Voices ResourcesA website for the worldwide community around the journal Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy

I was happy to read Thomas Wosch's latest column, in which he tells us about some of his recent personal experiences and thoughts about the relationships between music, the personal and the social - an area many of us think especially important to music therapy currently. I was slightly less pleased with an inaccuracy Thomas makes when he refers to my 2002 paper on Community Music Therapy (CoMT[1]), which in turn reinforces a wider misunderstanding I'm finding people often make in relation to CoMT. Thomas's title metaphor - 'the individual kernel of CMT' - gives for me just the wrong image, for reasons I will explain. So I hope he will forgive me if I use this response to him partly as a way of putting forward some of my response to this wider misunderstanding concerning the relationship between the individual and the social in CoMT practice and thinking. In short, I think it a mistake to polarize the individual and the social, or suggest that individual experience can somehow be separated from social or cultural experience (or that social experience reduces to individual experience). Far from CoMT stressing the communal to the expense of the individual, what it actually does is to re-emphasise the socio-culturally mediated relationship between individual and social experience. Individuality is less a kernel, more a node within the socio-cultural matrix!

I have four points of debate. I hope these might encourage further discussants to join, in the spirit of Voices dialogue and discussion.

1. CoMT & The Winds of Change Diagram - No Polarity Please!

Thomas writes in his column that when thinking about individual experience and CoMT he remembers a diagram in my 2002 Voices paper[2], "[where] [H]e showed in it the polarity between music psychotherapy and CMT with the individual experience on the one side and on the other side the social experience". Unfortunately Thomas' memory lets him down here: the diagram (Fig 1, Ansdell, 2002) shows rather a continuum between the 'individual' and the 'communal', but in terms not of music psychotherapy and CoMT, but of two different practices in the UK for working with people through music. I explained how music therapy had tended to 'colonise' working with people individually, and on the other end 'community music' had tended mostly to work with group and workshop formats. The point of my diagram and the subsequent argument was that community musicians were moving over into 'music therapy territory' and doing individual work. I suggested that CoMT as a model of practice could potentially work across the whole individual-communal continuum to the benefit of our clients and the places where we work. Thomas is perhaps right in remembering that this argument does relate to music psychotherapy in some ways too: in that this approach tends not only to work mostly with individuals, but typically has an individualist theory - it seldom incorporates socio-cultural thinking about the relationships between music, people and their contexts[3]. Perhaps, however (as with most diagrams) a wrong impression is given. Instead of thinking of a fluid and flexible two-way continuum between individual and social dimensions of experience, we instead tend to see the polarity: one end individual, one end social. I think we all know that nothing could be further from the truth - in music therapy or in any aspect of our lives. Perhaps the more accurate picture is the ecological, or 'russian doll' one: of the individual being nested within the socio-cultural. Just like Thomas' 'kernel', you may be thinking! But is it? Let's go on now to my second point, related to how Thomas discusses individuality and music in relation to Adorno.

2. Adorno, DeNora and 'Musical Individualism'

Let me say straight away that you always need to preface any discussion of Adorno's work with the comment that it is complicated, elusive and open to multiple interpretations. So whilst Thomas and I could have very different views on what Adorno meant, I would nevertheless like to disagree a bit with how Thomas uses Adorno to present his idea that "In the end it is the individual experience which counts in musical experience and everyone can feel her or his difference in it. And this seems to be the kernel of all musical experience" [emphasis in original]. Now, my understanding is that what Adorno was trying to do was to highlight the inevitable socio-cultural constitution of individuality (he would say consciousness), but whilst leaving a gap for an individual's 'resistance' to the social. I am presuming that when Thomas talks of Adorno's "social negativity" he means what is usually translated into English as negative dialectics, meaning just this resistance to a cosy synthesis, to a situation where, as it were, we can 'fight back' to the social or the cultural, even as we are inescapably caught within it. So I would say that however Adorno talks about 'individual consciousness' he comes at this from a resolutely social perspective (he was first and foremost a sociologist). I'm fairly sure he would be the last person to think of individuality as a polarity to socio-cultural being.

