The Marriage of Music and Narrative: Explorations in Art, Therapy, and Research
Abstract
Music and narrative share similar goals – the expression of thoughts, feelings, emotions, and meanings. While narrative may be employed as an oral or literary form, as a research tool, or as a therapeutic technique, music, as an art form, is most often perceived as a performance art or compositional act. Elements of both music and narrative have common ontological roots in human communication and expression. Over the past 50 years, both music and narrative have gained stature as therapeutic practices. The first two parts of this paper will focus on how music may be used to narrate events and to express personal meaning in both art and therapy. The third part will reveal the results of a pilot research study that explored the relationship between verbal narrative and music improvisation in the creation of an autobiography. The subjects (4 music therapists) narrated their autobiography, then improvised on each period (Narrative Improvisation Method – NIM), or performed the tasks in reverse order (Improvisation Narrative Method – INM). Musical and verbal data were analyzed to compare what was evoked in the music and in the narrative. Subjects were interviewed about their experiences in both methods and the interview data were analyzed to gain a deeper understanding of the process. Implications for the development of clinical and research techniques that integrate both verbal and music narration are discussed.
Key words: Life narrative, music therapy, music improvisation, autobiography.
Introduction
Music is often referred to as a language[1] of the emotions[2]. Narrative tells a story. In this most simple sense, it is not difficult to imagine how the two might be related, most obviously when music is set to text to unite narrative content and feelings. But is it possible for music and narrative to be related in non textual music? In his essay on Narratology, Maus (2001) states that in the late 20th century, music theory and criticism began to explore the possibility of narrativity in non-texted, non-programmatic music. He adds that these studies lie at the intersection of many disciplines, not just narratology and music criticism, but also historical interpretation, technical music theory, semiotics, and the philosophical study of expression and representation. That this subject is being discussed in such diverse fields is not surprising, especially if one accepts that one of the most compelling aspects of the relationship between these fields and narrative stems from their shared purpose of communication. Both narrative and music seek to express feelings and emotions of one person or group to another person or group; establish or maintain a relationship; deepen another's understanding of one's subjective experience; or deepen one's own understanding of one's subjective experience and one's experience in the world.
The focus of this essay is the exploration of overlapping borders and complementary dimensions of the relationship between linguistic or verbal narrative and musical narrative. I will begin by examining some differences as well as some characteristics shared by the two mediums and consider how instrumental music without text might be regarded as narrative. I will then explore Ludwig van Beethoven's opera Fidelio to exemplify how the manifest narrative – the libretto – contains a latent narrative about Beethoven's life which he expressed through the music. Turning to the field of music therapy, I will demonstrate how a man with chronic schizophrenia used music improvisations and images that he drew while listening to music to narrate the story of his psychological life to himself, thereby re-establishing his intrapersonal communication which made it possible for him to communicate with others and to achieve a greater quality of life. Finally, I will present the results of a research study which employed music improvisation with narrated autobiography as a research technique. The purpose of this study was to better understand how music improvisation contributed to a verbal narrative and how the two were related.
Intertwining of Narrative and Music
Characteristics of Narrative and Music
Music is primarily a nonverbal medium, while narrative is thought of as primarily a verbal medium. While the implicit meaning of a musical composition is highly subjective, often affecting the listener in an intensely emotional way, the explicit meaning lacks the precision of verbal language and is limited in conveying particular details of character, thoughts, and action. Main issues in discussions of narrative and music often concern the lack of agents or actors in music, as well as the role of plot (Levinson, 2004, p. 427), though the formal constructions in music may be considered to be equivalent to plot construction (Maus, 1997, p. 295). Clearly, if music and narrative are to find common ground, one must look further afield than a concrete representation of action within an unfolding story line over time.
