The Grieg Effect – On the Contextualized Effects of Music in Music Therapy
Abstract
In this essay I examine the group Upbeat's encounter with Grieg and his music and this story is used as an exemplar to illuminate themes of broader relevance concerning the role of music in music therapy. The contextual perspective taken is situated in relation to Wittgenstein's (1953/1967) discussion of meaning as use, De Nora's (2000) discussion of how various music(s) may afford certain things through appropriation, and Stige's (2002) discussion of health musicing. After a critical excursion to the discourse on the Mozart Effect and a brief discussion of various assumptions on the role of music in music therapy, the centrepiece of the essay is developed as the story of Upbeat's encounter with Grieg. This story is interpreted in relation to the involved interplay of human protomusicality, personal and cultural history, and in the concluding section of the essay the contextual perspective taken is substantiated through a summarized description of the proposed Grieg Effect as well as through a clarification of the concept of context itself.
Key words: Music therapy, concept of music, effect, meaning, use, context.
Introduction: The Use of Music
When music therapy was institutionalized as a discipline at the Grieg Academy in the University of Bergen in 2006, my colleague Hans Petter Solli suggested that we should define a Grieg Effect in music therapy. He of course made the suggestion at least half jokingly and he left it for me to figure out what the Grieg Effect could be… For a long time I just enjoyed the somewhat subversive allusion to the Mozart Effect. If you want to claim effects of the music of a specific composer, you better pick one of the great composers of the German-Austrian classical tradition and not a composer from the European periphery. For reasons that I will briefly outline, I have nevertheless gradually come to take interest in playing with the idea of a Grieg Effect. In contrast to the Mozart Effect, which is today a registered trademark, I will concentrate upon music as "popular technology," that is; music as a tool people can use in the process of handling the challenges of everyday life. In discussing the types of effects that may grow out of this, the focus cannot be on how people react to music only but on how they act and interact through music in a given context.
Edvard Grieg was born in Bergen in 1843, three decades after the status of Norway changed from that of being a Danish colony to that of being a nation in enforced union with Sweden. When Grieg died in 1907, Norwegian independence had been achieved just two years earlier. This historical and political context was important for Grieg's work, not least in relation to his extensive use of Norwegian folk music. In 2007 it was 100 years since Grieg's death, and the municipality of Bergen and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs interpreted this occasion as a possibility to revitalize and renew what they call "the Grieg heritage." They did this by focusing upon Grieg as a sampler, composer, and humanist. This "tripod" of concern for cultural appropriation, creativity, and humanness has struck me as an interesting foundation for reflections on the role of music in music therapy. Before proceeding I want to express the caveat that I do not think that Grieg is the only and essential exemplar of such a tripod.He is a "case" that I happen to know and therefore am able to use. As any historical figure he could be used in a multitude of ways. The value of the Grieg heritage is of course dependent upon how it is cultivated. "Freedom is in the fight for freedom" as Grieg himself once expressed.
Grieg once said that artists like Bach and Beethoven erected churches and temples on ethereal heights, while his aim in music was to build houses for the people in which they could be happy and feel at home. This statement is included in biographies as different as those written by the Russian musicologist Boris Asafjev (1942/1992, p. 24) and by the Norwegian composer David Monrad Johansen (1956, p. 301). Both biographers link this statement to reflections on the musical forms that Grieg chose to work with. With a few notable exceptions, such as his piano concerto in A minor (opus 16), Grieg cultivated small forms, often with use of a striking simplicity. This has led some to use the derogatory term "the little master," while others have seen a man who respected ordinariness and the folk music that he often used as a platform for his creative efforts. The platform that he in turn created has been used by many. Simplicity is in fact an excellent platform for exquisite performance, which has been repeatedly demonstrated not only by artists walking in Grieg's footsteps but by many artists in a range of domains.
