My name is Yoshie Sasaguri, a graduate student of music therapy in Japan. In one of my graduate class taught by Rika Ikuno, we decided that each of the students would choose one column and one main issue from "Voices," and use them as discussion materials in this semester. I read the main issue entitled "History and Heritage" by Brynjulf Stige.
Personally, I have had deep interest in the Nordoff-Robbins approach since I came to know about music therapy, and now I'm considering how to apply it in our practice in Japan. So the frank and productive criticism in the column was very interesting to me. I think it is very useful to master each musical elements separately as in the Nordoff-Robbins training courses, but how to use them in various musical, cultural, and social context rests with each therapist. It will depend on each clinical situation, and the effects that follow will also be diverse. If we apply this approach to the musical climate of Japan, maybe it will be effective for the elderly to improvise in the style of Japanese indigenous music such as Japanese folk songs. With the younger generation, we could use pop and rock music as suggested in the column. But even in the same culture and generation, individual musical histories and tastes are very much diversified in Japan nowadays, so we need to accommodate ourselves to our clients. And in order to do so, therapists require rich musical resources. It is no easy thing to become expert in such varying genres.
In the discussion in my seminar, when I asked a question of whether there was any "musical archetype" universally common to mankind as Nordoff had said, one student majoring in cognitive psychology told us about an interesting topic. She said that Narmour, a musicologist, had proposed a musical theory named the "Implication-Realization Model" about the way that people expect the continuation when they listen to a melody halfway (1,2). He says that the way of this expectation is influenced by both a priori, universal elements, and a posteriori, experiential elements. In recent music psychology, there have been a couple of research studies trying to inspect the validity of Narmour's theory through psychological experiments (3-5), with Schellenberg reporting that the theory could be applied to some extent over racial and musical barriers (5). Although the classmate says that the methods and result of this experiment themselves are doubtful, I think it may be necessary for music therapists to know and introduce such knowledge from music psychology and other related fields, because music music has too many aspects and elements to discuss only from the perspective of music therapy. I would be interested to hear others' opinions of this.
(1) Narmour, E. (1990). The analysis and cognition of basic melodic structures: The implication-realization model. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
(2) Narmour, E. (1992).The analysis and cognition of melodic complexity: The implication-realization model. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
(3)Cuddy, L. L., & Lunney, C. A. (1995). Expectancies generated by melodic intervals: Perceptual judgments of melodic continuity. Perception & Psychophysics, 57, 451-462
(4)Thompson, W. F., Cuddy, L. L., & Plaus, C. (1997). Expectancies generated by melodic intervals: Evaluation of principles of melodic implication in a melody-completion task. Perception & Psychophysics, 59(7), 1069-1076.
(5)Schellenberg, E. G. (1996). Expectancy in melody: Test of the implication-realization model. Cognition, 58, 75-125.
Music as an Inter-disciplinary Field of Study
First, I want to thank Yoshie Sasaguri for her response to my essay "History and Heritage" in Vol. 1(2) of Voices. I share both her interest and her respect for the Nordoff-Robbins approach, and agree with her practical proposal of trying out different musical genres when working with clients belonging to different groups (of culture, age, etc.). If our work is client-centered, we will in any case continuously be searching for the right music for each person.
The issue that Sasaguri wants to discuss is the notion of "musical archetypes." Personally I find this debate important, and since I think humans share a biological nature and also that there is something that we could call human "protomusicality" (Stige, 2002), I find it plausible that aspects of each individual's musicality are based on shared human capacities for perception and production of sounds. How this shared capacity is cultivated in different genres and sub-cultures is a discussion on another level, and it is here that I find Nordoff's notion about archetypes in music confusing.
