The following is offered as a manifesto: a bold assertion of our unique musicianship. We – music therapists - are different from performers and educators. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.
The following is offered as a manifesto: a bold assertion of our unique musicianship. We – music therapists – are different from performers and educators. If you are a music therapy student or clinician, consider this an affirmation of who you are. Your musicianship matters much more than you know.
How are we different?
A focus on people
First and foremost, we are musicians of the people. When we engage with participants, we are employing musics that diverse people listen to in their everyday lives. We also use the instruments common to these musics.
An example: I (Bill) am a percussionist who sings and plays thousands of diverse songs, emulating the qualities of different genres. I change these qualities to sound like the original, or to convey a different feel. I improvise using a range of musical frames (e.g., rhythms, progressions, modes). I compose lyrics to songs on the spot while accompanying through an improvised structure. This is only a surface understanding of my unique musicianship, and only one example.
Interactive engagement
Performance is NOT our focus. We focus on musical interaction that can lead to growth or change. We develop shared intentions with participants based on strengths, needs, backgrounds, interests, access to music, and their musicality/musicianship. We navigate with our clients a dynamic balance between structure/safety and creativity/autonomy. Our music-making is not tied to a “score,” but rather to in-the-moment modifications. We are musically vigilant (Ruud, 2020) and musically responsive.
Aesthetic sensitivity
We center our aesthetic sensitivity on people. We listen for more than what is in a song or piece, more so to the qualities of the music that participants and the environment give us: in the sound of a voice faintly singing, in a drum profusely struck, in a breath, in the sound of an ICU machine. We listen as witnesses, and integrate and respond in kind.
We see the values of music in their diverse and connected presentations: as a human right (Clements-Cortės et al., 2024), as a human technology (Patel, 2007), as a tool (Thaut, 2005) or resource (Rolvsjord, 2005) for promoting health, and as a medium for experience (Aigen, 2005; Dewey, 1934).
Why is this difference important?
While affirmation is an imperative of this research, systemic change is our overarching goal. The musics and processes that we employ in our work as music therapists are often peripheral in academic training outside of music therapy-specific courses. Common curricula are greatly informed by classical training and performance, and do not provide our musicianship the amount of space it needs to be truly developed and reinforced.
In many schools of music, music therapy students provide a major portion of student credit hours and funding. Students should not be subsidizing a system that focuses on areas outside of their needs. They should be paying for engaging experiences that clearly prepare them for where they are headed. Students should be taking courses with faculty who create an engaging environment within which these students’ unique music knowledge, music skills, and aesthetic sensitivity are valued.
First steps toward change
We invite you to dig deeper into our two articles (Matney et al., 2024; Meadows et al., 2025) and their supporting analyses. For those of you who are music therapists, students, and educators, we think that you will see parts of yourself and your work authentically represented.
Moving forward, we believe the following offers us the beginning steps toward change:
Affirmation: Understand and affirm this uniqueness with those around you (and within you!). Small acts change cultures. For our colleagues in various music and health fields, we hope you may affirm those you work with.
Advocacy: Assert the difference, with both objectivity and with pride, in informal and formal conversations.
Instigation: Even if shifts begin small, we collectively can find ways to move the curriculum toward greater relevance for music therapy musicianship. We can discuss what content exists in what courses, and how that content does or does not meet the needs of music therapy students. We can instigate change, moving toward classes, content, and timelines that benefit each student’s effort and investment.
The 21st Century Commission on Music Therapy(2024) has provided concrete and practical recommendations for restructuring curricula. Drafts of new AMTA musicianship competencies seek to provide greater detail, but do not yet go far enough in discussing the nuances of our musicianship: the processes of shared music making and musical responsiveness.
Affirm, advocate, and instigate. Together, we can shift the current culture to foster the future of music therapy as ‘musicians of the people.’
As a game, baseball has multiple antecedents and ancestors, most notably an English children’s game called rounders. But as an organized spectator sport, baseball is native to the United States. Still, the sport spread quickly beyond U.S. borders, and took hold in many other parts of the world. It became the national sport of both Cuba and Japan, and migrated from there to many of the lands where fans pay to watch live games and also follow professional leagues abroad. Here are five sites that illuminate baseball’s complex geography.