Grieg is therefore an interesting composer for the study of music as performance and event. This, and the fact that Grieg "sampled" Norwegian folk music and transformed it for performance in other contexts, suggests that his music and the use of his music could help us explore a contextual understanding of music's effects, that is; an understanding where effects are related to situated performance. With this phrase I try to communicate the idea that a musical piece may afford certain things but that it does not cause much; effects are created through use by the involved people in a given context. The term "use" does not have a restricted functional sense here. It is related to Wittgenstein's (1953/1967) influential discussion of meaning, where he argues that words do not have stable meanings that mirror reality; they achieve their meanings through use in particular contexts.[1] I have previously discussed the relevance of this perspective for the discussion of meaning and aesthetics in music therapy (Stige, 1998a, 1998b). In the sociology of music, Tia DeNora (2000, 2007) has developed a related perspective, through discussion of how certain music(s) may afford certain things, but only through appropriation by actors in given settings.
By combining the Wittgensteinian perspective on meaning and DeNora's discussion of affordance and appropriation, I have formerly described what I call health musicing and the affordances of musicing as a process where various agents negotiate and collaborate (or split) in relation to the agendas, artefacts, and activities of any given arena (Stige, 2002, p. 211). What the agents' agenda and the activities and artefacts of an arena could afford in relation to health is not given but neither is it completely open; the effects grow out of the relationships established in each case. This implies that a contextual perspective on the effects of music is not necessarily relativistic. It does not follow that any music could do (anything).
In this essay I will use the story of the group Upbeat's encounter with Grieg as an exemplar to illuminate themes of broader relevance concerning the role of music in music therapy, then. First, however, we need to take a brief excursion to the so-called Mozart Effect in order to clarify some alternative perspectives on music in music therapy.
An Excursion into the Mozart Effect
Mozart's music has been influential in more than one way. The recent interest for Mozart in relation to human (cognitive) development was prepared by the French physician Alfred Tomatis, not least in his book Pourquoi Mozart? (Why Mozart?) published in 1991. Not too many took notice at that time, but a few years later things changed dramatically. Today the Mozart Effect is a registered trademark by Don G. Campbell, Inc. What is the story here?
The supporters of the Mozart Effect claim that Mozart makes you smarter. Or: It all started with a claim that was a little bit more specific. A study published in the influential scientific journal Nature (Rauscher, Shaw, & Ky, 1993) reported that a group of students that had been given 10 minutes exposure to Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major, K. 448, had a temporary increase in spatial-temporal reasoning scores, compared to students who had not listened to this sonata. This effect then became known as the Mozart Effect. The rest is history. The Mozart Effect hit the columns of the New York Times and it hit the news all over the world. During the next few years various replications and extensions of the original experiment were performed, some results confirming the initial findings (see e.g. Rauscher, Shaw & Ky, 1995), others going in the opposite direction. This resulted in a quite sharp scientific correspondence in Nature, under the heading "Prelude or Requiem for the ‘Mozart Effect?'"(Chabris, 1999; Steele et al., 1999; Rauscher, 1999). The debate continues in the 21st century (see e.g. Sweeny, 2006).
From what we know today, the proposed Mozart Effect seems at best to be weak and uncertain. But the idea of a Mozart Effect is now part of common culture, people talk of it in relation to everything from the effect of music on women in labour to the effect of music on cows' milking. Given the fact that the term originally was used for some uncertain results about spatial reasoning scores among students, this enormous popularity may be somewhat surprising. But Don Campbell (1997/2001; 2000/2002) and many other investors have understood that to mention a superstar such as Mozart and a supertheme such as IQ development in the same sentence could be good business, at least if you could reframe the original results a little bit. If you could claim that kids will be more intelligent if they are given the opportunity to listen to Mozart, and add that this is scientifically proven, then quite a few parents could be interested in buying the books and special CDs that you may be able to create. This is what happened, and there seems at least to have been a Mozart Effect on parents' wallets (Jones, 1999).
The advocates and the critics of the proposed Mozart Effect have mainly been medical and cognitive scientists and there is no direct link to the Mozart Effect in contemporary music therapy practice. But, as many other music therapists, I have still encountered quite a few people who have ideas about music therapy which are not too distant from the Mozart Effect. They imagine music therapy to be the systematic application of specific music for specific purposes and thus think (we think of) music as a "pill," with no account of the experiencing person. This kind of thinking has its proponents in music therapy, but many more critics. It is quite common to acknowledge that people experience music differently, for instance because of cultural differences. Sometimes, however, even culturally aware music therapy thinking may be closer to the idea of the Mozart Effect than what we usually imagine, as exemplified by this description in a quite recent American music therapy textbook:
Culture and society define music and determine how it is used. It is a basic premise in the field of music therapy that music of cultures other than one's own has little or no meaning (Gaston, 1968) and that one will not respond to or participate in it (Gibbons, 1977, in Davis, Gfeller & Thaut, 1999, p. 296).
