Keeping the World in Balance - Music Therapy in a Ritual Context

By Carolyn Kenny

Beautifying the Earth

I asked Walker why the Spirit Dances were held in the Winter. He told me that in the Winter the Earth's reserves are low, so the people must dance to create energy for the Earth during the Winter months. At the time I was a graduate student in anthropology at the University of British Columbia doing my field studies in the Salish Guardian Spirit Dance Ceremonials of the Pacific Northwest Coast (Kenny, 1982). Walker didn't seem to care as much about the academics as he cared about the fact that I was Native American myself. And he wanted to support my learning about healing and the arts. The "Winter Dances," as the Salish people call them, are known for healing young adults in Pacific Northwest Coast Native societies who are not able to be cured by standard medical and psychological treatments (Kenny, 1982; Jilek, 1972).

Gary Witherspoon (1977), in his classic theoretical work, Language and Art in the Navajo Universe, describes the value for thought and language in Navajo society by quoting an esteemed Navajo elder and medicine man, who tells him that humans are upright creatures and can therefore make efficient use of air. Therefore it is their responsibility to think and speak on behalf of the elements on the Earth. Thought and language, along with the arts, are expressions that can help to fulfill the Navajo responsibility to "beautify the Earth." For the Navajo, beautifying the Earth is a moral obligation and the essential goal of one's life if one is to lead a good life. For the Navajo, beautifying the Earth means keeping the world in balance.

The Magic

Recently, David Abrams (1996) has offered us a beautiful work on a similar theme. It is called The Spell of the Sensuous. Abrams, an ecologist and philosopher, uses the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau- Ponty to assert that through phenomenology our perceptual experience unexpectedly begins to make evident the hidden centrality of the earth in all human experience. Phenomenology led Abrams to the conclusion that the human mind was thoroughly dependent upon our forgotten relation with the encompassing Earth.

Abrams focused upon his encounters and reflections while living as an itinerant sleight-of-hand magician among traditional, indigenous magicians in rural Asia. He lived with sorcerers, healers, magicians.

"The most sophisticated definition of "magic" that now circulates through the American counterculture is "the ability or power to alter one's consciousness at will." . Yet in tribal cultures that which we call "magic" takes its meaning from the fact that humans, in an indigenous and oral context, experience their own consciousness as simply one form of awareness among many others. .It is this, we might say, that defines a shaman: the ability to readily slip out of the perceptual boundaries that demarcate his or her particular culture - boundaries reinforced by social customs, taboos, and most importantly, the common speech or language - in order to make contact with, and learn from, the other powers in the land. His magic is precisely this heightened receptivity to the meaningful solicitations - songs, cries, gestures - of the larger, more-than-human field. (Abrams, 1996, p. 9) Abrams suggests that in the most primordial sense, magic is the experience of existing in a world made up of multiple intelligences, the intuition that every form one perceives is an experiencing form, an entity with its own predilections and sensations, albeit sensations that are very different from our own" (Abrams, 1996, p. 10).

In 1975 I perceived and experienced the type of magic described by Abrams in the Longhouse at the Salish Guardian Spirit Dance Ceremonials with Walker Stogan as my guide. Traditional, indigenous knowledge teaches us that we do not exist alone. The world is an animated place. And human beings are not the only animated creatures. Nor are they the center of the universe. Everything and everyone is interconnected.

The type of shamanism expressed in the Salish Guardian Spirit Dance ceremonials is community shamanism (Jilek, 1972). In these ceremonies, we can see and experience that all things are connected and interrelated. We are interdependent not only with those in our own species, but with all animate and seemingly inanimate phenomena on the earth. The worldview of most traditional, indigenous societies is so completely relational that there is not a concept of self as individual. Rather, a person exists and acts on behalf of others. A sick person goes through a healing ritual for himself, but also acts symbolically on behalf of the entire community. Someone who commits an act that is understood as immoral, commits this act on behalf of the community as well. And as such, she might bring the community out of balance with the animating forces of the world.

Over the years, I have participated in many traditional, indigenous ceremonies. And more recently, as a member of the Haida Nation, I attended an important ceremonial feast and potlatch to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the death of a great chief in the Haida Gwaii, the traditional territory of the Haida people, the magnificent Queen Charlotte Islands. I wrote about this experience in a special issue of the American Behavioral Scientist (Kenny, 2002) that focused on how researchers work with culture. My article was entitled "Blue Wolf Says Goodbye for the Last Time." The perceptual and experiential shift described by Abrams was as apparent for me in the year 2001 as it was in 1975. This excerpt may give you a feeling for the possibilities.

