Book Review: Barbara L. Wheeler and Kathleen Murphy (eds), Music Therapy Research

Abstract

Imagine the largest, most extravagant box of luxury chocolates. Where are you going to start? Are you a milk chocolate or dark chocolate person? Do you go for truffles or caramels? Do you take your time to study the descriptions on the box or dive straight in and take your pick? Well, Wheeler and Murphy’s third edition of Music Therapy Research is a little like an enormous box of chocolates. When dividing up the chapters and units for the purposes of this review, it was a bit like selecting our favourite or most familiar chocolates. There have already been several reviews of Music Therapy Research published and so we were keen not to duplicate the information already available. Odell-Miller (2018), for example, provides a detailed review of the content, while Rickson (2017) and Arns (2017) provide overviews of the book, highlighting aspects of the content and structure. So, to stay with the chocolate box metaphor, we aim to provide a brief overview of each layer, picking out a few individual flavours to describe in more detail, followed by a brief description of the companion volume, An Introduction to Music Therapy Research. We hope our review will provide ‘food for thought’ and encourage readers to maybe try some new flavours and delve into this rich, multi-layered and essential book.