ABSTRACT
There are many practical questions that preoccupy music therapists both in training and practice. There are few formulas or fixed prescriptive answers to these questions but rather we can bring into play a variety of musical/personal responses and clinical approaches to address them. An experienced therapist makes a number of seemingly instantaneous decisions during a session: for example, whether to play or to attend and listen to the patient without playing; how to engage with the patient’s music; how to work with silence; what kind of sounds to play; how to engage with any words in the session. This can all look very baffling to a student, something akin to the ‘women’s intuition’ articulated by Zeldin in Chapter 2. So how are those decisions made?