"This time we could all hear the men singing the Spirit Song from a room in the back. The song came to us sounding like the singing of our ancestors who had moved along. Everyone in the hall became very quiet. We stood. This was new to me. I had never seen or heard the spirit song performed in this way.

When I turned toward the back of the hall to look for the Spirit Singers, to my great surprise, I did not see singers, but a magnificent Blue Wolf. Our chief belonged to the Wolf Clan. There had been many references to the Wolf Clan in speeches, and I had seen the wolf image at the gravesite in carvings on the headstone and poles.

Blue Wolf moved slowly. Something between a dance and a slow walk punctuated by turning of shoulders and head. When he stepped, he dipped and rose, dipped and rose. He was represented in a magnificent blue mask, carved in the Haida way with deeply set eyes and monumental proportions. Wolf also wore the traditional Haida button blanket, red with black applique of the clan symbol, again the wolf. But the button blanket was covered with a sheer white cape. Indeed, as we beheld him, Blue Wolf was a spirit. He walked in this slow fashion, almost a dance, accompanied by the Spirit song, through the hall, taking time to gaze at people in the crowd, turning his proud and beautiful countenance to see us. Everyone was still". (Kenny, 2002, p. 1217)

"Later I heard from Dolores that they had burned the Blue Wolf mask in a tremendous fire on the beach that night after the potlatch. Dolores and other family members watched as the beautiful blue mask, worn only once for the Spirit Dance, for the end of grief, burned into ashes among the sands of Haida Gwaii". (Kenny, 2002, p. 1220).

This short excerpt gives one a sense of beauty, even in a time of mourning and grief. It informs us about the healing and the magic in traditional, indigenous ceremonies. It demonstrates the interconnectedness of all things and provides a model for continuing to beautify the world and to attempt to keep the Earth in balance, even in the face of sorrow and death.

The Magic of Music Therapy

In 1979, my formal studies began to focus on how to make a bridge between contemporary music therapy practice and traditional, indigenous healing practices, inspired by the teachings of Walker Stogan and my music therapy practice at the University of British Columbia Department of Psychiatry. These studies were published in a book entitled The Mythic Artery: The Magic of Music Therapy (1982). This work was an attempt to explore some historical and clinical possibilities for the application of concepts from ancient healing systems and to find ways of integrating them into a modern context. Under the guidance of Native elders, I wrote this book for music therapists. My goal was to make the knowledge accessible.

As an indigenous scholar, I must always be careful about the sharing of the traditional knowledge given to me by elders and healers (Smith, 1999). Because the pattern of New Age appropriation of indigenous knowledge rampant in the 1970s and 1980s persists today, I chose to begin the careful articulation of definitions and concepts for the bridge to modern music therapy. Poetry and metaphor are always good choices when attempting to translate traditional, indigenous concepts into academic and professional contexts. And so, The Mythic Artery took on a style that was an attempt to wed scholarship with metaphoric and poetic language.

The central thesis of this work is that music communicates patterns and structures of tension and resolution that translate into themes of death and rebirth that can be effectively used in music therapy. This work can be characterized as distinctly ecological. The practice of music therapy is linked systematically to our experiences upon the Earth. Traditional, indigenous knowledge and the works of such scholars as Gregory Bateson are wedded into a sensory landscape, reminding us that we are not alone. We are part of a web of interconnections on the earth. The interplay between the Earth and ourselves is essential for good and balanced lives. This balancing act allowed me the opportunity to express traditional, indigenous values and beliefs within academic and professional cultures. For example, the definition I offer for music therapy is: "Music Therapy is a process and a form which combines the healing aspects of music with the issues of human need for the benefit of the individual and hence society. The music therapist serves as a resource person and guide, providing musical experiences which direct clients toward health and wellbeing"( Kenny, 1982, p.7).

