Music Therapy: past, present and future
07 May 2026
It's our 50th birthday on 25 May and we've been asking our brilliant members of staff to talk about their roles here at the hospice. Tom, our Music Therapist, gave us a truly insightful look into the world of Music Therapy within hospice care.
How has Music Therapy progressed or changed in your time?
Sobell House was the first hospice in Europe to employ music therapy, introduced during the hospice’s infancy, and its progression has run parallel with Sobell’s own growth and development. Within the hospice, music therapy is recognised as a means by which to offer our patients and their families specialised psychological and emotional support in the most difficult and worrying of times, using music to connect with the individual more quickly.
Over the last 40 years, there have been four music therapists in post at Sobell House, all bringing their own particular skills as musicians and therapists to the role. Being person-centred, the work is always led by a patient’s needs. Singing, playing, listening, writing songs, writing poems, recording, arranging, performing, and of course, simply talking, have benefitted hundreds of people who have used music therapy to try and make sense of living with a life-threatening illness.
How important is it to patients to receive Music Therapy?
With serious ill-health, we can become patients very quickly, and our sense of self is often outweighed by our medical needs. By engaging with music, we can perhaps begin to reconnect with our true selves, the person we are rather than the patient we have to be.
What do you think the next 50 years will look like for Music Therapy in hospice care?
Music has a deep, important role within human nature and music seems to be at the very core of what it is to be human. Every culture has used music to soundtrack significant events; births, weddings, birthdays, funerals, religious and secular celebrations have all been scored by specific music.
We instinctively sing lullabies and nursery rhymes to newborn children. It has also been well documented how people living with dementia may not be able to recall that day’s activities but are still able to sing along to songs they have loved throughout their lives. So if music has a role to play at the two ends of our lives, maybe it can also help during our lifetimes.
In the next 50 years, I’m sure that music will remain as important a part of our lives, as it has been through millennia. Essential to this must be the continued human connection that music allows us a means to express ourselves and feel heard, to share ideas and thoughts, to bring us together in times of need.
