Music Therapy

The first paperback edition of this classic 1966 book by Juliette Alvin was published in 1983 by John Clare Books with a foreword by the then chairman of the British Society of Music Therapy, Auriel Warwick.

This re-issued book now published by Stainer & Bell is still the definitive introduction to music therapy for students of music, medicine, education and the social services and for anyone who has become aware of the power in music therapy for all ages.

Juliette Alvin – the founder of the music therapy profession in Britain was born in France just before the turn of the century. Trained as a cellist, she married an Englishman and settled in England, though she retained all her life a delightful Gallic accent often still imitated by her students when they recall some of her favourite phrases.

Having started a private practice dealing with mentally handicapped children, she encouraged and cajoled members of the medical profession to accept the use of music therapy as a serious aid to their work. By the 1950s she had organized meetings and information groups for interested doctors and musicians. In 1958 she was able to found The Society of Music Therapy and Remedial Music, extending the information groups into conferences publishing papers, leading to The British Journal of Music Therapy.

Through Juliette Alvin’s persuasive charm, a senior British conservatoire – the Guildhall School of Music and Drama-agreed. to start the first full-time course for qualified musicians to train as therapists under the auspices of the Society. Late in the 1960s, the Society had become The British Society for Music Therapy (BSMT) with the aim to serve the medical, educational and social services of the community through the application of music therapy in their respective fields”.

The first of Juliette Alvin’s books, Music for the Handicapped Child, was published by Oxford University Press in 1965. The present book, published the following year, was intended to complement that specialized account of her work with children, and it became a ‘textbook’ for the Guildhall course. By then, the author had travelled all over the world: in her late 70s she was still a redoubtable figure, recognized everywhere as the pioneer of the profession. Other courses had begun in England and in many countries, but she continued to teach on ‘her’ Guildhall course in London until she was well over 80 years of age. When she died in 1982, she was mourned from Tokyo to Toronto, in Australasia and America, in the many countries ace her students had come to train in London and now practised.

This book was first published in paperback by John Clare Books in 1983 with a foreword by Auriel Warwick, then chairman of the BSMT, and is re-issued by the present publishers still the definitive introduction to music therapy for students of music, medicine, education and the social services… and for anyone who has recently become aware of the power in music therapy for all ages.