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

Lately there has been an increasing interest for aesthetic aspects of the music therapy process. I welcome this warmly. While in many contexts it is essential to underline functionalistic aspects, it will be very limiting to music therapy if issues of meaning, narrative, and aesthetics are neglected. To include aesthetic aspects has its own pitfalls though, since the western concept of aesthetics have certain romantic and elitist connotations to it. I will try to illuminate the problem by using an allegory.

Imagine yourself in a kayak on a quiet winter day. The sea is calm and a pale sun climbs the white mountains and is peacefully reflected in a mirror of tranquil deep waters. Everything is peace. You can hear the water-drops falling from your paddle, and you see how they produce small expanding circles. Except for this there is no sound around; not even from the bird in the horizon. Everything is close but still far away. A few porpoises play in front of you. They seem to be smiling. Then you discover a seal on your right side. It is looking at you with curiosity painted on its face. Two seconds later it is gone. You look for the porpoises. They are gone too. Again sounds of silence are all there is, except for the water-drops from your paddle. Looking more closely at the circles they create, you discover that they make the sun and the mountains move a little.

Then imagine yourself in a kayak on a storming winter sea. It is a strong feeling; a mixture of anxiety and pleasure. The anxiety is for real; it is a dangerous game. Too many things are going on at once for you to be in total control. You may see the larger waves some seconds before you have to deal with them. To some degree they seem to be predictable. You know that they are not; they conceal smaller and sharper waves, often moving in directions you do not see. They are experienced as abrupt attacks on your balance, which you quickly need to compensate for. You should be careful though. If you get scared and do too much you will lose control and direction. In a few seconds you will be at the bottom, thrown in an angle of 90 degrees to two heavy swells, and you are gone. If you manage to avoid this, there is still the wind to handle, howling around your ears and threatening to steal your paddle at any minute. If it does not succeed with that, it will find some other ways of challenging your balance, if not of your body maybe of your mind. What about throwing some ice water in your face? In a second you may lose your concentration, and game is over.

Which one of these situations is the best analogue to the aesthetic aspects of music therapy processes? Many would go for the second. "The first situation is too sweet, too beautiful to be true", they would say. "Music therapy is a serious thing, it's dangerous as a rough winter storm, but through the music and through the relationship to the therapist this danger may be contained, and the individual may develop a feeling of control and mastery". Others would say; "Wait a second, quiet and beautiful winter days do exist too, also in music therapy!"

They may all be right. We need to be open for a broad spectrum of aesthetic experiences in music therapy. We should choose our images carefully though. The image that I have used so far - the isolated (wo)man in a kayak on the open sea - has aspects of the romantic myth on the loneliness of the artist. There may be important existential experiences of loneliness in music therapy. Still; the image we are searching for is possibly not a loner in a kayak. Possibly it is a couple in a rowboat? The rhythm they find together shapes their experience as well as their chances on the changing seas, and - as in life - they move forward while much of their view is rearward.

How to cite this page

Stige, Brynjulf, 2001 Aesthetic Aspects of Music Therapy. Voices Resources. Retrieved January 15, 2015, from http://testvoices.uib.no/community/?q=fortnightly-columns/2001-aesthetic-aspects-music-therapy