A difficulty for music therapists using Adorno is that, although his thinking was progressive in many ways, it was also conservative in terms of his equating music in relation to the canon of musical works. My own understanding of Adorno has been greatly helped by the music sociologist Tia DeNora's interpretations of his work - particularly in her latest book After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology (2003), which is both homage and critique of Adorno. Thomas himself quotes DeNora's examples of people's individual musical experiences and how these sometimes afford a form of 'social resistance' in the way Adorno wrote about. But again, this is I think not meaning that individual musical experience is somehow more central than the social (or perhaps that the social reduces to the individual). DeNora's position is, like Adorno's, one which is from the beginning a socio-cultural perspective on individuality, as she makes clear in her earlier book Music in Everyday Life (2000) when she comments how psychologists' research on musical 'solitary and individualistic practices' could be:

...reviewed as part of a fundamentally social process or self-structuration, the constitution and maintenance of the self. In this sense, the ostensibly 'private' sphere of music use is part and parcel of the cultural constitution of subjectivity, part of how individuals are constituted themselves as social agents. (DeNora, 2000, p. 47)

In DeNora's After Adorno, her re-reading of Adorno's project is in terms of the kind of musical action (ie musicing) that we as music therapists are typically involved in. Again it is true that many of her examples are ostensibly of how individuals appropriate music for themselves and their various needs. But the conclusion towards which her empirical and theoretical investigations is this:

Music acts, albeit only 'in concert' with the material, cultural, and social environments in which it is located. [...] It is thus possible to speak of the ways that music is a medium within and with which being is performed. It is a medium, in other words, of action. Music gives us modes and instrumentalities for doing social life...music is simply one way in which we do that which we end up calling social action. (DeNora, 2003, p. 157).

3. How Individual Really is 'Individual'?

At the heart of this argument is the old chestnut, 'Which comes first: self or society?', a rather hopeless chicken-and-egg question. Different academic and practical traditions have come at this question in their own ways, many of which are well-known to music therapists. Psychological thinking has moved in the last century from a one-person model of intrapsychic life to two-person inter-psychic relational model (via Object Relations and developmental theory). Trevarthen and his followers show us how intersubjectivity (not subjectivity) comes first; Stern recently talks of the 'intersubjective matrix' as the foundation of selfhood - a wider view akin to social constructionists telling us that the self is fundamentally socially constructed. In the current edition of Voices there's an article by Eugenia Hernandez-Ruiz (Postmodernism & Music Therapy) which even has a subsection entitled 'Problems of Individualism'.

Here's how I summarized this issue in my chapter in Community Music Therapy, in a subsection entitled 'Individuality in relation to community':

[there is] a growing attempt to reach a position where the 'I' is not some essential boundaried self, but something more porous, more transactional within context and relationships: a process, a capacity for reflexivity, dialogue, community. This is nearer to Buber, Bakhtin, Derrida: to difference and meeting as central to the politics of identity and community. (Ansdell in Pavlicevic & Ansdell, 2004, p. 81)

I then quoted a passage from the psychotherapist Maurice Friedman, which is of relevance to my point in the response about not yielding to an individual-social polarity:

We are used to thinking in terms of polarities - the individual versus the social, or inner versus outer. But to see only the polar extremes obscures a great deal of human reality. The prime human reality is the life of dialogue that takes place in the family and in community. To view the individual or the community outside the context of the life of dialogue is like trying to draw a map of the world with only the north and south poles as references. For the life of dialogue, the self versus the world is an abstract notion. The self in the world is the basic reality we all share. (Friedman in Frie, 2003, p.54)

A notion of an'ecological self' is perhaps useful here: an 'individual' is certainly boundaried (ie not merged with everyone/everything else), but is also a node within a network of interdependent communicating relationships in a specific context. As such it is bounded but porous (Capra, 2003). So the conclusion is perhaps (from all these angles): the 'individual' is not very individual! "I" as a designation is a rather 'hypothetical' position - we'd be better thinking of the form "I/You" as the more accurate description: ie the individual-in-relation (and in society).

