Re: Dialogue About Music Therapy Theory
About Carolyn Kenny
Biography
Carolyn Kenny, Ph.,D. MT-BC, CMT is a Professor of Human Development and Indigenous Studies and one of the founding faculty members in the Antioch University Ph.D. in Leadership and Change in the Professions. She also continues her private practice in Music Therapy in Santa Barbara, California. She serves on the Advisory Board for Music Therapy Education and Research (MUSERS), associated with the Pavarotti Music Centre in Mostar, Bosnia-Hercegovina (http://www.musers.org) and as Co-editor-in Chief (with Brynulf Stige) of Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy. She served for many years as Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Music Therapy Journal. And also currently serves on the Editorial Review Board for the Journal of Music Therapy. She contributes as a Book Reviewer on a regular basis to The Arts in Psychotherapy. She has published extensively in both Music Therapy and Indigenous Studies. Her most current publication is A Holistic Approach to Aboriginal Policy Research, published in French and English by the Status of Women Canada.
The response of Rudy Garred to my comments on his essay 'On the Ontology of Music in Music Therapy", help to clarify his ideas and certainly help us to understand his reference points. He also elaborates important ideas on theoretical constructs in music therapy. I'll comment briefly here in reply to his submission to the discussion.
At 18 years of age, I'm sure I didn't understand half of what my Jesuit professors were talking about during the formative stages of my academic life. I didn't really choose to main line philosophy but I have not abandoned the field entirely. Those Jesuit scholars left a lifelong impressionistic template for understanding our ideas about human nature and the world. One of the central ideas spoon-fed to us academic babies was the concept of questioning. The Jesuits were skeptics in the most radical schools of thought in every field. So Garred's defense of a philosophical approach is not necessary, at least to me. However, I remain committed to questioning "ontology". Though, as Garred suggests, ontology is about what we consider the nature of reality to be, this is the softest and most general description of ontology. As suggested in my comments on his original article, ontology can quickly become dogma. There is no better example than "religion". But music therapy could also run the risk of falling into some kind of essentialism if we do not question each other on the topic. There's no race to get "the theory", I hope.
Garred makes a wise choice in Martin Buber, not introduced to me by the Jesuits but by Even Ruud, much later than 1965 (the year I started with the Jesuits). Buber has so many useful concepts for music therapy. My bone of contention about the term "dialogue" has to do with "the nature of the musical experience". When I sat down on my piano bench next to Sister Grace Marie in the old days, she didn't say, "dialogue the piano". She said, "play the piano". And today, when I sit down at the piano with my clients in music therapy, I say something similar. Sometimes I say "Just play" or "Play". I mention this issue particularly because Garred's original article is entitled "The Ontology of Music in Music Therapy", not the Ontology of Music Therapy. Doesn't this have a few ontological implications?
Unfortunately, we are often trained to believe that if we are "playing" we are not doing anything serious. However, if we are "dialoguing", well, that's serious stuff. Playing is fundamental to our experience in music therapy. Words are not always fundamental. Now there's a little ontological implication too.
We might say that we are having a "musical conversation" or a "musical dialogue". This is a long tradition in music playing. We hear about this in improvisational genres, like jazz, as well as in our own music therapy. But we are clearly "playing". 1
Of course, Garred could redefine the term dialogue, which I assume he will do in his doctoral thesis. But how would Socrates feel about this?
Placing the "relative autonomy of music in creative music therapy" is so very important. This is certainly an ontological implication and reminds me of the times I have asked people like Rachael Verny and some other creative music therapists (Nordoff/Robbins) to tell me what the music means or describe the music to me. The only reply is, "It's all in the music". I perceive this statement, which used to drive me up the wall, and which, to my understanding, is still implied in our conversations about creative music therapy from theorists like Garred, to be not only ontological but mystical. Is the music itself the source of all being? Given the esoteric roots of creative music therapy, this question must not remain rhetorical.
Garred's use of concepts from the Field of Play do need some clarification. There is a lot that could be said here. But I'll comment briefly. Garred writes: "Music is not just "interplay" - it is something more." Diminishing the term interplay, as it is used in the Field of Play, does not really give an accurate impression. Of course the original text for the Field of Play was a rewrite of my own doctoral thesis. So, I can understand Garred's position as one of writing an "early stage" set of ideas. The Field of Play was written with the specific purpose of creating something accessible to grassroots music therapists, especially the ones who believed that theory was unimportant. I'm sure that it takes an entire life to develop a useful theory. The denotative structures in this early work (1987) suggest connotative structures, of course. And the quote I use to introduce the chapter entitled "The Interplay of the Fields" points the way:
Just can't get rid of those Jesuits, I guess. Anyway, there's something rather connotative, denotative, ontological, and mystical.
The interplay is not "merely" between persons, as Garred suggests, but as any good natural scientist knows, between fields. A field can be any environment (remember that a person is also an environment). This is basic to all understanding of systems theories, and particularly ecological systems theories and field theories. Even concepts like "the music child" place music "inside". Perhaps the music is pervasive and does not behave with boundaries in a rigid sense. As I suggest many times in my own texts, perhaps music is a fluid phenomenon and allows movement through boundaries under certain conditions. This is ecology. This is systems theory. This is physics.
In terms of the role of the music therapist, I do think that if we accept the premise that the therapist is a condition in the space, we know that she is not "merely" a condition in a one-dimensional, abstract sense. She has a nature, attributes, responsibilities, roles, and on and on. Of course, this all influences the "interplay". My concern is about the hierarchy which so easily can dominate our encounters between client and therapist. So, I attempt a rather clumsy, but humanistic approach to diminish this hierarchy, which is placed upon both the therapist and the client from the society and often embodied in the values, beliefs and behaviors of both.
I thank Garred for his challenging comments. They have helped me to make some more ideas "explicit". Though the idea of "implicate order" finally seems to have gained some popularity recently in music therapy circles, it does have a few drawbacks. Perhaps the work of a scholar is to make the implicit, explicit. It's the work of a poet to make the explicit, implicit. Well, that's an entire conversation about music therapy and other things.
I do congratulate Garred on his interests and works in music therapy theory. There's much work to do here.
Reference
Kenny, C.B.(1989). The Field of Play: A Guide for the Theory and Practice of Music Therapy. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Co.
Note
1) For a further defense of the use of the term "play" and "interplay" see my 1994 Keynote Speech for the American Association for Music Therapy entitled "Our Legacy: Work and Play" in which I build on the ideas of, d'Aquili, Dissanayke, Drewal, Duvury, Feuerstein, Huizinga,Kapferer, Kenny, Laughlin, McManus Riegel , Schechner Turner, and others.)