To think about music as a culturally determined stimulus is not too different from thinking about music as a pill; we could say that these are two different sets of ideas about music which both are informed by mechanical root metaphors. There are of course alternatives. In psychodynamic and humanistic traditions of music therapy, for instance, it is quite common to focus upon music as personal experience and expression. The level of analysis is changed from that of the reacting organism to that of the experiencing and interacting person. The limitation may be that some of these traditions do not take sufficiently into consideration the contextual character of person's life, resources, and problems. As I have argued in a previous publication (Stige, 2002), we could think of therapy as a process where we learn about how each one of us could enter a cultural field and find our way in it (or out of it). In this perspective it becomes crucial to develop a notion of music that mediates between some kind of determinism on one side and the idea of personal expression beyond culture on the other. This is where Grieg – and users of Grieg's music – could come in and help us, as exemplars illuminating effects that could neither be linked directly to characteristics of the musical object nor to personal or contextual factors only, but to the interplay of all of these factors.
The Story of Upbeat's Encounter with Grieg
I will explore this theme by telling you the story of how Upbeat encountered Grieg and how that contributed to changes in their lives. The example is taken from the field of Community Music Therapy, but I think the lessons we could learn from it could be of broader relevance.
Upbeat was a group of six adults with Downs Syndrome who happened to become members of the very first group of mentally handicapped students in any Community Music School in Norway. The six heroes of the story that I will tell are Gunnar, Knut, Reidar, Jon Reidar, Solbjørg, and Solveig. I call them heroes because they are the main characters of the story, they had to travel a long way before they could come home, and they demonstrated lots of courage and curiosity. Most of them were born in the 1940s, in Sogn og Fjordane, a rural county north of Bergen. In this county there is no big town and when people talk about "going to town" they actually mean "going to Bergen." Our six heroes did go to Bergen and for quite a long time too. In the 1950s, when they grew up, very few people considered the possibility of letting children and adolescents with Down's Syndrome grow up in their own community. They were sent to institutions, and the central institution for people from the county of our heroes was located in the "capital" of Western Norway; Bergen. So they had to leave their families; they had to go the six or eight or ten hours or whatever it would take to go to Bergen, where they would live in this institution, in principle for the rest of their lives.
But principles change. In the 1960s and 1970s criticisms of the central institutions for mentally handicapped people flourished. These institutions were too large and too medical in their orientation, in short; not humane enough, many critics argued (see Stige, 1995). Eventually, in the late 1980s this criticism would lead to a process where all of these institutions were closed down. But in the 1960s and 70s what happened was that some new and smaller institutions were built, in an attempt of developing more humane conditions for these people. In consequence, due to political decisions and not personal choice, our six heroes were moved from Bergen and to the town of Florø. This was not the home town of any of them but it was a town in the county where they were born and that would have to do, the logic must have been. In the late 1970s and early 80s, the wheel of change turned around once more. Smaller local institutions were built, and our six heroes were moved again, this time to the small town of Sandane, further north in the county. This is where I first met them. I had just started working as a music therapist engaged in a project supported by Arts Council Norway and aimed at exploring possibilities for community inclusion. "Cultural activities for everybody" had been a slogan in Norwegian policies since the early 1970s, but even after a decade no community music school in this nation had anything to offer people with mental handicaps. This is different in Norway today, but at that time this was the harsh reality: If you had the destiny of being born with Down's Syndrome you would in most cases be denied access to music (Kleive & Stige, 1988).
