Playing marbles, playing music

While keeping an eye on their family’s sheep and alpacas, Aymara boys in the Peruvian Andes play marbles. In their game they need to shoot the marbles over rocks and twigs and through clumps of grass as they aim for a row of small holes they have dug into the ground. The appeal of the game lies in how these rocks, twigs, clumps and holes acts as agents, and in where the marbles will be diverted to. Through this example, Smith (2017) highlights how it is not simply the case that children play with material toys. Toys – including the surface of the ground – also play with children. The current issue of Approaches contains articles stretching from music-making programmes to music therapy with groups, individuals, couples, and families, in diverse contexts such as a prison, community settings, an inpatient psychiatric care facility, private practice, and an arts therapies organisation. Rich in their own right, each of these papers also dialogue with one another. Holding While keeping in mind the story of the Peruvian boys and their marbles, we might hear a strand of dialogue emerging in relation to various notions of agency. These notions feed into wider debates about who (or what) the players are when music therapy “works.” Is the music therapist offering an “intervention” or “treatment”? What is role of the client and of musicking in the therapeutic outcome? What is the impact of the interrelations between therapist, client and music? What is the influence of the situated nature of the therapeutic encounter, including its sociocultural context? Alongside these considerations, further questions emerge about how music therapy works (including its spatial and temporal elements – the ‘where’ and ‘when’) and, indeed, about what we actually mean by saying music therapy “works.” Individualistic notions of agency champion lone individuals as holding within themselves the capacity to be actors. From this perspective, people are agents when they choose one course of action over another in order to produce a particular effect (Archer, 2003; Giddens, 1984). Various alternative perspectives are available however, some of which have long existed within indigenous knowledge systems (Enfield, 2017) and others that have more recently been integrated within Western critiques of individualised agency. Writing within relational sociology, Burkitt argues that people produce certain effects on each other and in the world “through their relational connections and joint actions, wh