MU 550 - Music and Trauma (MU 450)

3.00 credits.

Becoming a trauma-informed practitioner of music therapy or music education is an increasingly important skill amidst reports of rates of adverse childhood experiences, war, violence, and a reckoning with how trauma becomes lodged within the transgenerational body. This course brings together perspectives from music therapy, music education, and the neuroscience of sound processing to interrogate trauma and what it means to engage in trauma-informed and trauma-reparative practices. Students will explore the ethics of trauma-informed work alongside an exploration of how music, sound, and embodied cognition offer new ways to understand trauma and practices of healing, sensitivity, and repair. Fall semester.