In august 1983, our six heroes were invited to form a group in the community music school in Sandane and I was given the possibility to work with them, together with my music therapy colleague Ingunn Byrkjedal. I have told aspects of Upbeat's story in some previous texts and explained how the very first music we made together was characterized by poly-rhythmic chaos, as only one of the group members had any previous musical experience. In the beginning even the task of playing a basic beat together on simple percussion instruments was far too difficult. I have explained how this changed during the first year we worked together, through a process where both dyadic and group improvisations were central elements. I have explained how the members of Upbeat gradually were able to coordinate their playing so that we could start to arrange and perform musical pieces, and I have explained how during a period of three years of hard work we were able to establish Upbeat as a visible group in the cultural life of this local community, with a collaborative relationship with other musical ensembles, including several choirs and the marching band of the town (see Kleive & Stige, 1988; Stige, 1995; 2002; 2003).
In this essay I will examine one aspect that I have not discussed in detail before, namely this group's encounter with Grieg and his music. I need to explain that the members of this group did not start by asking for Mozart or Grieg. They probably had never even heard of any of them. Their questions in relation to music were about the local marching band or about Sputnik, a Norwegian country music artist using three chords, a frank voice, and quite straightforward lyrics. It took some time before Upbeat discovered Grieg. In fact it just happened by chance. One day, in the middle of an improvisation, one of the group members became tired and started to look around at various pictures in the music room. He looked at an image of Bach, and then one of Mozart. He looked at Beethoven. He didn't seem to care. But then he looked at a photograph of Grieg, and he became curious. I don't really know why. Maybe he liked his moustache? In any case; he addressed me and asked:
"Who is that guy?"
"It's Edvard Grieg!" No response.
"He was a composer." No response.
"He made music." There is still no response.
"He was from Bergen." "From Bergen? Bergen?!"
Bergen got the group going. As you will remember; most of the group members had lived in Bergen in their childhood and adolescence. These were people with very limited language skills. What possibilities did they usually have to talk about, think about, and remember their own history? Given Grieg's connection to Bergen it struck the two music therapists working with the group that to play his music could give the members of Upbeat a rare opportunity to relate to their own history. In order to acknowledge their renewed interest for Bergen, we therefore decided that we wanted to see if any of Grieg's music could be included in the group's repertoire. We had several concerns: Would Grieg simply be too difficult for this group? In the world of classical music Grieg is known for his simplicity, not least in the Lyric Pieces for piano, but would this be simplicity in the world of the members of Upbeat? And would the group members take interest in his music? And, finally: Would the local community respond positively, that is; would people feel that Upbeat had the "licence to play" Grieg?
As Upbeat's piano-player I had some homework to do. I went home and played through most of Grieg's Lyric Pieces and also Opus 17 and 66, which are collections of Norwegian Folk Tunes arranged by Grieg. I was searching for pieces that could match Upbeat's musical experience and interests. In the improvisations that we had had together, I had experienced Knut's love for splendid strikes on the cymbal, Reidar's interest for the chime bars, Solveig's ability to keep a beat on the drum, etc. Could we find musical pieces that could be arranged so that these musical skills could be honoured?
The first piece we tried out was Opus 12, No. 2, which is a Waltz with a folk tune feeling. When writing this essay I have been able to study a video recording made by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation NRK in 1986. It is a recording of Upbeat practicing this piece. One of the first things that strikes me when watching this video is the ease with which the musicians play. The group had been practicing for a while before this recording, but there is something more to this; there seems to be a kind of fit between the music and the group of musicians here. I have the impression that this music makes sense to them, so that it is natural for them to play what they play. I will try to explain by going into some musical detail.
The piece starts with two bars of accompaniment only, where the rhythm and the key of A minor is established. That is; Grieg wrote two bars here, but some performers do it differently. The Norwegian jazz pianist Bugge Wesseltoft has made a beautiful recording of this piece, using four bars to get going.[2] Upbeat used whatever number of bars it would take Solveig to get going, each particular day. Often two bars would be enough. Sometimes we would have four bars, or eight.[3] Then the melody comes in on the piano, accompanied by a harmonic pattern where the first beat of each bar has an A as its base, even though the chords change between A minor, D major and E major seventh. It is all very simple and delicate, and when Upbeat played this, Solveig's beat was the only addition to the piano.
