Posts Tagged ‘history of music therapy’

Everett Thayer Gaston was born in Oklahoma on July 4, 1901. A trained clinical psychologist, he is now known as the “father of music therapy.” He was active in the 1940s-1960s and greatly helped advance the music therapy profession.

Gaston and Music 
Gaston first started studying music in college before switching to pre-medicine after a year….

Music therapy is an established profession in the US since the last century. The American Music Therapy Association and the organizations that came before it helped shape the world of music therapy in the USA. The purpose of the AMTA is the “progressive development of the therapeutic use of music in rehabilitation, special education, and community settings.”….

Notions of music therapy go back thousands of years. We know about music in the pre-historic world thanks to the survival of Palaeolithic cave-paintings and flutes made of bone found in caves, dating back 35,000 years. What exactly did they use these instruments for? We might never know for sure, but we do know that people have used music both in their daily lives and in healing rituals for a long time….