Turning to the root of the word narrative, one discovers that it originates from the Latin gnarus, meaning "to know." In the online entry for “Narrative,” the Oxford Companion to Philosophy (2005) states that a narrative "is a representation of a sequence of events between which there is some connection." A more expansive definition is presented in Fisher's (1984) narrative paradigm which defines narration as symbolic actions, words, and/or deeds that have sequence and meaning for those who live, create or interpret them. Klein (2004) presents a perspective of musical narrative as an "emplotment of expressive states rather than a sequence of actors and their actions" (p. 23). Certainly, this wider context for narrative expressed by Fischer and Klein provides a field within which contemplation of the relationship between music and narrative may be considered. Music can therefore be considered to be a narrative in the sense of a way of knowing, as a means of communication, and as a symbolic language that has meaning in its creation.
Music Set to Text
The closest extant relationship that exists between music and words occurs in song. The union of text with music is an intricate dance in which the music expands the primary semantic function of words beyond the realm of their connotative and denotative meanings to intensify their message by stimulating the emotions and the subjective associations of the listener. The composer or song writer accomplishes this intimate connection by exploiting the innate characteristics of words and phrases and utilizing inherent qualities of language such as tone, intonation, and stress when setting the text to music. In this way, the music manifests psychological aspects of the text. For example, the musical rhythm draws attention to the primal energy of the text; melody provides the emotional context; phrasing highlights the organization of the aim or goal of the text; dynamics shape the intensity and character; harmony creates the interactive environment; and counterpoint shows how the various parts, characters or feeling states interact (Bruscia, 1987, pp. 450-464).
Music Without Text
There are two genres of instrumental music: programmatic music where the narrative is explicit, or as non-programmatic, pure instrumental music. Programmatic music occurs most commonly in Romantic Classical music, for example, Berlioz' Symphony Fantastique, or Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, commonly known as the Pastoral, where the descriptive written text accompanies the composition and the music depicts the action and feelings of the story. In a portrayal of the textual narrative, music may concretely represent physical objects in the story in three ways: 1) by direct imitation of something which emits a sound of definite pitch, such as a cuckoo, a shepherd's pipe, or a hunting horn; 2) by approximate imitation of something which emits a sound of indefinite pitch, such as a thunderstorm, a rippling brook, or rustling branches; and 3) by suggestion or symbolization of a purely visual thing, such as lightening, clouds or mountains, using sounds which have an effect on the ear similar to that which the appearance of the object has on the eye (Cooke, 1959, p. 3).
The vast majority of instrumental compositions in the Western tradition belong to the genre of non-programmatic or pure instrumental music, and here, the premise of the existence of an implied narrative requires some elaboration. Certainly, this has been a subject of debate among music scholars for decades.[3] It is evident that in pure instrumental music, which includes genres such as classical symphonies, jazz standards, instrumental folk music, and popular guitar instrumentals, there is no story to accompany the music and no text within the music. However, using Klein's concept of musical narrative, the embedded narrative, albeit a highly subjective one, issues from the subjective meaning and the feeling states that are evoked in the listener by the music. As Levinson (2004) states:
It is, after all, not surprising that music, as an intentionally arranged, temporally extended sequence of sounds, one that often displays a character of utterance, is readily thought of as recounting something or other, and likely something that is itself temporally extended, such as a sequence of actions, events, or mental states (p. 429).
Music and narrative each have their own formal characteristics such as tone, dynamics, rhythm, accents, and phrasing; they both possess formal structures and a semiological organization that is manifested in rules and style. Like different languages, the rules and structures are unique, yet unlike spoken languages, the languages of music and narrative may be used simultaneously. This provides the possibility of an extended vocabulary and enriched communication when they are synthesized in works of art, in therapy and perhaps even as a form of narrative research.
Narrative and Music in Opera
Music and text provide narrative information of a different but complementary nature. The dramatic genre of opera is a primordial example of how the musical setting of the libretto, or textual narrative, intensifies the psychological dimension of the story by providing an emotional context for the libretto and by evoking feelings and identification in the listener. Levinson (2004) supports this view when he states that we are prompted to hear the music as animated by agency when we hear it as expressing a mental state or when it induces us to imagine a persona expressing a mental state (p. 434).
