ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the roots and quality of musical interaction generated in music therapy outlining how music and its elements may be used by one and enhanced by the other. During the LINK project, music therapists worked with experienced teachers to prompt such encounters with young people with vulnerabilities arising from adverse childhood experiences. Some have proposed that music itself developed from mother-infant communication, specifically from the musical manner of their interaction. Music therapy and other arts therapies draw on the human drive towards expressiveness and also on our innate predisposition to make contact with others. The expressive languages of music/arts based therapies can provide channels for reaching and reworking earlier developmental and related trauma. Time and form are therefore common elements, with different cultural variants, in music as well as in all forms of human expression.
