Performing Identities and Performing Relationships: Community Music Therapy and Adolescent Mental Health

Abstract

This article explores the “Coffee House,” a community music therapy performance event held biannually at an adolescent mental health treatment facility in Southwestern Ontario, Canada. In this paper, I draw upon techniques and theory from narrative inquiry in order to investigate the experiences and perspectives of 7 adolescent clients and 11 staff members who participated in the event as performers and audience members. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and analyzed through qualitative coding; the participants’ voices are presented here. Building upon a previous article, in which I attribute the Coffee House’s success to its participatory ethos, this article examines the impact of performing upon participants’ musical and personal identities as well as upon their relationships with others at the facility. The shifts and transformations that took place within youths’ identities were interdependent with the relational features of the performance context; expansions in youths’ self-identities were indelibly connected to staff members’ expanded perspectives on these youths, afforded through witnessing their performances. Participants’ narratives validate not only the ways in which identity and relationship intersect, but also the way in which musical performance’s impact upon identity and relationship is uniquely musical.