In honor of Women’s History Month, we’re celebrating trailblazing paths taken by women whose courage and vision transformed societies. This reading list features five biographies that highlight women who resisted systemic barriers, confronted entrenched hierarchies, and fought for the dignity and safety of others. From activists and reformers to scientists and cultural leaders, these stories reveal how women—often overlooked or silenced—have pushed boundaries, protected the vulnerable, and inspired movements for justice. Together, they remind us that progress toward gender equality has always been driven by those who refused to accept the limits imposed on them.
1. A Slumless America: Mary K. Simkhovitch and the Dream of Affordable Housingby Betty Boyd Caroli
In this biography, Mary K. Simkhovitch emerges as a pioneering force in the settlement house movement and a central architect of American public housing reform. Betty Boyd Caroli traces Simkhovitch’s founding of Greenwich House in 1902 and her influential role in shaping early 20th‑century urban policy, including her leadership in New Deal housing initiatives, the creation of the National Housing Conference, and co‑authoring the landmark 1937 National Housing Act. Balancing an unconventional marriage, family life, and a relentless public mission, Simkhovitch became widely admired—once even depicted as a “Wonder Woman of History”—for her ability to confront urban poverty while advocating fiercely for immigrant communities and affordable housing. This biography, rich with historical insight, positions her as an enduringly relevant figure whose work helped define the federal government’s responsibility to support low‑income families.
2. American Infidelity: The Gilded Age Battle Over Freethought, Free Love, and Feminism by Steven K. Green
American Infidelity traces the dramatic late‑19th‑century clash between a dominant evangelical culture and a rising coalition of freethinkers, feminists, and sexual reformers who sought greater personal liberty and challenged religious authority. Historian Steven K. Green follows this struggle through the activists who fought for birth control, divorce reform, and women’s autonomy, as well as the moral crusaders—including Elizabeth Cady Stanton—who worked to suppress them. Revealing how these “infidels” pushed for a more open, rational, and egalitarian society, Green shows how their movements were ultimately stifled but left a powerful legacy that continues to shape today’s debates over reproductive rights, censorship, and the role of religion in public life.
3. COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War by Edda L. Fields-Black
Winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for History
This book recounts the often‑overlooked story of Harriet Tubman’s 1863 Combahee River Raid, a daring Civil War operation in which she led Union spies, scouts, and two Black regiments up South Carolina’s river to destroy major rice plantations and liberate 730 enslaved people. Drawing on newly examined documents—including Tubman’s pension file and plantation records—historian Edda L. Fields‑Black, a descendant of one of the raiders, brings to life the enslaved families and communities who escaped to freedom that night and later helped shape the Gullah Geechee culture. Through this vivid reconstruction, the book reveals one of Tubman’s most extraordinary military achievements and the enduring legacy of those who fought for liberation.
4. The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America by Kathleen B. Casey
The Things She Carried reveals how purses, bags, and sacks have long been critical tools for women asserting privacy, autonomy, and political power in America. Kathleen Casey shows how these objects—from 19th‑century reticules to the handbags carried by immigrant workers, civil rights activists, and Rosa Parks herself—became symbolic extensions of women’s rights struggles, allowing them to navigate male‑dominated spaces, protect personal dignity, and challenge discriminatory systems. Drawing on sources ranging from vintage purses to photographs, advertisements, and legal archives, Casey uncovers how women of all backgrounds used the bags they carried to assert agency, cross restrictive social boundaries, and shape pivotal moments in the fight for gender and racial equality.
5. Frances Oldham Kelsey, the FDA, and the Battle against Thalidomide by Cheryl Krasnick Warsh
This biography tells the remarkable story of Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey, the FDA medical officer who, in the early 1960s, prevented the dangerous drug thalidomide from being approved in the United States, sparing countless Americans from catastrophic birth defects. A pioneering scientist who earned advanced degrees in an era with few female researchers, Kelsey resisted intense pressure from Merrell Pharmaceutical and spent nineteen months demanding solid evidence of the drug’s safety. Her unwavering stance not only kept thalidomide off the U.S. market but also spurred sweeping reforms in drug regulation through the 1962 Drug Amendment, which established modern clinical trials, informed consent, and stronger FDA oversight. Drawing on archival records and family papers, the book reveals her lifelong commitment to ethical science, her battles against industry hostility and institutional barriers, and her enduring legacy as a vigilant protector of public health.
Laurence Sterne, the eighteenth-century author of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey, might seem an unlikely figure to capture the imagination of early Soviet intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s. The Bolshevik Revolution dismantled the cultural institutions of the old regime, displaced much of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia, and set out to create a new literary canon for a new Soviet reader. From the outset, literature was subject to political control.By the 1930s, the state increasingly defined a canon of approved literary classics, while the newly-established doctrine of Socialist Realism began to dominate official literary institutions.