But then, after eight bars of this there is room for something different. The harmony changes; the next bar starts with a chord in the parallel key C major and ends with a secondary dominant to that key, namely a D seventh chord (with an added ninth). This tension is then resolved; the next bar starts with a G sixth, which after a tripled expression on the first beat is altered to a straightforward G major chord on the second beat. Most musicians play this piece somewhat faster than what Upbeat did, and the sequence from the C to the secondary dominant leading to the G is often played as a light and quick transition, even though the G sixth is usually accented. With Upbeat, the accented G sixth was very important, because it gave Knut such a good possibility to take one of his splendid strikes on the cymbal (and this pattern is repeated several times in this piece, so that he could go for this strike more than once). In order to make this work, however, as pianist I had to play with quite a solid touch and with use of both ritardando and crescendo, so that the secondary dominant creating the tension that could "legitimate" the accented strike on the cymbal would stand out. This worked well for Knut, and he played with an extraordinary precision in this piece. Grieg's music afforded this, but only as performed in the way described here. A more standard quick and light performance would have been different.
The subsection that starts with the bar leading to Knut's first strike on the cymbal did lend itself for a parallel track: Reidar could play a stepwise sequence on the chime bars, one note for the first beat of each bar; first C, then B, then A, G, F, E, and D, and then – finally – an E again, but this time on the second beat instead of the first beat of the bar. This was a challenge for Reidar, but usually he got it right, even the delayed final E. The drama of Knut's cymbal combined with the steady stepwise movement of the chime bars worked well together, and were followed up by the shivering rhythms of Gunnar, playing proudly like a true tambourine man in the final two bars that closed the musical phrase that Grieg had composed.
Then the whole thing is repeated. Many critics have claimed that Grieg was a lazy composer, using repetition in stead of variation. Others have argued that Grieg worked with repetitions as variants and that they suit the musical idioms he used. Whatever we may think of this, for Upbeat these repetitions were a blessing and a real opportunity for mastery. After three repetitions of the sequence described above, there is a different sequence in Grieg's piece, where the key changes to A major and there is a kind of continuous change between the tonic and the dominant, making it possible for Solbjørg to play a continuous E on a chime bar and for Jon Reidar to play a free-floating pattern on the chimes. After this section, the piece again goes back to the A section described above. Before the Waltz ends in silence, there is then a short and simple coda which offers Jon Reidar an option to play some soft and long notes on a reed horn in A.
Interpretation: The Interplay of Protomusicality, Personal and Cultural History
There are many things to discuss in relation to the performance that I just described. The video recording shows a group of musicians who are quite serious, maybe to the degree that we could ask if there is too much pressure involved. They are obviously concerned with getting it right. But at the same time, there is engagement and also quite a bit of pride and pleasure. They are performing music made by this famous moustache man from Bergen. It sounds quite OK and they are able to do it.
The abovementioned theme of simplicity may be a keyword here. Among musicologists you will find many different descriptions of Grieg's simplicity; expressive simplicity, beautiful simplicity, naïve simplicity, or just plain simplicity. Whatever you call it, Grieg's simplicity in this waltz was perfect for Upbeat. When we played it we discovered that the group members liked this music a lot, and the process of arranging this music so that the group could play it in a "natural" way turned out to be quite manageable. Several structural elements in Grieg's music afforded this, such as Grieg's use of drones, stepwise lines, short and clear phrases, short and clear sections, and repetition of phrases and sections. We could say that the encounter with these qualities in the music made it possible for Upbeat to mobilize their human protomusicality in the service of cultural learning (Stige, 2002, Chapter 3).
I would argue, however, that it would be misleading and limiting to focus upon the idea of what effects these qualities did produce. In this particular case, the music grew quite effectual but this could happen only because of the musicians' use of it. And this use was not linked to the qualities in the music only. It was linked to the match between these musicians' skills and preferences and the actions afforded by the musical material, as described above, but it was also linked to these musicians personal history, which made music from Bergen such a burning issue. As things developed, we could also say that the effects were linked to Norwegian cultural history, which made Grieg's music an important identity marker. This happened, however, as mediated by a specific cultural situation. I will try to explain:
Upbeat decided to go public with their version of Grieg. In one of the concerts of the community music school, Upbeat's idiosyncratic version of Opus 12, No 2 was on the program. I remember that I was nervous before this concert, because this was different from anything Upbeat had performed publicly before. Usually they played more popular tunes, not Grieg and other composers of the canon of Norwegian classical music. As Lubet (2004) has demonstrated, Western classical music is not an inclusive institution; it is driven by a search for perfection that excludes many people from musical participation. Of course, a community music school concert is a relatively inclusive enclave of this culture, but it was still not clear for us if the audience would think of Upbeat's appropriation of Grieg as legitimate.
