Where is it and how can we think about it in Music Therapy?

I love this subject; I find it fascinating. There are (again) tomes written on this subject with various musings from intellectually and musically brilliant people in interviews, letters, and discussions out there in the world. I want to collect a few of the ideas that I’ve found interesting to learn about, and describe how a Music Therapist might think about the music that happens inside the therapy space.

Leonard B. Meyer outlines the main problem with ‘meaning’ in music as it being a “closed system”, employing no specific symbols that indicate objects, human emotions, or concepts outside of music (at least none that are universal). Meyer lays out two major schools of thought in his book Emotion and Meaning in Music - the Absolutists, and Referentialists. To summarise the positions very briefly, Absolutists hold the opinion that music remains a closed system; the emotions that music causes in the listener are innately within the music itself. The music contains essences of ‘sadness’, ‘joy’, 'raindrops falling on a Lilypad’ that originate within the music; its ebb and flow, its harmony, its timbre. Referentialists come in a few flavours, but the general idea is that music evokes emotion because we reference its elements (rhythm, melody, harmony etc) against our own experiences of other things. A slow piece of music may remind us of feelings of ‘lethargy’, ‘melancholy’, or ‘sadness’. A syncopated melody might give us the idea of skipping and thus ‘joy’ or ‘gaiety’. The descending motion of an instrument with a delicate timbre that ends with quiet percussive beats could bring to image the mind of rain on windows or a lilypad.

This is of course a very abbreviated outline of Meyer’s descriptions, however it might make a good launching pad. The Referentialist position begins to intersect with a whole myriad of other ideas, but I want to talk about one way in which Music Therapists think about the music that happens in the Music Therapy space.

Daniel Stern coined a term, Dynamic Forms of Vitality. He broadly posits that ‘vitality’, the aliveness of someone or something, is represented by dynamic changes in different modalities. Simplified, the change in intensity or direction of an action over time shows us the vitality, aliveness, of a thing. Stones aren’t alive when they’re not being acted on – it’s hard to argue the vitality of rock unless we speak more poetically about how it makes us feel. However, a dog is full of vitality; it scampers and whines and barks and plays and nuzzles. In much the same way, anger can be cold, creeping, explosive, or seeping.

If we run with the notion that music can evoke emotion in the listener through reference, can we make a reversal of that and suggest that the music we create spontaneously (improvise) can reference our own emotional states or events, even those that are subconscious? These are some of the things a music therapist thinks about. A loud, even, banging on a drum could be angry, playful, exploratory, joyful. The dynamic vitality of clients provides opportunities for the therapist to see, to understand and to engage with the expression of the clients’ “aliveness”. It is important to understand that this isn’t always a conscious process. Clients may do this naturally with the therapist; feeling, hearing, and seeing the therapist relate to their music in the session. This sense of ‘being with’, for the client, could be perceived as empathy and congruence which are foundational aspects of the Therapeutic Relationship (read more about it here!).

Whilst the deep subject of ‘understanding meaning and emotion in music’ is covered by thinkers like Leonard B. Meyer, Susanne Langer and Leonard Bernstein, a therapist pays attention to things inside the room as well as the music the client is playing. Dynamic Forms of Vitality play out across every modality of a human’s life, their movement, speech, music, emotions, thoughts. Music Therapists may pick up on the movements of a client that isn’t making music, and respond musically to those movements with sounds and actions that mirror and match the client.

It's not a cheesy aphorism to say that everything in the music therapy room is music. Humans are innately musical beings, sometimes we are musical in everything but sound.

Garrick Wareham

Reference List

Emotion and Meaning in Music, Leonard B. Meyer
Forms of Vitality: Exploring Dynamic Experience in Psychology, the Arts, Psychotherapy, and Development, Daniel Stern
The Unanswered Question, Leonard Bernstein https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MB7ZOdp__gQ&list=PLFjonLo8gYHIXC35K4Ujrbu6XHchNDCv9