Music & Me: exploring interdisciplinary practice through a collaborative songwriting project across Scotland’s children’s hospices.

Description

Music & Me was a large-scale collaborative songwriting project designed to celebrate the diverse voices within Children’s Hospices Across Scotland (CHAS) (see Drury, Harris and McLachlan, 2025). The project involved 178 individuals including babies, children and young people, their families, and staff and volunteers. The resulting song and accompanying music video represent a rich musical collaboration across services offered through the 2 children’s hospices in Scotland, and also highlights successful interdisciplinary practice between music therapy and community music - an angle not often found in the research literature (Tsiris, Hockley and Dives, 2022).
Within its post-pandemic context, the Music & Me project was situated in a period of flux and was designed to build bridges between a community that had been severely impacted by the national lockdowns. The medium of songwriting was used as a platform for authentic collaboration (Baker, 2015) and highlighted the many ways in which genuine ‘voice’ can be included. The project used hybrid ways of working to facilitate this and nurture a sense of community and connection. In doing so, it embraced changes to practice experienced through the pandemic and harnessed this learning in the evolution to post-pandemic approaches.

Period	9 Aug 2025
Event title	2nd International Conference on Children's Music Therapy: Music Therapy in Paediatrics
Event type	Conference
Location	Oslo, NorwayShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International