My thoughts on the nature of music therapy are related to my thoughts on myth and story telling. I think of myth as beginning with an authentic experience so moving that those who participate in it feel impelled to share it with others. The retelling is embellished and colored in order to express the momentousness of the actual event. This way of looking at myth describes it as a way of transmitting authentic experience through story telling.
I like this way of thinking about myth because it circumvents our societies' tendency to think of other culture's world view as ignorant rather than creative. It may be that we depend upon mass media to fill our imaginations and tell our stories. "One of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music." This wry comment from one of the characters in The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx expresses the modern impulse to rely on movies and other pop media to fill the need for creativity in our lives without creating or co-creating our own authentic culture. Barbara Wheeler discusses the role of music therapy and culture in her article Cultural Aspects of Music Therapy. She ponders that "perhaps the pots and pans have nothing to do with any kind of traditional musical expression but are rather a current expression through music that is not traditional. Perhaps everyone who works with people in an urban setting finds that people respond to the music that they hear on the radio and television and that this music has much more to do with a larger, popular culture, than with more traditional local culture." It may be that the pervasive nature of the electronic information we are exposed to keeps us from participating in more local forms of cultural dialogue and that music therapy provides the authentic experience that results in myth, mass media, story, and community performance.
It helps me to think of music therapy in terms of culture crossing linguistic barriers. Martin Buber in his book I and Thou describes recognition of and relationship to another being, and its' opposite, "The capricious man does not believe and encounter. He does not know association; he only knows the feverish world out there and his feverish desire to use it." If we are a people distanced from traditional culture are we missing something important, the element of intimacy based on a common understanding? In Handbook of Music Psychology, edited by Donald Hodges, play and aesthetic sensitivity are described as essential characteristics of what it means to be human. Thought of in this way music therapy can be seen as conversing with traditional culture whenever it fosters and creates just such personal interaction. Each time we abandon the role of music performer/teacher and enter into the serendipitous musical encounter (so skillfully anticipated!) it may be that we are dialoging with tradition in a deeply rooted way.
In the introduction to his book So Human an Animal Renet Dubos says "The species Homo sapiens can be described in the lifeless words of physics and chemistry, but not the man of flesh and bone. We recognize him as unique person by his voice, his facial expressions, and the way he walks-and even more by his creative responses to surroundings and events." Music therapy, culture centered music therapy, community music therapy; these are all anodynes for a technological society that tends to define each of us in reductionist terms. If this is so it seems that we may be loosing individual creativity and expression as we absorb what is popular instead of expressing what comes from our own very individual experience of life and community. Music can be seen as a tool for communication across cultural barriers creating the 'I and Thou' moment. I see this experience as the basis of culture, community, and myth.
The concept of music therapy as myth helps me to think of music therapy in terms of culture as transmission of authentic experience. In his article Performance of Community Brynjulf Stige suggests Goffman's idea that the "dramaturgical approach to the understanding of everyday life suggests that conventional music therapy may be viewed as backstage performances." From the viewpoint of myth as the retelling of that moment of intense experience, then community music therapy becomes the retelling of the story, the myth if you will. It is shared and enlarged so that others may be enriched. This is the backstage performance that Brynjulf Stige describes in his article. As Brynjulf suggests community sharing of this experience is a continuation of the seminal music therapy experience, carried into performance and shared with the community.
Stige, Brynjulf (2004). Performance of Community [online] Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy. Retrieved April 9, 2004, from http://www.voices.no/columnist/colstige160204.html
Wheeler, Barbara (2002). Cultural Aspects of Music Therapy [online] Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy. Retrieved April 9, 2004, from http://www.voices.no/columnist/colwheeler290702.html