Paul Nordoff and Clive Robbins: Therapy in Music for Handicapped Children, with a foreword by Benjamin Britten.  Victor Gollancz, London, 1971. Price £1.80.

This book is an account by an American composer and an English music therapist of the evolution of a technique of music therapy with individual children and with groups of children. The authors have worked alongside educators, psychiatrists, neurologists, speech therapists and others—both in Europe and America—dealing with children suffering from severe functional and/or organic handicaps. The detailed case-material, including excellent photographs, conveys to the reader a vivid impression of the individuality of the children and of the authors’ relationship with them.

In their work with individual children, the authors have developed an “exploratory” (diagnostic) technique in which the senior author, seated at the piano, offers the child the use of drum, drumstick and cymbal to use as he wishes. What is of especial importance is that the authors are receptive and attentive to what the child brings, and only then try to give musical expression to this for the child through improvisation at the piano. This appears to be comparable to the analytic situation in which the therapist is receptive and attentive to the child's unconscious communications and attempts to put these into words for the child. The authors then go on to see how the child responds to new musical stimuli; they regard this as an indication of the child's capacity to relate to the therapist as an external object and also an indication of the range of emotions which the child is ready or willing to experience with him.

The authors describe some of the resistances to emotional involvement and the moments of breakthrough. An example is the case of a seven-year-old autistic girl (“Rosita”), where the sequence from withdrawal through to animation and delight at a shared experience as she joined the therapist in playing and singing is vividly illustrated in words and photographs.

With those children who are unable to use the instruments, or indeed to come beyond the doorway, the therapist improvises music expr