One of the themes in The Mythic Artery is that myth is an important aspect of magic. Local knowledge forms the basis for what we might call a "situated practice." This is the underlying rationale for the study of concepts rather than imitating practices when it comes to the traditional healing systems of indigenous peoples. Concepts allow us to engage in the material world as academics without committing the colonizing act of appropriation. The "mythic artery" is a metaphoric representation. It was my intention to communicate the potential for music to connect us to deep primordial and empathic roots, perhaps long forgotten in what Mayan scholar Jose Arguelles (1975) refers to as "holonomic amnesia," but roots we need to remember as an important legacy that he names "aboriginal continuity" (Kenny, 1989).

Ritual Studies[1]

One way for Western societies to understand the rituals of traditional societies is to study their mythologies. Any meaningful ritual has a myth as the source of its expression. Some modern day practitioners create rituals that do not contain the important ground of myth. These practices can be viewed as attempts to learn from traditional societies out of context. Any ritual devoid of myth is vacant. And it would be difficult to locate the meaning of such rituals. "Ritual relates to the realities which are built around it, and which continue in their processes after the completion of a ritual performance" (Kenny, 1982, p. 81).

In my theoretical work, I tried to create a definition of ritual that would reflect the concepts of a traditional, indigenous worldview and also be practical for music therapists. I revised a definition inspired from the field of architecture. "Rituals are repeatable forms that make space for innovation" (Kenny, 1989). And it made sense that architects would come up with a fitting concept for my purposes since rituals create safe spaces for the people. However, an aspect of ritual that is often missing from contemporary expressions of ritual is the aspect of "repeatable forms." Repetition is a fundamental concept in traditional, indigenous societies because the cycles of the Earth, the phases of the sun and moon, the developmental stages of peoples' lives, the processes of healing all depend on repetition for keeping the world in balance. So it is in music therapy. Repetition of musical expressions in safe space is critical for efficacy of our work.

Some music therapy scholars, notably Even Ruud (1995), have borrowed concepts embedded in ritual practice such as communitas and liminality. These concepts, first coined by Victor Turner, the father of ritual studies in anthropology, can be very useful in helping us to understand certain phenomena and processes in music therapy. However, taking such concepts out of context also has its shortcomings. The contemporary climate of postmodernism, deconstruction, construction, critical theory, and cultural studies has led us to examine "context" at every level. Our modern intellectual climate only gets more and more complex. We each must exercise a degree of discernment, based on our "situated, located, authentic" selves.

As sure many of you have, I have written things that I am still mulling around in my mind, reluctant to share in a public text. In 1985 I wrote a discussion paper as part of my doctoral studies entitled "Ritual as Pure Form." The basic thesis of the paper was to suggest, based on current works in Ritual Studies by scholars such as Richard Grimes along with Eugene d'Aquill, Charles Laughlin, Jr., and John McManus on the biological nature of ritual, that ritual was programmed as patterns in the brain. Furthermore, I suggested that these biological patterns found their first representations in mythological expressions as language and story and extended themselves into sensory and physical expressions in the form of ceremonies and rituals within the context of specific societies that included a matrix of arts performances.

Figure 8.1: Relationships between biological and cultural rituals.

Biological Ritual - Mythological Expressions - Cultural Ritual

It seemed to me, at the time, that this thesis had a lot of promise for music therapy. In remembering my many experiences in music therapy over the years, I can see that while doing musical improvisations, many patients and clients "knew" where to go on the piano and other instruments as if their brains were programmed with forms. This could be pre-cognition. In The Mythic Artery I suggest that music can represent themes of stories through tension and resolution in the music, which translates mythologically into death/rebirth myths. In a sense, music itself becomes the ritual form traveling from the coded brains of both the patient and the music therapist, into the storytelling of music, and being perceived as cultural rituals in music therapy. This thesis has serious implications for what we might call "situated practice" because practice is not situated in method. Practice is situated within a much broader context and simultaneously hidden within the deep recesses of the human brain.

