Development of a Music Therapy Research Culture in Denmark

Special section: 70th anniversary of the Danish Musicological Society

Abstract

Within the growing tradition of music therapy research, the field has drawn on research from musicology and transdisciplinary areas. The authors of the article 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 of this development 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 in the fields of psychiatry, dementia, and public health.