It turned out that our worries were unwarranted. When the group played the Waltz in the audience was extremely positive. Many came up to the stage after the performance and said things like "I didn't think that this would be possible!" Upbeat had chosen a culturally valued artefact to work with and they experienced that their unique performance of it was valued. And the story did not stop here. In the months that followed Upbeat gradually developed a relationship of collaboration with several musical ensembles of this local community, including two different choirs and a marching band (see Stige, 2002, Chapter 4). The Grieg performance was of course not the only factor leading to this development, but I would argue that Grieg was a door opener for Upbeat. How would this be possible? In a post-modern culture there is no high and low and almost anything goes, could be one answer, but I don't think it would be very precise. I think it is more relevant to discuss the audience's positive response in light of the specific cultural situation of small towns in rural Norway in the early 1980s.
The events that I have described happened in a decade that challenged rural towns in this country quite seriously. There were winds of change leading to financial problems and stagnation in many rural areas. At the same time, there were some counter-movements trying to mobilize rural pride and identity. One element of this was the television program that eventually recorded Upbeat's appropriation of Grieg, a program called Norge Rundt ("Around Norway"), which has been broadcasted every week since 1976 and which focuses upon everyday events from all over the country, not least from the rural areas. It is a program produced by the many local departments of the Norwegian government-owned public broadcasting company NRK. In the 1980s this was one of the most popular programs in the country, and one thing to note here is that the opening melody of this program was written by Grieg, namely Norwegian Dance No. 2, Opus 35. It is not performed in the classical way, however, but in a synthesized version.
Whether or not this synthesizer version is a good version of Grieg's Norwegian Dance is not interesting here, but the fact that a television program representative of rural pride used Grieg as their musical emblem is. This provides us with the hypothesis that when the audience heard Upbeat play Grieg, they did not only hear an idiosynchratic version of the music of Grieg the classical composer. They also heard the music of a rural Norwegian identity of the 1980s. We could put this somewhat differently; while the fact that Grieg was from Bergen was important for Upbeat, the fact that he was not from Oslo, the nation's capital and thus the symbol of sentralization, was maybe more important for the rural audience attending Upbeat's concert performance. This may have opened their ears for Upbeat's non-classical use of Grieg's music.
There is much to this story that I have not touched upon, since music is such a multi-layered phenomenon. I do think, for instance, that another reason why the audience could value Upbeat's version of Grieg is that music is not only a sonic art, it is also a visual art. This is very obvious, in two very different ways, when you go to a rock concert or to a symphony concert. The physical and communicative interaction between musicians is an essential part of the experience. Visual effects of Upbeat's performance were less produced than that you would find with most other groups, but still very engaging, maybe even partly for that reason. In many ways music is good and feels good when it looks good, so the abovementioned theme of music as visual experience would be worthy of a lengthy discussion, but I must leave that for another occasion.
Conclusion: The Grieg Effect in Context
I have tried to demonstrate that one of Grieg's Lyric Pieces could be used with ease and success by a group of mentally handicapped musicians. The story that I have told should suffice to illuminate that the effect of the music in this case was due to the relationships that were developed between the musical material (as "text"), the biography of the musicians (including their appropriation of one element of the composer's biography), the performative practice of the group of musicians, and the cultural history of the community they belonged to. This then exemplifies Wittgenstein's (1953/1967) argument that meaning is use in a particular situation, but it also exemplifies that certain artefacts afford certain things (DeNora, 2000) and that these affordances are linked to various historical contexts (Stige, 2002). In other words; the lesson here is not just that meaning is use, but that part of why music could be useful for people is that established meanings could be recharged and exchanged, and thus also changed. We could say: musical meaning is accumulated through accompanied use.