With this in mind, I began to have dialogues with colleagues about metatheoretical considerations for music therapy. I would choose a colleague who had a distinctively different approach than mine, hoping to expand my own thinking on the topic. The result of these dialogues was a presentation entitled "Toward a General Theory of Music Therapy" (1998) with Henk Smeijsters for the Fourth European Music Therapy Conference. Later I published an independent article in the Nordic Journal of Music Therapy on a similar topic entitled "Beyond this Point There Be Dragons: Developing General Theory in Music Therapy" (Kenny, 1999). In this article I set aside most of my own constructs in the Field of Play theory (aesthetic, musical space, field of play, ritual, power, particular state of consciousness, creative process) in service of metatheoretical ideas. I proposed the concepts of aesthetics, intersubjectivity, empathy, uniqueness, and representation (symbols, analogies and metaphors) as a beginning place for a metatheoretical discourse. Interestingly enough, the only concept shared between my own theory and a possible metatheory or general theory was "aesthetics," though one might say that the Field of Play is certainly embedded with all of the other concepts proposed for general theory in one way or another.

General theory challenges our notions of situated practice because it begs us to be "inside" of our situations, and simultaneously "outside" of our situations, or rather within multiple contexts. One might ask, how many contexts do I have to imagine? The answer: many.

Nature and Nurture Revisited

Debates on nature and nurture have been raging since the dawn of psychological studies. A pendulum seems to swing periodically from one to the other depending on new research discoveries and sociopolitical movements inherent in academic discourses. As a graduate student in cultural anthropology in the 1970s, for example, my fellow students and my professors were disgusted with E. O. Wilson's (1975) text Sociobiology. We were studying cultural anthropology because we believed that culture counted most of all. In our group there were educators and therapists who were invested in believing that if we could only manipulate the environment in the best possible way, the students would learn, the patients would heal. E. O. Wilson, has somewhat redeemed himself to many of us by publishing his comprehensive and accessible work, The Diversity of Life, (Wilson, 1992) [2] in which he reveals the importance of diversity in rainforests and makes an analogy about the importance of diversity for all aspects of life on earth, including people and cultures.

Soon after I received my Interdisciplinary degree in Anthropology, Ethnomusicology, and Psychology, however, one of my professors introduced me to d'Aquili, Laughlin, and McManus's The Spectrum of Ritual (1979), a work that I could not so easily dismiss and which later formed the basis of the discussion paper I mentioned earlier, "Ritual as Pure Form." It seemed to me that these scholars gave more credence to culture and the interplay between nature and nurture than Wilson, who we interpreted as advocating a dangerous theory potentially leading to the dreaded biological determinism.

As a musician and music therapist, I always knew intuitively that music systematically and consistently engaged the sensory and physical body just as much as it engaged the emotional, psychological, and spiritual bodies. Of course many music therapists have subsequently written about how our physical state changes along with our psychological state when we play or listen to music. Certainly Helen Bonny (Bonny and Walter, 1972) wrote about this in the early days when reporting her initial research activities at the Maryland Psychiatric Institute. Kumar et al. (1999) study music therapy and psychoneuroimmunology. Mark Rider (1997) writes about the specific physical changes initiating a variety of altered states of consciousness in music therapy. Michael Thaut (1999) also considers the quantifiable physical changes when music therapy is in play. As a neuroscientist and music therapist he is bringing nature and nurture together in new ways. The International Journal of Arts Medicine, representing the International Arts Medicine Association and The International Society for Music in Medicine, is publishing more and more research about the important links between the brain and the body that will shape our music therapy practices in new and radical ways, but also will validate some of the ideas we have already had.

In fact, E. Thayer Gaston's (1968) early treatment of biology and culture implies the importance of both nature and nurture in music therapy. And, as we know, John Blacking (1973) made assertions about the biological and social origins of music and thus music therapy quite clear.

The Spectrum of Ritual (D'Aquili, Laughlin & McManus, 1979), however, focuses on a very specific aspect of this play, biogenetic structuralism, the chief orientations of which are neuroanthropology and ethology. It is a vast and complex work, but one of its basic premises is that ritual may serve to stimulate both the parasympathetic components of the central nervous system and lower brain mechanisms and thus may function as a unifying agent within the brain. It is notable that the authors say that ritual itself is the stimulant, not music or other phenomenon. However, as I wrote in The Mythic Artery in 1982, the music itself could be considered a "ritual."

More recently we have scholars such as Ellen Dissanayake (2001), a neo-Darwinian, who speaks of the importance of ethology for music therapy. In an earlier work, Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why (1992), Dissanayake offered two extremely important ideas for music therapists - the concept of "making special," and her notions of "empathy" (Kenny, 1999). Many other recent discoveries and discourses in neuroscience also bring us to revisit and revise our notions of the interplay between nature and nurture (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Damasio, 1994).

