Re: History and Heritage
About Brynjulf Stige
Biography
PhD, Professor in Music Therapy, University of Bergen, and Head of Research in GAMUT, The Grieg Academy Music Therapy Research Centre. Stige has published on topics such as music therapy improvisation, music education, culture-centered music therapy, and community music therapy. He has published four books in Norwegian and three books in English. The latter are: Culture-Centered Music Therapy (2002), Contemporary Voices in Music Therapy (2002, edited with Carolyn Kenny), and Elaborations toward a Notion of Community Music Therapy (2003). Stige is Norwegian editor of Nordic Journal of Music Therapy and co-editor (with Carolyn Kenny) of Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy.
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.