| Cancer is a serious, potentially life-limiting and life-threatening disease and illness that profoundly affects individuals, and their families and friends. Business-as-usual is irreparably altered, never to be considered "normal" in the same way again. Music at a Time Like This chronicles a music therapy support group study for adult cancer patients that voices experience from the patients' perspectives. The study is a hermeneutic-phenomenological inquiry about the meaning of the music therapy support group.;Ten individuals, recruited from hospital and community cancer facilities, participated in eight weekly music therapy support group sessions from May to June, 2004. Participants talked about feeling lonely and isolated as cancer patients. They experienced the music therapy support group as profound, nonverbal connection to themselves, to each other, and connection to something larger---the music---that was beyond themselves. The experience of improvised music-making in music therapy support groups was particularly empowering and provided feelings of control during a time of loss-of-control inflicted by the disease and its experience as illness.;Music therapy research is, by definition, arts-based. The representation of this inquiry is, furthermore, arts-informed because the findings are portrayed in a literary form that is intended to be accessible to a wide readership beyond the academy and the music therapy profession. Substantive content is located throughout the thesis text, including endnotes and appendices. Nonverbal visual and auditory elements are incorporated to portray the participants' experiences directly and to heighten the reader's phenomenological engagement. These include a melodic-poetic transcription---a song---based on the compression and synthesis of the research findings.;A CD player is required to access the audio compact disc that accompanies the hard paper copy of this thesis. The colour images and audio data can be accessed on-line at http://hdl.handle.net/1807/4797. The computer must have a suitable sound card and speakers or earphones.;This arts-informed representation more fully conveys the tone of the project. It honours the creativity, courage and integrity of the research participants and the music they created together. An arts-informed representation embodies the risks taken and expands the notion of research, including ways of knowing, what can be known and how this can be represented.*.;*This dissertation is a compound document (contains both a paper copy and a CD as part of the dissertation). The CD requires the following system requirements: Windows MediaPlayer or RealPlayer. |