As the pendulum kept swinging from nature to nurture in degrees and in constant motion, I was working in my music therapy practice and in my doctoral studies, thinking about how music therapy could keep up with the new developments in both nature and nurture. My solution was to continue my ecological perspective and develop field theory for music therapy which focuses on "conditions in the space" (Kenny, 1989). I came upon the notion of field theory in my academic studies, of course. Field theory seemed, in many ways, consistent with the traditional knowledge given to me by indigenous elders. Two music therapy scholars who shared my Native American background, William Sears and Charles Eagle, also had an interest in field theory. A reflection on the work of William Sears (1968/1996) will easily name conditions, fields or environments, relationships and organization/self-organization as the foundational elements of his processes in music therapy (Kenny, 1989; 1996c).

But I had a cognitive epiphany while observing Rachael Verney doing music therapy at the Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy Centre in London, England, in the mid1980s. I had decided to take a trip to England to travel around the country observing how Nordoff-Robbins music therapy works. While observing Verney at the piano with one of her young clients, I began to perceive a space, an environment that was created in the playing of music. In this moment, the multiple elements of my studies and my own work converged and the Field of Play was born. I saw Rachael interpreting the conditions in this space, the developing musical space between she and the child, in musical forms, discovered through her intuitive function. Subsequently, the seven fields of the Field of Play were discussed and analyzed with Rachael Verney and other colleagues in meetings at Phoenicia, New York.[3] Participants in the Phoenicia think tank improvised at the piano and had numerous discussions and interpretations about the possibilities. This was extremely helpful to me in developing my theoretical ideas.

In describing the human condition of an individual in music therapy we must take into consideration the dynamic and changing environmental, cultural, psychological, emotional, physical, and spiritual aspects and consider as many conditions as possible in creating our music therapy experiences. And if we follow an ecological view, we are in constant motion, opening and closing. [4] This is the way of the human heart, the way of breath, the way of the seasons of the earth, the cycles of the sun and moon, the way of living things. Both nature and nurture are at play in an ever-present motion. We are only one of many.

Ritual Criticism

The field of Ritual Criticism is significant for music therapists because it helps us to distinguish important aspects of the sacred and the secular in ritual contexts. Most ritual studies are associated with the study of religions. In Grimes's 1982 essay, "Parashamanism," he launched Ritual Criticism as a distinct field. This essay is somewhat of a tongue-in-cheek satirical academic work on the interest in shamanism that emerged in the mid1970s. Grimes places the social locus of parashamanism at the interstices among university, church or synagogue, theater, the holistic health industry, therapy groups, and New Age religious groups, adding that feminist ritual circles and Wiccan covens are "also making some use of the paradigm"(Grimes, 1982, p. 253).

Ritual Criticism brings critical analysis to the various aspects of Ritual Studies. One of the most interesting discourses for music therapists in this field is the discourse on theory. Catherine Bell (1992) brings a discerning eye to the works of scholars like Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner, Claude Levi-Strauss, Gilbert Lewis, Edward Shils, James Peacock, Emile Durkheim and others. She rejects the separation of ritual context from myth and notes the tendency toward functionality in this split. Bell insists that ritual form is not merely a vehicle for the mediation of conflict between structure and anti-structure, or the more abstract thinking and acting. In general, she claims that ritual performance and process are far too complicated to reduce to "opposing forces" of any kind.

An important message coming out of the field of Ritual Criticism is that anthropological research methods are no panacea. Claims on knowledge shift and change as cultural/social/academic landscapes deconstruct and construct. Some of the ideas that we consider so relevant to music therapy and even so "natural," such as communitas and liminality, come into question in the interpretations and critiques of such contemporary anthropological scholars as Ronald Grimes and Catherine Bell. This analysis is pertinent to our work, especially if we are hoping to make bridges between cultures. How will this critique in Ritual Studies influence the way we use such borrowed terms as communitas? Doesn't the foundational concept of "opposing forces" critiqued by Bell, shape our concept of communitas in specific ways that will influence how we use this concept in music therapy theory and practice?

