International Keynote Speaker Presentation: Balancing Consonance and Dissonance to Orchestrate Impact for the Future
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| Saturday, October 18, 2025 |
| 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM |
| Centre Stage |
Overview
Professor Wendy Magee | Sponsored by the Robert Connor Dawes Foundation
Speaker
Professor Wendy Magee
Temple University
International Keynote Speaker Presentation: Balancing Consonance and Dissonance to Orchestrate Impact for the Future
Abstract
As we mark fifty years of music therapy in Australia, it is timely to reflect on points of consonance and dissonance that continue to shape stability and tension for our profession. The voices of our profession’s pioneers (past and emerging) have grown a rich legacy that resonate in the practices, research, and community connections we nurture today. Alongside these achievements, we continue to face challenges that call us to question, adapt, and innovate. Despite the growth in high quality evidence supporting music therapy in recent decades, we still encounter the persistent “with more evidence” challenge from funders and policymakers. Why is the substantial body of evidence for music therapy still not considered sufficient? How can we seize these moments of discord to advocate for the services that music therapists (as trained music interventionists) bring to healthcare and education? Addressing these questions requires the capacity to position our work as relevant, credible, and collaborative. This may demand us to reframe our scope of practice to align with established theoretical frameworks and practices in care settings. Using examples from lived career experiences this keynote will explore how balancing the tight rope walk between consonance and dissonance—honouring tradition while embracing innovation—can enable us to orchestrate lasting impact of music therapy for future generations.
Biography
Wendy L. Magee PhD is Professor of Music Therapy at Temple University in Philadelphia, USA, where she also co-ordinates the PhD program in Music Therapy. With a distinguished career spanning over 37 years, she worked as a clinician, researcher, manager and trainer in neurological rehabilitation across Australia, England and Ireland before moving to the US in 2011. Her scholarship, including a Cochrane Review, focuses on music therapy for individuals with acquired brain injury and neurological illness, spanning both paediatric and adult populations, as well as music technology in therapeutic contexts. She is deeply committed to knowledge translation, aiming to maximise meaningful, real-world outcomes for patients, families and interdisciplinary teams.
Pioneering contributions to the field of Disorders of Consciousness (DoC) have earned recognition including the World Federation of Music Therapy Research Award (2023) and Temple University’s Paul W. Eberman Faculty Research Award (2021). She is an active member of the International Brain Injury Association’s DoC Special Interest Group and leads collaborative research projects across Europe, Latin America, North America and Asia. Her impactful work has received funding from major institutions including the Leverhulme Foundation (UK), American Music Therapy Association’s Flagler Fultz Research Award and GRAMMY Museum grant for paediatric consciousness research. A former Chair of the British Society for Music Therapy, she currently serves on the Board of the International Association of Music and Medicine and several editorial boards