Narrative in Beethoven's Opera 'Fidelio'
Klein (2005) proposes an argument for the "biography theory of musical narrative" in which tragic events in the composer's life "miraculously inscribe themselves into the fabric of the music" (p. 108). Ludwig van Beethoven's opera Fidelio is an excellent example of the narrative aspect of autobiographical sub-text related to a conflict in Beethoven's life. The subjective subtext is not only the primary factor contributing to Beethoven's choice of libretto, but it also colours the emotional character of the music to which the text is set. Written in 1814 (final version), Fidelio is written in the genre of rescue opera invoking themes of imprisonment, freedom, and enlightenment, both of a physical and psychological nature.
The theme is political, reflecting an actual historical situation; but it is also personal, reflecting Beethoven's unresolved psychological struggle with his father and his fantasy about the origin of his birth. The political references are numerous, particularly with regards to Freemasonry, and the French Revolution's ideals of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity—and these ideals act as a metaphor for Beethoven's personal psychological conflict. Beethoven scholar, Maynard Solomon (1977), states that Fidelio is a "seething compound of contradictory and ambivalent psychological themes and fantasies, lightly disguised by an ethical content and a Singspiel surface" (p. 198).
The opera is set in an underground prison where the righteous political prisoners are kept, and in a garden above the prison, where the sun shines on the evil subjugators. Thus, light masks darkness and the stage is set for the heroine to restore the world to its proper balance. Florestan (god of vegetation) is unjustly imprisoned by a tyrant, Pizarro (god of winter), who issues an edict for his death. In order to save him, his wife Leonore takes on a male disguise as Fidelio and is hired as a jailor; her task is to dig his grave and assist in his execution. Her descent into the prison in the bowels of the earth suggests a theme of death-rebirth which results in the restoration of equilibrium in the world when the prisoners of conscience are led into the light in the garden, and the evil forces symbolized by Pizarro are banished.
Beethoven's Personal Narrative in His Composition of 'Fidelio'
The theme of death and rebirth, evil being supplanted with good, had a particular resonance for Beethoven. Beethoven's father, an alcoholic, had been abusive towards Beethoven throughout his childhood (Solomon, 1977, p. 17, p. 29-30). At the age of 17, two weeks after his arrival in Vienna, Beethoven's father recalled him to Bonn to care for his brothers and sisters because his mother was dying. For the next five years Beethoven provided and cared for his family and witnessed his father's alcoholic descent into complete incompetence. Throughout his life, Beethoven found it difficult to abandon this role of protector that had been cast upon him at an early age; he continually tried to dominate his brothers and to control their lives, as well as that of his nephew, Carl (Solomon, 1977, p.199). In spite of his identification with the role of protector, after five years of caring for his siblings, Beethoven left his terminally ill father to return to Vienna only seven weeks before his death.
Solomon suggests that Beethoven's unresolved poor relationship with his father and his inability to mourn his father's death were the unconscious motivation for his Family Romance fantasy.[4] In this fantasy, the identity of one or both parents is substituted for an ideal parent. Throughout his life, Beethoven cast doubts upon the identity of his father, refusing to deny queries about his royal parentage ('von' signifies royalty as opposed to Beethoven's name, 'van'), even at the expense of his mother's reputation. I propose that Beethoven's psychological solution to his need to disidentify with his father was to symbolically reinvent the origin of his birth in Fidelio.
Viewed symbolically, the last scene in the hollowed-out centre of the earth is not only the prison of the libretto's narrative, but it is also the mother's womb in Beethoven's psychological narrative. Here, the battle for ascendancy and paternity takes place. The good father, Don Fernando, deus ex machina, rescues Beethoven-Florestan from the evil father, Pizarro, who represents Beethoven's actual father. Florestan and his wife, Leonore-Fidelio (the female mother figure), emerge from the womb-prison and are borne into the sunlight while the evil father is apprehended by the good father to be returned to powerlessness. In this way, Beethoven psychologically returns his father to nothingness —to the state before existence—while the good father reigns over his family with love and equanimity. By identifying himself with Don Fernando as the rescuer of his family, Beethoven became his own good father, thereby relinquishing his psychological need of his actual father. Thus, the narrative underlying the text became Beethoven giving voice to his personal narrative of desperation and hope in the musical setting of Fidelio.
