Abstract In clinical settings, music therapy is frequently received as a gift—a voluntary offering that invites but does not demand participation. Drawing on ethnographic research with music therapists and patients in Canadian and American hospitals, this article examines how clinical care is co‐constituted through practices of giving, receiving, and reciprocating. Through improvisation, song, silence, and the negotiation of refusal, music therapists and patients co‐compose moments of affective connection in which reciprocity is registered as felt presence and care is rendered audible. Situating these practices within colonial ontologies of sound that govern what is heard as music and who is audible as human, the article shows how gift relations unfold within and against liberal regimes that constrain the recognition of musical personhood. Listening for reciprocity otherwise refuses to tether care to normative modes of intelligibility, while exposing the limits of musical and social recognition within and beyond the clinic.
Meredith Evans (Mon,) studied this question.
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