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After four weeks I am still nourishing from my visit to Hamburg and therefore want to share some impressions with you. First of all: What a good idea - celebrating one’s big birthday inviting friends and colleagues, sharing food, wine, information and emotion during a whole day. This was what happened on Eckhard Weymann´s birthday-Symposium entitled: “Momente des Nicht-Wissens” or “Moments of Not-knowing”. I wonder who received more gifts, the celebrated or the visitors.

I will lucid just some of the wonderful “gifts” we, the audience, received this day, otherwise the text would be too long for a column. One gift came from Hans Helmut Decker-Voigt: Reflecting about ritual and surprise, he brought up some historical remarks about the origin of the term “surprise attack” (“Überraschungsangriff”), and explained that a successful military attack implicated a perfect technique at the same time as intuition: with the right strategy and right arms in the right moment, with precision and spontaneous impulse - otherwise the attack would fail. From here we switched to music therapy, to the improvisation as a ritual of all sessions and to the musical instruments as arms or better: toys. So, feel free to make your own conclusions. Finally, he revealed to us his impression of the “improvisational personality” of the hereby celebrated man: since ever, a perfect mixture of accuracy and pleasurably abandonment, the two faces of a big whole.

The second gift was handed by Eckhard Weymann himself. What is meant by “Not-knowing”? Are there people who know and others who “not-know”? In former times, in Greece, the word “Academia” meant that lecturers and learners came together in the shadow under the olive tree in order to listen to each other, to think together and learn from each other. Everybody is a “knower” at the same time as a “not-knower”. With Heinrich von Kleist´s famous publication “Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden” (“Concerning the gradual formulation of thoughts while speaking”, v. Kleist 1805/06) Weymann posed the question: what is first, thinking or speaking? Following von Kleist´s idea of a process called “thinking loudly”, knowledge grows up and comes out while speaking. Weymann sustained that all of us know about these moments and processes in music therapy, for example during improvisation. He called them “professional situations”, which are supposed to be complex, unsecure and ambiguous. Those situations need fast reactions and also a dynamic play-attitude as well as a preparation, experience, flattening of hierarchy and augmentation of interconnectedness. From the state of not-knowing we arrive at knowing by the overlapping of theory, practice, daily life and art. Intuition needs methods and vice versa. Only experts are able to manage well their “Knowing” and the “Not-Knowing” accounts.

Last but not least, the presentation from Jan Sonntag about music therapy with people with dementia… here, you really never know. Jan Sonntag introduced the concept of “atmospheres” and placed it in the context of “Not-knowing”. He called “atmospheres” “inter-phenomena” (“Zwischenphänomene”) and “emotional shading” (“Gefühlstönung”). People with dementia are very sensitive to atmospheres, maybe due to a lack of cognitive function and, as a consequence, of missing emotional distance. Music always produces atmospheres and instead of “significance“ (“Be-Deutung”) we deal with „insinuation“ (“An-Deutung”). Sonntag made us listen to an audio registered clinical example, which highlighted what he said: the music therapist playing single sounds on his guitar, the patient (a woman with dementia) emitting sounds and words  the music therapist playing more and other sounds, the patient augmenting her vocal repertoire. We listened to a real interconnection in an intersubjective space. Both, therapist and patient, created an atmosphere that became more and more intense and increasingly colorful. The audience heard and felt the exciting togetherness where the guitar and the voice went along together and “understood“ each other by knowing - without knowing.

What a widening of the horizon – to realize the importance of “knowing” as a condition for “not-knowing”.

Next day. As for coincidence and prior to catching the train back to Berlin, I went to the Giacometti-Exposition in the Hamburger Kunsthalle. Still in touch with my thoughts and feelings from the day before, a strong feeling of self-coherence and congruence invaded me. This was another gift: Giacometti did exactly what experts are supposed to do: facing not-knowing-situations with a huge amount of knowing, daily life experience, method and art. Creating intersubjective spaces and atmospheres painting or modeling, based not on the visual impression of the model, but on his feelings and the emotional perception of it - while becoming one with it. And more: the dimensions of and the proportions in the created object represent the emotional distance or closeness he feels. Giacometti was fascinated by the constant movement of the space-in-between-elements, by simultaneous as well as successive phenomena. This is what he called the “totality of life”, adventure and experience at the same time, for me, the perfect condensation of “knowing” and “not-knowing”.

How to cite this page

Bauer, Susanne (2013). To Know or to Not-Know - ….. Some Reflections on a Recent Symposium Held at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst, Institut für Musiktherapie, Hamburg. Voices Resources. Retrieved January 09, 2015, from http://testvoices.uib.no/community/?q=fortnightly-columns/2013-know-or-not-know-some-reflections-recent-symposium-held-hochschule-f-r-musi