As an example of how Beethoven's psychological and biographical narrative of hope and desperation was intertwined with the textual and musical narrative, listen to the beginning of Act II, Scene I. At this moment, Leonore-Fidelio arrives in the dark underground unbeknownst to Florestan. Florestan mourns his fate, then he becomes hopeful when imagines that Leonore is close by. Ironically, she is actually beside him, though he doesn't know it. One hears in Florestan's opening recitation a cry of anguish that suggests a primal scream that is older than speech itself. When he begins to imagine that Leonore is with him, the music effects an emotional change of poignant tenderness and hope. In this interpretation it would not be amiss to suggest that Beethoven's biographical narrative not only imbued Fidelio with psychological meaning germane to the composer's life story, but it also played a major role by contributing an intimate emotional dimension to the music.
Relationship between Narrative and Music in Music Therapy
Music Improvisation and Narrative in Music Therapy
The concept of working out aspects of one's life story through musical creation and narrative is not the exclusive domain of composers. One of the main methods used in music therapy is clinical improvisation as a solo medium or in a dyad either with the therapist, or in the context of a group. In improvisation, the client makes up music by playing on various tuned and untuned percussion instruments or by singing, extemporaneously creating a melody, rhythm, song, or instrumental piece. The music may be non-referential, i.e. not representing anything nonmusical, or it may be referential, i.e. a portrait of something that is nonmusical such as a feeling, image, or event (Bruscia, 1998, p. 117).
To demonstrate how clinical improvisation functions as a narrative, I will discuss excerpts from a case study describing work that I carried out with D, a man in his mid-thirties who had been recently hospitalized with a diagnosis of schizophrenia.[5] Exhibiting negative symptoms of severe poverty and content of speech, I introduced drawing, music improvisation, and word association to help D to access his thoughts and feelings and to help him to express aspects of his life story when he was unable to use language to express himself. Viewed from the perspective of a life story, his narrative had many gaps. However, through the therapeutic process of creating musical, visual, and verbal narratives, he slowly regained the ability to communicate with himself (intrapersonal communication), which gave him the confidence to communicate with others (interpersonal communication) (Bruscia, 1998, pp. 127-128).
Therapeutic Process and Results
Because D exhibited strong symptoms of poverty of speech and was fearful of playing for more than a few seconds on any instrument, we began by listening to classical music which was his preferred music. While listening, D drew whatever came to mind and gave a title to his drawing afterwards. We then improvised together based on the images that he drew, listened back to the recording of the improvisation, and attempted to find a word or phrase that described what he heard in his playing. Often, we improvised again on the words to uncover the connotative meaning that was locked inside as we worked on intrapersonal communication. This process was repeated in each session as D continued to unravel the connotative meaning of his words and their emotional associations. D's burgeoning ability to relate to the world around him and to narrate that experience can be seen in four drawings that he did in the first two years.
The first pair of drawings is based on music that D associated with a dance.
In the first drawing, Dancing girls[6] (drawn to the Ball Scene in Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique) D tells about his world of isolation: the girls do not have faces, nor limbs or hands to join together; they have no identity, and interaction is impossible; they are half made, and they face out into a world that they cannot see (see Image 1). Some of the improvisations to word associations for this drawing included the titles active vs. neutral and curiosity vs. structure. By exploring these themes after listening back to his recorded improvisations and discussing the meaning of the words he used to describe them, D was eventually able to recognize and express some of his basic fears:
- If he allowed himself to explore his curiosity and to become active, he feared he might lose the structure that he found in flatness
- He feared losing the neutrality that he believed had been providing stability in his life.
