Community Music Therapy

This chapter provides an overview of the wide and complex territory of Community Music Therapy, orientating readers to the key events, arguments, and practices of this international movement. Characterizing CoMT as a “social movement” helps explain the particular pattern of its emergence and development, and the varying reactions to it. This also indicates how the movement critically refracts dimensions of the practice, discipline, and profession of international music therapy more generally in its late-modern phase—showing how it is adapting to the demands and opportunities of globalization, cultural plurality, economic crisis, and the restructuring and revisioning of health and social care services. In its short history CoMT has functioned variously as an inspiration for broader and more flexible practice, as a critique of traditional theory, as a platform for exploring fresh interdisciplinary theory, and as an instigator of inter-professional dialogue and dispute.