I therefore agree perfectly with Sasaguri when she states that: "I think it may be necessary for music therapists to know and introduce ... knowledge from music psychology and other related fields, because music has too many aspects and elements to discuss only from the perspective of music therapy." In fact I could not agree more. Music therapists should do more than speculate on the role and function of music, even though such speculation may be both extremely interesting and valuable, if it is based upon solid practical experience and good intuition. In addition we need to explore related fields of knowledge about music, and, of course, we need to do research on our own field of practice. Personally I do not know the work of Narmour, and can therefore not comment directly upon what Sasaguri writes in that respect (except that the basic premise sounds sensible: that musical expectation is influenced by both a priori, universal elements, and a posteriori, experiential or learned elements).
I prefer myself not to speak of "archetypes" but of universals, and I think we need to go to evolutionary theory in order to be more specific concerning the possibility of human universals. The problem is that music as human capacity traditionally has not been taken very seriously in evolutionary theory. The last few years have seen a change in this respect, however. The question whether music is a biological adaptation or not is now under debate, and there has also gradually been an increasing acknowledgement of evolutionary perspectives within musicology. The recent book The Origins of Music (Wallin, Merker & Brown, 2000) will probably be considered a milestone in this respect, and lately there have been several articles about this in the Nordic Journal of Music Therapy (Grinde, 2000; Merker, 2000; Christensen, 2000; Kennair, 2000, 2001; Trevarthen & Malloch, 2000; Dissanayake, 2001).
In taking a cultural perspective on music therapy, as I do, we need to take the non-universality of music seriously. To include a biological perspective, as suggested here, is to challenge this argument, that is, we may be sensitized to some new nuances. When talking about music as cultural artifact, as product of history, it is accurate to speak about musics in plural. Multiple traditions exist. We have in fact no guarantee that there is any common nucleus to them. It is hardly plausible that any specific kind of music is universal (except for a few basic elements), but rather that expression in sound and the capacity and desire to develop and organize these expressions are universal. These expressions are not music, as developed in cultural history. But neither are they just noise or sounds. We may consider them as raw material for the rituals and traditions of music, dance, and drama that have been developed in different cultures. This is where the notion of protomusicality comes in (Dissanayake, 2001; Stige, 2002).
What I have been arguing for here is of course not a completely new insight. The music anthropologist John Blacking (1990, p. 71) has expressed similar ideas by talking about "musics as cultural systems" on one hand and on the other "an innate, species-specific set of cognitive and sensory capacities which human beings are predisposed to use for communication and for making sense of their environment - that is, music as a human capacity."
What we need to develop, therefore, is the capacity both to separate between these two hands, and to understand how they work together.
References
Blacking, John (1990). "Music in Childrens's Cognitive and Affective Development: Problems Posed by Ethnomusicological Research." In: Wilson, Frank R. & Frantz K. Roehmann (eds.). Music and Child Development. St. Louis, MO: Magna-Music Baton.
Christensen, Erik (2000). "Music Precedes Language. Comment on Grinde's Article." Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, 9(2).
Dissanayake, Ellen (2001). "An Ethological View of Music and its Relevance to Music Therapy." Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, 10(2), pp. 159-175.
Grinde, Bjørn (2000). "A Biological Perspective on Musical Appreciation." Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, 9(2).
Kennair, Leif Edward Ottesen (2000). "Developing Minds for Pathology and Musicality: The Role of Theory of Development of Personality and Pathology in Clinical Thinking Illustrated by the Effect of Taking an Evolutionary Perspective." Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, 9(1).
Kennair, Leif Edward Ottesen (2001). "Origins - Investigations into Biological Human Musical Nature." Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, 10(1).
Merker, Björn (2000). "A New Theory of Music Origins. Comment on Grinde's Article." Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, 9(2).
Stige, Brynjulf (2002). Culture-Centered Music Therapy. Gilsum, NH: Barcelona Publishers.
Trevarthen, Colwyn & Stephen Malloch (2000). "The Dance of Wellbeing: Defining the Musical Therapeutic Effect." Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, 9(2).
Wallin, Nils L., Björn Merker & Steven Brown (eds.) (2000). The Origins of Music. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.