What place could there be, in such a system, for an eccentric Yorkshire clergyman whose popularity in Russia had peaked more than a century earlier, at the turn of the nineteenth century? And yet, in the two decades following the 1917 Revolution, Sterne’s name began to appear with notable frequency in lecture halls, private correspondence, diaries, and unpublished manuscripts. Laurence Sterne and His Readers in Early Soviet Russia: The Secret Order of Shandeans traces Sterne’s reappearance in early Soviet culture. Drawing on letters, diaries, translation drafts, marginal notes, illustrations, and editorial correspondences, the book reconstructs how Soviet readers encountered Sterne and what they sought in his writing.
In mid-1920s Leningrad, an undergraduate student Edvarda Kucherova wrote to a friend: “You cannot imagine how much I adore Sterne. In a very personal way and with such gratitude, for he helps me live. Thanks to him, it is so clear that everything that is closest and most desirable is always so far away from us. Sterne taught me to understand and endure this.”
One of Sterne’s most influential early Soviet advocates was Viktor Shklovsky, a literary critic associated with the experimental literary criticism of the 1920s. In a 1921 pamphlet devoted to Tristram Shandy, Shklovsky presented Sterne as a ‘radical revolutionary of form’ whose digressive prose anticipated the poetry of the Russian Futurists and paintings by Picasso. Sterne’s Soviet afterlife, however, was not confined to the avant-garde circles. By the 1930s, as official discourse turned against modernism, Sterne continued to be read, but attention shifted from questions of form to philosophical and psychological concerns. Despite this change, one association remained constant. Sterne was repeatedly linked, whether approvingly or critically, with artistic and inner freedom.
The book takes Sterne as a point of entry into the everyday intellectual life of Soviet translators, critics, and readers. The circulation of works by the ‘freest writer of all times’ (as Friedrich Nietzsche once called Sterne) an author with no obvious utility for the Soviet state, allows the reconstruction of a form of intellectual life that existed alongside, and partly outside, the enforced unanimity of Stalinist culture.
Readers turned to Sterne for many reasons. In 1937, the celebrated Soviet writer Isaac Babel and his wife, Antonina Pirozhkova, consulted A Sentimental Journey while searching for a name for their newborn daughter. Among those drawn to Sterne in the 1930s was Gustav Shpet, one of Russia’s leading philosophers before the Revolution. Excluded from academic philosophy under Soviet rule, Shpet turned to literary translation as a means of both economic and intellectual subsistence. In his notes to an unfinished translation of Tristram Shandy, he read Sterne as a belated Renaissance humanist, an author who sought distance from his own times by immersing himself in older comic traditions. Shpet’s fate, however, underscores the limits of such refuge. Arrested during the Great Terror, he was executed in 1937.
The book follows figures from very different backgrounds. One of them is the Ukrainian critic Stepan Babookh. Before becoming a literary editor, most notably one of the editors of the 1935 Russian edition of A Sentimental Journey, he had been a worker, soldier and Bolshevik activist. Babookh discovered English literature while being held as a POW by the British during the war, first in an internment camp in India and later in a London prison. A self-taught intellectual of the new Soviet generation, he chose to abandon a Party career in order to become a scholar of English literature.
In the late 1930s, Izrail Vertsman, a scholar of Marxist aesthetics, defended the first Soviet doctoral dissertation devoted to Sterne. Vertsman belonged to a group of critics known as “the Current”, led by philosophers Mikhail Lifshitz and Georg Lukács. These intellectuals advocated more sophisticated forms of Marxist criticism, opposing the crude (in their view) sociological approaches of the 1920s. For Vertsman, Sterne embodied the spirit of creative renewal he associated with “the Current”, yet his private letters reveal the difficulty of reconciling his deep admiration of Sterne with the intellectual constraints of the Stalinist 1930s.
Through these intertwined lives, the book reconstructs what it calls the secret order of Shandeans—an imagined community of readers ranging from literary scholars, translators, and high school students to soldiers and Gulag prisoners. For many of them, Sterne’s humour offered an imaginary escape at a time of political uncertainty and mounting restrictions on creative freedom, when public expressions of individuality were becoming increasingly dangerous.
