BAMT Conference 2014

February 2014, Birmingham

The first British Association for Music Therapy Conference got underway at the Birmingham Conservatoire in February with the premiere of Gordon Thornett's 'Fanfare and Fantasia for Brass Ensemble, in memory of Tony'. Composed for the opening of the BAMT Conference in memory of Prof. Tony Wigram, the fanfare was performed by the Birmingham Conservatoire Brass Dectet, conducted by Christopher Houlding.

A first in many ways, the conference saw the coming together of music therapists and researchers from across the UK to share practice, research and celebrate the transformative power music therapy has to play in enriching lives. 

The vision for the conference was to represent our diversity as music therapists - it was all about 'counterpoints' rather than harmony. Music therapy is simply too diverse a field to define simply and its richness comes from this overlap between music and the many different fields in which music therapists work. What unites us is precisely our concern with this overlap between 'music' and 'therapy', and all the various subtleties those two words contain. 

It was also a deliberate choice for the conference to engage with aspects of the 'real world' in which music therapy lives, bringing new counterpoints to bear on our theme and to include speakers from outside the music therapy field. This very much came to life in the form of themed panel discussions. 

With a packed conference programme, there was a wonderfully rich collection of diverse material that came from the many presentations and interviews that we want to share with the wider membership and the general public. We hope that the materials available provide you with a flavour of the conference as well as being thought provoking and stimulating, and demonstrating many examples of innovative thinking, research, development and evidence. 

For further information about the conference, please contact us