Professional Association of Music Therapists in Germany

Music therapy is the utilization of intercessions to accomplish individual objectives within a therapeutic bond by an expert who has completed an appropriate music therapy program. Music therapy is an associated health profession and one of the expressive therapies, comprising of a process in which a music therapist uses music and all of its aspects like physical, aesthetic, mental, emotional, social, and spiritual to help patrons advance their physical and mental health. In the first allusion it is stated that the contact of a German university-president with Paul Nordoff in 1966 was the birth of German music therapy. In another allusion it is emphasised that Franz Adalbert Fengler in the 1940s and 1950s printed the first German articles as well as a book regarding music therapy and at University of Arts in Berlin the first academic teaching in music therapy was established. Jacques Dalcroze was working in Dresden during the early 20th century with his fundamental use of music in early education of children including handicapped children. While in the beginning and in the middle of the 20th century in medicine such medical doctors like Karl-Heinz Polter and Hildebrandt R. Teirich established musical constituents of their treatments of psychosomatic, neurological, and psychiatric diseases. Later towards the end of the 1950s, Christoph Schwabe inaugurated to improve music therapy in the clinics of psychiatry and psychotherapy at University Leipzig.

In 1969, the first German music therapy congress took place in Leipzig with East and West-German as well as Austrian participants. In the beginning of the progression of music therapy as a occupation in West-Germany in the 70s anthroposophic music therapy became significant. This music therapy is also accentuated active music therapy in West-Germany.  The creative music therapy tactic of Nordoff and Robbins and the diagnostic music therapy of Mary Priestley became persuasive in the further advancement of music therapy in West-Germany.  In the 90s the situation between East- and the different West-German music therapy organisations were challenging. But one important milestone in the 90s was the 8th World congress of music therapy in 1996 in Hamburg, directed by Hans-Helmut Decker-Voigt. In the time of preparation of this very imperative event for German music therapy music therapists of all music therapy schools sit organised on one chair, and a mutual meeting point of all German music therapy organisations was engendered: the Kassel conference, which still exists. In the 90s a transformation to bigger efficiency was seen.

A new generation of music therapists is now in the workstation, skilled not only by the first generation of German music therapy professors, also by the second and third generation. Also, at the end of the 90s and in the new millennium synopsis-books are being published, in which most of German music therapy is integrated in one book with different representatives of their various schools.