The purpose of any abstract is to summarise your article’s content in a way that will help potential readers decide if they want to read your work. An abstract usually runs between 150 and 300 words and will likely be your readers’ first interaction with your research article, so you must write it with that in mind. It should be intelligible on its own, without someone needing to have read your whole article or have in-depth knowledge of the subject at hand to follow the abstract’s meaning.
Interdisciplinary abstracts are more complex than abstracts aimed at a single discipline, since they must appeal to a wider range of readers with radically varying knowledge bases. What follows is a list of eight key strategies for writing clear, compelling abstracts for interdisciplinary research. It’s not intended to be prescriptive or exhaustive, but I hope it will help if you’re feeling overwhelmed with the amount of ground you’re expected to cover in such a small number of words.
Start with the hook A stand-up comic once told me that the golden rule of comedy is to always start with your best joke. This advice can be applied to writing abstracts: start with the hook. The ‘hook’ is the most exciting and impactful feature of your work. It answers the perennial questions of ‘So what?’ and ‘Why should anyone care?’ If you can convincingly answer these questions in the first sentence of your abstract, readers are much more likely to want to read the full article.
Often, the hook is placed at the end of the abstract as an enticement to read more, but increasingly I think it can be more effective when placed in the very first sentence of an interdisciplinary abstract. When writing up interdisciplinary research, you are appealing to a wider readership that goes beyond the confines of one discipline, so you must capture their attention right from the off with a statement of impact that makes it abundantly clear why researchers in multiple disciplines need to read your work. Then, you can move onto specifics like background and methods.
State your purpose Every abstract should state the central research question or aim of the article, in the clearest possible terms, and justify why it must be answered. It is possible for an article to answer more than one research question, but juggling multiple research questions often leads to an unfocused argument and an overly long article. An article of six-to-ten thousand words gives you enough time to answer one central research question very convincingly, and it is better to do this than to answer multiple research questions less convincingly. Before moving on, you must clarify why it is important to answer that research question. Why is this research necessary and how does the article address that need?
Summarise disciplinary contexts Your interdisciplinary article likely builds upon recent developments in more than one discipline, so you should not assume that readers will be conversant in all the disciplines with which your work engages. Use a couple of sentences to explain key developments in each relevant discipline that directly impact your research. Focus only on what’s essential for understanding your argument. Keep this concise, though, as abstracts should not be overloaded with contextual information.
Explain your methods Interdisciplinary methods are complex but enriching. They usually pull together and combine research techniques from multiple disciplines. Due to this complexity, interdisciplinary abstracts are sometimes overloaded with technical terminology that seem impenetrable to many readers. Take care to explain your methods or theoretical framework and why they help you answer your research question, keeping jargon to a minimum and defining key technical terms with which readers may not be familiar.
Defend your interdisciplinarity Interdisciplinary research is often called upon to justify its existence as interdisciplinary research. There are large numbers of scholars who are sceptical about the very idea of interdisciplinarity. If you are to retain these scholars as readers, you must explain in your abstract why an interdisciplinary approach to your research question is not only possible but essential. Some problems demand interdisciplinary approaches, others do not. You need to convince readers that your work fits into the former category and explain why you have assembled your unique interdisciplinary methodology or theoretical framework to respond to this research question.
Forecast your results Some abstracts won’t do this because the authors prefer to keep the revelation of their findings back for the conclusion of their article. I prefer abstracts to at least forecast the results of the research, simply because this might convince more prospective readers to engage with and cite your article if they know from reading the abstract that its results have direct implications for their own research.
Use an economy of words All your sentences should have a purpose. Meandering trains of thought that take a while to get to the point do not have a place in an abstract, so remove anything that is even slightly tangential. Bear in mind that an abstract is also a discovery aid, since the text of an abstract is often part of the metadata that is pulled across to bibliographic indexes such as SCOPUS and Google Scholar. Consequently, an abstract should include the kind of words you imagine potential readers might type into a library catalogue or online search tool. You will often be asked to provide a list of keywords alongside your abstract, and it is a good idea to work them into the text of the abstract itself to boost your article’s discoverability further.
Write assertively Abstracts are not the place to be modest about your achievements. Use assertive verbs and write in the present tense: say ‘this article does X’ rather than ‘this article aims to do X’ or ‘this article will do X’. Avoid hedging your bets, with words like ‘arguably’ and ‘potentially’ or an overly liberal use of the conditional. And above all: back yourself! It is expected for a research article to contain detailed discussion of other researchers’ work. That is not the case for an abstract, which should foreground your own original interpretation.