In the cultural recycling that we call human life, various texts such as the Waltz discussed in this essay are essential tools for the identity development that we engage with to find our place in relation to others. This is an intrapersonal and interpersonal process. We could describe it as a meaning-oriented process which could only be realized through participation in a community of some sort; the performance of identity has little meaning if it is not witnessed (Stige, 2006). In an individualistic culture we are sometimes helped by the witnessing of the smaller circles of family, friends, or therapeutic group or dyad, but sometimes – such as in the case of Upbeat – our identity issues are linked to broader questions, such as on the right to partake in the activities of our local community, and then both the performance and the witnessing may need to go public.
In the beginning of this essay I described the tripod of Grieg as a sampler, composer, and humanist, which I translated to interest in cultural appropriation, creativity, and humanness. When this concern is realized, we may experience the effects of music. We are talking about effects that are unpredictable in some respects; when musical performance and other actions interpret each other in situations of use there is always space for creative generation of meaning and new possibilities for active participation.
This, then, is the meaning that I would like to link to the term the Grieg Effect; the effects of contextualized use of selected musical material in ways that generate meaning and new possibilities for participation. In the story that I have told in this essay, the musical material was a whole composition. It may of course be something much smaller and much more fragmented, such as a tune or a little rhythmical pattern. It does not need to be high art or complicated. It could be a single sound, but it would still be a cultural artefact in some respects. The Grieg Effect is not an effect that music and its structures produce, then, but neither is it independent of the music and its structures. I have described how Grieg's use of short phrases, repetitions, and simplicity afforded participation for Upbeat. But this was not the whole story: When it came to public performance it was still not clear if Upbeat had the "licence to play." Upbeat played this music in a different way, with extra instruments, a slower tempo, tons of rubato, a very special seriousness, and an expression of pride and pleasure. They played in a way nobody in their community had thought of. When the audience did value this music I would suggest that they also redefined what terms such as "our music" and "our community" meant for them.
In their own small scale and context Upbeat was doing something similar to what a rock star like Bob Dylan is currently doing; "stealing" something that was not "theirs" to begin with and then making it their own in ways others appreciate. Dylan's last record, Modern Times, is (another) record of love and theft, where he has stolen everything from the lyrics of the Roman poet Ovid to music of the blues legend Muddy Waters. In the context of cultural appropriation, to steal is not simply about taking away, though, it is just as much about taking a new way with old tools. Dylan's use of Ovid and Waters has been valued by many people who feel that these are their lyrics and their music too (Aadland, 2007; Børdahl, 2007). So maybe the Dylan Effect would be a suitable term for the successful appropriation of selected musical material that I have been discussing? Possibly, and for some of the clients that I have been working with Dylan's music has been much more meaningful and important than anything Grieg ever wrote.[4]
This reminds us about the fact that the term context may at least have two different meanings; that which surrounds and that which connects (Cole, 1996). A contextual perspective on the effects of music is not limited to sensitivity to local context, then. We are invited to explore the implications of the fact that human beings link their lives to complex webs of cultural meaning. So here we go: The Dylan Effect, The Grieg Effect …. The list could of course be made much longer, but I do not think it could be created by consulting a music encyclopaedia. It would need to grow out of practice and lived experience. I would indeed find it very interesting to read other stories about the contextualized effects of music in music therapy practice.
To use selected musical material in ways that could generate meaning and new possibilities for participation was something Upbeat could do and it is something you and I could do, at certain times and in certain places, if we work hard and encounter people that are willing to listen. It is, I think, very much what Grieg managed to do. He was a great sampler, "stealing" Norwegian folk music and making it very much into his own. In doing this, he expressed his identity in ways that people later on have been able to use in a variety of ways. He thus provided us with new material as well as with new possibilities of hypertextuality; that is; new possibilities of linking our own histories to that of others. In a way Grieg did something similar to what a music therapist could do, when music therapy works.
Notes
[1] Shared use of language in a given practical context Wittgenstein termed "language game."
[2] Track 3 on the CD "Edvard Grieg – Sampled" produced for the commemoration Grieg07.
[3] Musically, I would argue, each solution makes sense in different ways.
[4] A similar argument have been developed by Viggo Krüger (2007) in an essay published in Volume 7(2) of this journal, where he writes about how he refused to play Grieg as a young student: "music was too important for me to be wasting time rehearsing … old tunes in a dull living room."
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