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Feasibility, clinical efficacy, and well-being outcomes of an online singing intervention for postnatal depression in the UK: SHAPER-PNDO, a single-arm clinical trial
Full text linkBackground: Postnatal depression (PND) affects over 12% of mothers, with numbers rising during COVID-19. Singing groups can support mothers with PND; however, online delivery has never been evaluated. SHAPER-PNDO, a single-arm clinical trial, evaluated the feasibility, clinical efficacy, and well-being outcomes of a 6-week online version of Breathe Melodies for Mums (M4M) singing intervention developed for mothers with PND during COVID-19 lockdowns.
Methods: The primary objective of this study was to assess the feasibility of a group online singing intervention for new mothers with postnatal depression. This was ascertained through recruitment rates, study retention rates, attendance rates to the singing sessions, and study completion rates. The secondary objective of the study was to assess the clinical efficacy and well-being outcomes of the singing intervention. Specifically, we measured change in Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS), State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), Perceived Stress Scale (PSS), and Office for National Statistics Wellbeing Scale (ONS) scores from baseline to end-of-intervention (week 6); follow-up assessments were completed at weeks 3, 16, and 32. Mothers were eligible if they scored ≥10 on the baseline EPDS.
Results: Eighty-seven percent of the 37 recruited mothers completed the study, attending, on average, 5 of the 6 group singing sessions. With regard to secondary outcomes, at end-of-treatment, mothers experienced significant reductions in depression (EPDS, 16.6 ± 3.7 to 11.2 ± 5.3, 95% CI [0.79,1.65]), anxiety (STAI-S, 48.4 ± 27.1 to 41.7 ± 26.8, 95% CI [4.96, 17.65]) and stress (PSS, 29.0 ± 5.7 to 19.7 ± 5.3, 95% CI [1.33, 7.07]); and, furthermore, significant improvements in life satisfaction (ONS, 50.5 ± 23.0 to 72.8 ± 11.7, 95% CI [− 39.86, − 4.64]) and feelings of worthwhileness (ONS, 51.7 ± 30.4 to 78.6 ± 15.1, 95% CI [− 52.79, − 0.85]). Reduction on the EPDS correlated with a reduction on the BDI and the STAI-S and maternal childhood maltreatment was predictive of a smaller treatment response.
Conclusions: M4M online was feasible to mothers who partook in the programme. Furthermore, M4M online supports the mental health and well-being of new mothers experiencing PND, especially when barriers to in-person treatment are present.
Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT04857593. Registered 22 April 2021, retrospectively registered
The Routledge Companion to teaching music composition in schools: international perspectives
No full textThe Routledge Companion to Teaching Music Composition in Schools: International Perspectives offers a comprehensive overview of teaching composing from a wide range of countries around the world. Addressing the current state of composition pedagogy from primary to secondary school levels and beyond, the volume explores issues, including different curricular and extracurricular settings, cultural aspects of composing, aesthetics, musical creativity, the role of technology, and assessment.
With contributors from over 30 countries, this volume encompasses theoretical, historical, empirical, and practical approaches and enables comparisons across different countries and regions. Chapters by experienced educators, composers, and researchers describe in depth the practices taking place in different international locations. Interspersed with these chapters, interludes by the volume editors contextualize and problematize the teaching and learning of composing music. The volume covers a range of contexts, including formal and informal, those where a national curriculum is mandated or where composing is a matter of choice, and a range of types, styles, and genres of musical learning and music-making.
