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

I would like to begin this column by quoting a sequence from the previous column here in Voices. In a piece focusing upon thresholds and transitions, Leslie Bunt writes:

How many links could be made with transitions in music? What about the invitation we give in every music therapy session to our patients and clients to move across a threshold into a music space? (Bunt, 2005).

What kind of a space is the music space in music therapy? In he Field of Play, Carolyn Kenny suggests that:

The musical space is a contained space. It is an intimate and private field created in the relationship between the therapist and client. It is a sacred space, which becomes identified as "home base," a territory which is well known and secure. In early childhood development, it is similar to the space created between mother and child. Trauma necessitates the recovery of such a space for growth and change (Kenny, 1989, p. 79).

Kenny describes the music(al) space as a closed and contained space and a safe and intimate space. My clinical experience suggests that this description captures very well one central element in many therapeutic processes. It is intriguing to read the description of the therapeutic process in The Field of Play, because it also includes ideas about open fields. Kenny claims that there in music therapy could be growth-promoting potentials in the dynamics between contained and open spaces. In this little column, I will elaborate - in my way - upon this idea. I think of music therapy not only as a practice of depths within a safe musical space; it could also be a practice of doors and windows.[1]

The norms - or the "walls" - surrounding our personal and social life are continuously changing in late modern societies. For music therapy it is therefore important to search for metaphors that may capture personal development as an interactive search for connections. I learned a lot about this from one of my clients, Ramona, with whom I worked in a psychiatric clinic. She used music very much as a way of creating links, in several directions; to her own biography, to her experience of her body, to her relationship to the community where she was living, and to her relationship to contemporary Norwegian culture. Ramona helped me see that the metaphor of hypertext could illuminate aspects of the music therapy process. The hypertext metaphor aided my ability to contain and acknowledge Ramona's need to work on several levels and in several directions simultaneously. This could probably also have been contained by other ideas than the hypertext metaphor, for instance by humanistic ideas underlining the value of the open interpersonal encounter in client-centered therapy (Rogers, 1951/1999). The hypertext metaphor could - in addition - sensitize to the changing functions of musics and activities and to the navigation problems experienced by the client during this process.

Humans often use narratives as tools of navigation, and - if not limited to the denotation of the clear-cut story written or told by an individual author - this may be a helpful notion here. As Bruner (1990) and several others have pointed out; human life could be understood as the participation in an endless human performative conversation involving the constant reworking of scripts and stories. In this perspective the boundaries between stories and hypertexts are blurred. The qualities of being open-ended, inhabited, and enacted could be shared, and this could be related to cultural sensitivities developed in late modern societies: As Sherry Turkle (1995/1997) suggests, we may be moving from a modern culture of calculation toward a postmodern culture of simulation. This produces new metaphors for the self and its relationships to the world. Windows, for instance, has become a cogent metaphor for thinking about the self as a multiple, distributed system. As Turkle suggests, the self is no longer simply playing different roles in different settings at different times. The "life practice of windows" is that of a decentered self, a self that exists in many worlds and plays many roles at the same time.

If this is so, life could be characterized by quite complex and messy hypertextuality. As players participate in games of simulation and navigation, they become authors of texts and hypertexts, constructing new selves through social interaction. Some times, people get lost. Therapy may then be to provide clients with new and safe options both for simulation and navigation. In some ways, we may then be back to Kenny's (1989) description of the musical space in music therapy as a safe space. The central idea I want to consider here, is related to Kenny's idea that there are also open fields in music therapy. Sometimes, the doors and the windows of our practice are essential. If we acknowledge this, maybe our understanding of the musical space can relate even more constructively to the challenges people experience in a late modern world. Implications for music therapy could include at least two issues: First, a theoretical challenge concerning the development and understanding of the concept of self is established. Second, a clear-cut distinction between the notions of private and public is challenged, with implications for future theoretical and practical developments on the relationships between individual and communal perspectives on music therapy.

Note

[1] The following argument is based upon a chapter in my thesis Elaborations toward a Notion of Community Music Therapy (Stige, 2003, pp. 333-343). In the thesis I argue that it is reasonable to assume that some of the sociocultural developments that have led to the recent international interest for Community Music Therapy are of relevance also when discussing more conventional or individual music therapy. If this is true, discursive polarization of these approaches or ways of thinking and working will not be fruitful.

References

Bruner, Jerome (1990). Acts of Meaning. Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press.

Bunt, Leslie (2005). On the Threshold of a New Year. Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy. Retrieved January 27, 2005, from http://www.voices.no/columnist/colbunt170105.html

Kenny, Carolyn B. (1989). The Field of Play. A Guide for the Theory and Practice of Music Therapy. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Company.

Rogers, Carl R. (1951/1999). Client-Centered Therapy. London: Constable.

Stige, Brynjulf (2003). Elaborations toward a Notion of Community Music Therapy. Doctoral dissertation, University of Oslo, Department of Music and Theatre. Oslo: Unipub.

Turkle, Sherry (1995/1997). Life on the Screen. Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Touchstone.

How to cite this page

Stige, Brynjulf (2005). Of Doors and Windows. Voices Resources. Retrieved January 11, 2015, from http://testvoices.uib.no/community/?q=fortnightly-columns/2005-doors-and-windows