Seen this way Thomas' metaphor of individuality as a 'kernel' seems to me to give the wrong impression. I'd suggest this is a rather dated essentialist notion of the person - with a sharp distinction between essence and context. In my essay 'The Stories We Tell'[4] in NJMT I contrasted a 'plum view' of the person with an 'onion view' (representing essentialist and constructionist theories). I suggested we might better work (as music therapists) with the latter than the former: it presents a more relational and transactional view of people, contexts and therapeutic opportunities.

4. The Social Matrix of Community Music Therapy?

What then is the relationship of the individual and the social in CoMT? Another way of putting this would be: What does music(ing) tell us about this question? CoMT has developed not primarily as a theory, but as a practice (the theory is attempting to match the practice). What we found in practice is that, whilst individuals certainly use music(ing) as a way of expressing, elaborating and reflecting on themselves, so too they naturally use it as a relational medium, and also as a social medium. Music(ing) does not respect theoretical boundaries between self and society - it quickly elides the personal and the social. Moreover (and here is where I think I disagree with Thomas), whilst perhaps only a person can experience something, I think music(ing) shows us how some quite new forms of experience emerge at group/collective levels. That is, a social phenomenology shows a group's music not just as the addition of many individual experiences, but as a new level (as social emergence theory is now showing[5]). All of these observations are relevant to how we understand CoMT, and how a music therapist follows where people and music lead to therapeutic benefit.

I mentioned earlier that I'd suggested an onion metaphor for a non-essentialist self, perhaps a more accurate image than Thomas' 'kernel'. But the onion is not right either: it misses the sense of the connected self. Stern's latest book The Present Moment, has the image of the 'intersubjective matrix' where we see individuality as bounded but connected and collaborative - a node within the matrix of socio-cultural life. The music therapist Stuart Wood has also used a matrix model for the practical principle of CoMT. So perhaps this is also the best image for imagining the connection between individuality and sociality for CoMT practice. The matrix generates an ecology of relationships, resources and contexts for the creation and repair of self and community; where 'musical communitas' emerges from communicative and collaborative action.

So for me the important critique I have of Thomas' position is that I do not think that there is an 'individual kernel' of CoMT. Instead it shows how we are all social individuals, without any need for the social to collapse into individual experience (or visa versa). But does this diminish individual experience, or musical experience? Not I think if we take a rather more social view of experience, for example that suggested by the American philosopher John Dewey:

Experience is the result, the sign and the reward of that interaction of organism and environment which...is a trasformation of interaction into participation and communication. (Dewey, 1934, p. 22)

Perhaps, were we debating together face to face, Thomas and I would agree more than I think. We both end up talking about participation, experience and community. One interesting aspect (which I, and perhaps you) will have picked up from reading his column and my reply, is perhaps how our cultural differences are involved in our theoretical differences. I come from the UK, part of a rather tired liberal democracy, where people hunger for more 'community spirit'. Thomas grew up in the former DDR, and perhaps has a quite different feeling about the relationship between individuality, sociality and politics. When I talk to Japanese colleagues they again have quite a different attitude to these phenomena.

Voices was designed partly to bring these issues to the fore in terms of music therapy practice and theory. Can I encourage my colleagues to continue this current dialogue, which I think is a crucial one: What is the relationship for you between individuality and sociality in music therapy?

Notes

[1] I use the abbreviation "CoMT" here, rather than 'CMT' as the latter stands for many people for 'Creative Music Therapy'.

[2] Community Music Therapy & the Winds of Change: A Discussion Paper. Voices 2, No.2 (July 2002) https://normt.uib.no/index.php/voices/article/view/83/65

[3] Perhaps I can clear up another misunderstanding here: I called this tradition the 'consensus model' (which mostly characterizes music psychotherapy, but could include other theories resembling it). I meant this as a heuristic for the purpose of the argument, ie I made up the term 'consensus model' to analytically characterize a certain 30-year consensus of practices and ideas within our discipline. Nobody actually does music therapy with this model! (and you won't find anyone wearing the badge 'consensus music therapist', any more than people go around wearing the badge 'positivist' or 'postmodernist'!).

[4] The Stories We Tell: Some Metatheoretical Reflections on Music Therapy (2003): Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, 12(2), pp.152-9.

[5] See Keith Sawyer (2005), Social Emergence: Societies as Complex Systems. CUP.