Providing a wide-ranging and detailed review of international approaches to incorporating music composition in teaching and learning, this volume will be a useful resource for teachers, music education researchers, graduate and undergraduate students, and all those working with children and young people in composing music
Chapter interlude VII: the role of digital technology in classroom composing
No full textAdvances in digital music technology continue to transform how we engage with music and how it is taught. This interlude explores how the use of technology changes how we create new music. It describes the inclusive potential and benefits of using technology in the music classroom, as well as how technology challenges traditional norms and beliefs around musical learning. The dangers and challenges of using technology to compose are investigated along with how the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated its use, and inequality is highlighted as well
Bridging the gap: gender equality in music technology
No full textComposer-educator Dr Kirsty Devaney and school music-technology teacher and senior examiner Nick Hughes reflect on the gender disparity in music tech and share ideas on how to improve this for future generations
Book review: 'Child composers in the old conservatories: how orphans became elite musicians' by Robert O. Gjerdingen (OUP 2020)
No full textPractitioner Review: effectiveness and mechanisms of change in participatory arts-based programmes for promoting youth mental health and well-being – a systematic review
Full text linkBackground: Participatory arts-based (PAB) programmes refer to a diverse range of community programmes involving active engagement in the creation process that appear helpful to several aspects of children's and young people's (CYP) mental health and well-being. This mixed-methods systematic review synthesises evidence relating to the effectiveness and mechanisms of change in PAB programmes for youth.
Method: Studies were identified following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses approach. Eleven electronic databases were searched for studies of PAB programmes conducted with CYP (aged 4–25 years), which reported mental health and well-being effectiveness outcomes and/or mechanisms of change. A mixed-methods appraisal tool assessed study quality. A narrative synthesis was conducted of effectiveness and challenges in capturing this. Findings relating to reported mechanisms of change were integrated via a metasummary.
Results: Twenty-two studies were included. Evidence of effectiveness from quantitative studies was limited by methodological issues. The metasummary identified mechanisms of change resonant with those proposed in talking therapies. Additionally, PAB programmes appear beneficial to CYP by fostering a therapeutic space characterised by subverting restrictive social rules, communitas that is not perceived as coercive, and inviting play and embodied understanding.
Conclusions: There is good evidence that there are therapeutic processes in PAB programmes. There is a need for more transdisciplinary work to increase understanding of context–mechanism–outcome pathways, including the role played by different art stimuli and practices. Going forward, transdisciplinary teams are needed to quantify short- and long-term mental health and well-being outcomes and to investigate optimal programme durations in relation to population and need. Such teams would also be best placed to work on resolving inter-disciplinary methodological tensions
Specialist support for performers: psychotherapist
No full textLearn how a psychotherapist can help performers optimise their mental health
Emma Calvé: a diva’s campagne de propagande
No full textTaking one of the author’s archival finds—a photograph of the famous French diva Emma Calvé in a Red Cross uniform, made by the Fifth-Avenue-based Aimé Dupont Studio in the early twentieth century and now preserved at the Musée de Millau et des Grands Causses—as its starting point, this chapter examines the singer’s wartime tour of America in 1915–16. It locates this tour alongside Calvé’s other efforts towards self-re-fashioning following her retirement from the operatic stage around the turn of the nineteenth century, suggesting that the war enabled the singer to take on a new—and newly relevant—role in public life, the memory of which she maintained until her death in 1942. Imagining what this photograph may have meant to and for Calvé when she first posed for it, and some of the meanings she and others may have attributed to it since, this chapter also acknowledges some of the challenges involved in interpreting archival artifacts
Book review: 'Debating English Music in the Long Nineteenth Century' by John Ling (Boydell & Brewer, 2021)
No full textThis book review is available open access at the Official URL given below
Community music and the civic imagination
No full textIn this chapter, I outline how Community Music (CM) might be considered a resource of the civic imagination in the broader quest for ways of addressing complex global challenges. Over the last few decades, the full potential of CM to bring about social transformation has been paradoxically diminished by its coupling to political agendas, and this has led to two complex and related challenges. On the one hand, being musical has gradually been commodified into serving those political agendas – around social impact and more recently health and wellbeing. On the other hand, increasingly those same political systems have become a barrier to addressing the world’s most pressing problems, especially environmental degradation brought about by the ‘great acceleration’ (Anthropocene Working Group, 2019) of human population explosion, climate change and species extinction. As a result, by cosying up to political agendas, CM might have
inadvertently become a resource to help people ‘cope’ with the challenges of living in this period of human history (Camlin, 2018), rather than being part of a wider movement to change those conditions