Colonizing conditions have defamed ritual practices for centuries (Smith, 1999). A graceful exit from this conundrum will not be easy. Now that our academic and professional discourses are shifting once again, we must each apply our own discerning eyes in order to purge ourselves of colonizing attitudes and behaviors. This shift has its own hazards because colonizing attitudes and behaviors are themselves implied in the cultures we learn. Since indigenous scholars are taking their places in academic and professional practices, access to their societies is becoming more and more limited for non-indigenous scholars.

Landscapes of scholarly discourse will certainly benefit from the types of participatory research currently in vogue in many music therapy contexts. Yet the valuable and I might dare to say, essential aspects of traditional, indigenous knowledge keepers often remain absent in these discourses (Kenny, 2000; 2001). If music therapists are to seriously consider culture and if any of us are hoping to bring traditional music therapists into an honest and respectful post-colonial discourse with professional music therapists, we must hear more than the voices of non-indigenous academics. This is a feature the landscape truly craves. Knowledge from fields like Ritual Studies and Ritual Criticism is certainly valid, in its own right. But how can we find ways of making friends with elders and healers so that there is enough access, understanding, respect, and trust to make a level playing field between the lost and found and recover so much of what we need in society today?

Keeping the World in Balance

As scholars we feel a tremendous pressure to invent more and more categories. This is the status symbol for us. As our lexicon increases exponentially, we feel more and more confident that we are getting a better grip on a chaotic world. But there are those who believe that the most profound thoughts are best expressed with simple language and simple stories. I'd like to borrow David Akombo's idea here: "Ethnomusic therapy is like storytelling. Kenyan folk music in therapy is no exception, for it is the advice of the elders sprinkled liberally among the fairytales of youth" (Chapter 9 this volume, p. 177). Could our scholarship also occasionally reflect this traditional, indigenous wisdom?

I will never forget the day that I asked Walker Stogan what the ritual music "meant." He gave me a long, silent look and then instructed me to "Go into the Longhouse and listen." That's it. That's all I got to put in my "field notes" while doing my studies on Salish Guardian Spirit Dance Ceremonials about music and meaning.

As music therapists, we use this same "listening principle" in our work. "Music is a resource pool. It contains many things - images, patterns, mood suggestions, textures, feelings, processes. If selected, created and used with respect and wisdom, the clients will hear what they need to hear in the music, and use the ritual as a supportive context" (Kenny, 1982, p. 5).

Maybe keeping the world in balance means trusting a little bit and opening up our multiple intelligences in our scholarship as well. As music therapists we have a great resource as our constant referential context. In an article entitled "Field Consciousness and Field Ethics," in the book The Holographic Paradigm and Other Paradoxes (Wilber, 1982), Renee Weber describes the operating principle of David Bohm's "implicate order." Weber states that Bohm's basic contention is that "love is an informing energy"(see also Kenny, 1989).[5]

Each of us must do our own balancing act. I support David Bohm's idea of an implicate order. It also reminds me of the advice of Walker Stogan to do more listening and less naming and categorizing, to surrender some of scholarly privilege and confidence for new understanding. I like the idea that we can sense this implicate order in music and in our music therapy experiences. It might take those multiple intelligences mentioned by David Abrams (1996), a different way of perceiving and experiencing the world. These perceptions might even be mirrored as patterns in the brain, ritual patterns that can be expressed in musical form in music therapy. It seems to me that the best practices of "nurture" tell us that the prime condition for allowing this connection, this expression, is love as the informing energy as a condition in the musical space. This reminds me of the phrase used by so many indigenous elders instructing us to go where there is "a good feeling."

These are some of the ideas that brought me to the Field of Play. "The Field of Play suggests an attention to subtleties, quiet and implicit non-verbal cues, which communicate the natural healing patterns of the human person and imply an order which can guide and inform us into the best movement, which will lead us into wholeness" (Kenny, 1989, p. 139). This means keeping the world in balance - listening to the ground, listening to our bodies, our brains, our hearts, our minds, our souls, our senses, listening to the many cultures of the Earth, and listening to the Earth, too.

Notes

1) For an overview of the field of Ritual Studies, you can read the foundational papers in Ronald Grimes' (1996) Readings in Ritual Studies, an edited anthology.

