintained a private practice in music, expressive psychotherapy and supervision for over 25 years, and has lectured and taught V...

Julie Sutton works in a regional adult psychiatry NHS service for patients with severe, complex disturbance, and in private psychoanalytic practice. Having qualified in 1982 she retired from music therapy in June 2020. Over the decades her work covered most areas across the age range and she presented, lectured and examined nationally and internationally. Former Head of Training for NR London she...

Davina qualified as a music therapist from Anglia Ruskin University in 2006 and has been working in wide variety of settings ever since.  She specialised in a brief therapy model, writing her masters these in this field.  She has continued to explore this model in special educational needs settings with children and adults in schools and residential settings.  She has worked in acute and long term...

Associate Professor Daphne Rickson, PhD, teaches music therapy at the New Zealand School of Music – Te Kōkī, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.  She has practiced music therapy and undertaken research with a range of client populations but particularly with children and adolescents in schools.  Her research has involved critical analysis of the concept of disability and investigation...

Alexia Quin is the director of Music as Therapy International, a charity which she founded in 1995 and which seeks to embed music into the care and education of vulnerable people worldwide.  Alexia trained at Roehampton in the late 1990s and worked as a music therapist in the NHS for 15 years.  In 2017 she was awarded the WFMT Advocate of Music Therapy Award and in 2018 she was a member of the Com...

Ray Travasso is a Music Therapist and has been working in children's and adult services for 18 years.  He trained at the Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy Centre, London and graduated with a Masters in Music Therapy in 2002.  He has a background in paediatric and adult palliative care and currently works part-time as a Music therapist and Team Leader at The Treehouse, East Anglia's Children's Hospices...

Episode 45 is part 2 of Luke's interview with Alex Maguire, music therapist at Broadmoor high security hospital. Alex talks in some detail about his clinical work in this episode, and some of the important theories he draws on to support his work. The episode also includes Alex's interview with Shamrat Sengupta. Shamrat Sengupta is an Indian renaissance man - in addition to his role as a consultan...

Alex Maguire is Senior Music Therapist at Broadmoor high security hospital specialising in working with high dependency and intensive care patients. He has presented his work at numerous conferences and has contributed to the books Forensic Music Therapy (JKP 2012), 'Forensic Arts Therapies –Anthology of Practice & Research', (FA Press 2016), 'Working Across Modalities in the Arts Therapies: Creat...

Nate Holder BA, MMus is a musician, author, speaker and music education consultant based in London. He is an advocate for decolonising music education and has been writing, speaking and consulting on the subject for the last five years. Nate brings his passion and skill in public speaking into leading CPD training and workshops; helping address bias and underrepresentation in music classrooms, dep...

Marianne Rizkallah is the Director and Head Music Therapist at North London Music Therapy, 'Music Therapy Outreach and Enterprise Tutor' for the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, and the Vice Chair of the British Association for Music Therapy. Founded in 2018, North London Music Therapy provides music therapy for anyone, of any age, with a mental health condition such as stress, anxiety or depres...

  Luke interviewed eight colleagues from the team at Oxleas Music Therapy Service about their experiences of adapting practice during lockdown. This has inevitably included a wide range of experiences, some very positive, some frustrating, but all of them demonstrating the ability of music therapists to adapt and improvise in a crisis, keeping the children and young people they are working with at...

Amelia Oldfield feels incredibly lucky to have worked as a clinical music therapist in the NHS for 40 years. In the early 1980s she worked full-time with people with learning disabilities for six years, and then part-time with pre-school children and their families referred from a child development centre, as well as with primary aged children and their families in a child and family psychiatric u...

Andrew West is a child and adolescent psychiatrist based in Oxford. He graduated from Cambridge University with First Class Honours in Natural Science, Part 1a in Law. He went on to study Anatomy at Leeds University and then Clinical Medicine at Oxford. He worked for several years in New Zealand, completing an internship in Psychotherapy and Counselling there. He completed Oxford Higher Training i...

Jamal J Glynn is a registered Music Therapist with the Health and Care Professions Council in the United Kingdom (HCPC). He holds a BA in Musical Arts from the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, and a M.A. in Music Therapy from Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, UK. He offers under the North West Regional Health Authority in Trinidad and Tobago Music Therapy to inpatients and outpati...

Irene Lo Coco and Elizabeth Nightingale from Chiltern Music Therapy talked to Luke about remote working in music therapy, including technical and online resources, as well as issues that may arise through these ways of working may bring up. After qualifying as a music therapist, Elizabeth gained clinical experience with adults with neurological disorders and worked with children with a range of ne...

In episode 36, Luke talks to his manager at Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust, Sarah Hadley. Sarah trained at Nordoff-Robbins in 1984 where she feels privileged to this day to have experienced a structured and focused training in how to use music to tap into her clients' fundamental "music child"; namely that innate communicative musicality we all possess, which provides the platform for powerful therap...