Music therapy with an improviser’s mindset: An interdisciplinary dialogue at the intersection of therapeutic and educational approaches

This chapter explores the improviser’s mindset as a shared conceptual and practical foundation across music therapy and music education. Drawing on over three decades of personal and professional dialogue between the authors (a music therapist and music educator), the chapter presents an interdisciplinary narrative grounded in jazz improvisation, reflective practice, and relational approaches to musicking. Framed as a tripartite dialogue, the authors propose the improviser’s mindset as a framework for reflective, adaptive, and relational practice. Through this dialogic structure, the authors argue that the improviser’s mindset offers a generative approach for planning, facilitating, and evaluating music therapy and music education practice. This work contributes to the scholarship on interdisciplinary collaboration and invites further exploration of improvisation, not only as a musical method, but as a mode of enquiry, pedagogy, andragogy, and care.