Music Therapy Conversations

Amelia Oldfield feels incredibly lucky to have worked as a clinical music therapist in the NHS for 40 years. In the early 1980s she worked full-time with people with learning disabilities for six years, and then part-time with pre-school children and their families referred from a child development centre, as well as with primary aged children and their families in a child and family psychiatric unit. In 1994, she and her colleague, Helen Odell-Miller, jointly set up the MA music therapy training course at Anglia Ruskin University, and Amelia has taught music therapy students on this course since that time. She has particularly enjoyed running workshops to enable and encourage students to develop clinical music therapy improvisation skills on single line instruments. It has always seemed very important to continue to be active clinically herself during her teaching, as her clinical music therapy work inspired her teaching, and her teaching made her think about her clinical work in a rigorous and critical way.