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2) The aftershocks of Wilson's Sociobiology continue and now the developing field of evolutionary psychology conducts debates in the area. You can read an article entitled "Exorcising sociobiology" by Paul R. Gross in The New Criterion (online at http://ww.newcriterion.com) or check out Val Dusek's article "Sociobiology sanitized: The evolutionary psychology and genic selectionism debates" in The Human Nature Review (online at http://www.humannature. com/science-as-culture). Also see Evolutionary Psychology Online.

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3) For more information on the Phoenicia Group read Helen Bonny's (1987): Music: The Language of Immediacy.

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4) The seven fields in the Field of Play alternate opening and closing. For example, the aesthetic is open. The musical space is closed. The field of play is open. Ritual is closed. A particular state of consciousness is open. Power is closed. The creative process is open.

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5) David Bohm wrote his important work, Wholeness and the Implicate Order in 1980. As a physicist, Bohm was attempting to describe certain principles in the New Physics in a way that was accessible to the lay person. In the Nordic Journal of Music Therapy (Bruscia & Stige,2001), we see a term coined by Bohm resurfacing in an interview with Kenneth Bruscia, who agrees that music can communicate an implicate order.

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References and Suggested Readings

Abrams, D. (1996). The Spell of the Sensuous. New York: Random House Inc.

Arguelles, J. (1975). The Transformative Vision. Boulder and London: Shambhala.

Becker, H. S. & McCall, M. M. (Eds.). (1990). Symbolic Interaction and Cultural Studies. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Bell, C. (1992). Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. London: Oxford University Press.

Blacking, J. (1973). How Musical Is Man? Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Bohm, David (1980/2000). Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London and New York: Routledge.

Bonny, H. (1987). Music: The Language of Immediacy. The Arts in Psychotherapy, 14: 255-261.

Bonny, H. & Walter, N. P. (1972). The Use of Music in Psychedelic (LSD) Psychotherapy. Journal of Music Therapy, 9.

Bruscia, K. & Stige, B. (2001). The Nature of Meaning in Music Therapy: Kenneth Bruscia interviewed by Brynjulf Stige. Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, 9(2), 84-96.

Damasio, A. (1994). Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Avon Books.

D'Aquili, G., Laughlin, C. D. Jr. & McManus, J. (1979). The Spectrum of Ritual: A Biogenetic Structural Analysis. New York: Columbia University Press.

Denzin, N. K. (1992). Symbolic Interactionism and Cultural Studies: The Politics of Interpretation. Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell.

Dissanayake, E. (1992). Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why. New York: The Free Press.

Dissanayake, E. (2001). An Ethological View of Music and its Relevance to Music Therapy. Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, 10(2), 159-175.

Gaston, E. T. (Ed.). Music in Therapy. New York: Macmillan Publishing.

Grimes, R. L. (1982). Beginnings in Ritual Studies. Colombia: University of South Carolina Press.

Grimes, R. L. (1990). Ritual Criticism: Case Studies in Its Practice, Essays on Its Theory. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

Grimes, R. L. (1996). Readings in Ritual Studies. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

International Journal of Arts Medicine. St. Louis, MO: MMB, Inc.

Jilek, W. (1972). Indian Healing. Surrey, BC: Hancock House Publishers, Ltd.

Kenny, C. B. (1982). The Mythic Artery: The Magic of Music Therapy. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Co.

Kenny, C. B. (1985). Music: A Whole Systems Approach. Music Therapy, 5(1), 15-22.

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

Kenny, C. B. (1991). The Use of Musical Space with an Adult in Psychotherapy. In Kenneth Bruscia (Ed.). Case Studies in Music Therapy. Phoenixville, PA: Barcelona Publishing Co., pp. 333-347.

Kenny, C. B. (Ed.) (1995). Listening, Playing, Creating: Essays on the Power of Sound. New York: State University of New York Press.

Kenny, C. B. (1996a). The Dilemma of Uniqueness: An Essay on Consciousness and Qualities. Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, 5(2), 127- 136.

Kenny, C. B. (1996b). The Story of the Field of Play. In Langenberg, M., Aigen, K. & Frommer, J. (Eds.). Qualitative Music Therapy Research: Beginning Dialogues. Gilsum, NH: Barcelona Publishers.

Kenny, C. B. (1996c). Introduction to William W. Sears' Article "Processes in Music Therapy." Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, 5(1), 31-32.

Kenny, C. B. (1999). Beyond this Point there be Dragons: Developing General Theory in Music Therapy. Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, 8(2), 127- 137.

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