After improvising on these drawings, he began to wonder if he could risk joining the dance, risk reaching out to the dancing girls who were a symbol of his life force.
The Dancing couple (Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances) was drawn nine months later (see Image 2). During the intervening time, his musical relationship with me had become more interactive as he allowed me to choose instruments and sounds that I thought might complement his playing. In this drawing, there are still no faces, but the bodies are imbued with life. Rather than three disconnected figures, there is a hand-holding couple whose movements are in synchrony as D is engaged in a dance on the stage of life. After doing the improvisation related to this image, D revealed that he felt a great distance between his body and his mind. In the following sessions, D began to express emotions of sadness, loss, and vulnerability primarily through improvisations, drawings, and song choice.
Two drawings of an Evergreen tree demonstrate the progression of intimacy and engagement issues. After having revealed in previous sessions that he feared feeling anger and anxiety (symbolized by the wind), he drew Protected evergreen (see Image 3). He believed the evergreen to be unassailable in its protective outline of light because it was cut it off from its threatening environment. However, when he listened back to his recorded improvisation, he became alarmed; he heard woodpeckers, beavers, and a saw attacking it. By discussing this narration of events, D recognized what his unconscious had communicated through his music—that isolation and repression were defences that did not ultimately insure protection. His anger and anxiety had been projected onto the tree (himself) and it (he) was in danger. In this example, music became a psychological narrative that helped D to gain insight into the relationship between his subjective experience and his experience in the world.
In the following nine months, issues symbolized by the Protected evergreen were explored through techniques using imagery, movement, improvisation and poetry writing. In one example of a poem, D placed himself waiting in the woods, watching the tree which was untouched by the wind and not attacked by anything to withstand. A discussion of this narrative revealed that though the tree was strong and free from attack, it was sad because it was not touched by music or snow or wind. In the following session, D narrated three images of the tree he had during an imagery exercise. He saw the wind touch the tree (anxiety with its memories), snow falling upon it (nourishment) and a group of people coming to visit it (connection with his environment).
A few months later D played calm (rain stick) and force (piano) with me in an improvisation and described that when these two ideas were integrated, there was no more brooding. He drew another image of an Evergreen tree (see Image 4) to represent this feeling visually. This Evergreen tree was surrounded by a covering of snow (nourishment) while more snow (force) fell around it. At this point, D recognized that the tree was a symbol of his own self. It was drawn eight months after the first evergreen, and it was one of the last drawings that D did in therapy. After having regained some of his verbal communication skills D eschewed the drawings he had been doing and began instead to write more poems and the occasional song; he continued to express himself through music improvisation, and he also chose to play pre-composed music on the piano which was an old skill he had abandoned. Having consciously touched upon his fears and dealt with some of them during the sessions, he agreed to join a music therapy group where he could make music and share aspects of his life with others verbally and in the music. Two years later, he used improvisation to access and express his fears related to a proposed move into a supervised apartment; he felt comfortable enough being with people in the music group to risk joining another group, then he attended a rehabilitation center. At the time we ended therapy D was planning a trip by air to visit an elderly relative and had taken on a volunteer job.
Transcendence as a Function of the Musical Narrative
Beethoven’s composition of Fidelio and D's improvisations were vehicles through which they were able to express psychological narratives related to feelings, emotions, and conflicts, both conscious and unconscious, thereby changing the nature of their experience and perceptions. One might say that they accessed a new internal space that transcended a particular state of mind that was prison-like in its limitations. As listeners, we, too, can experience the state of transcendence that the music evokes in Fidelio, for example, or in any piece of music that suits our tastes. If we open ourselves to the music, we discover we are naturally brought to a different space; the contextual meaning of the narrative can call to mind ideals or personal associations to the feeling states, and the music magically transports us to a place of transcendence of the ordinary. I propose that this transcendence of the ordinary, though not the exclusive domain of the music, is one of the main functions of music as narrative.
Thus far, we have seen how music and narrative are related—married, so to speak, in art and therapy. I will now turn to a brief exploration of the relationship of music and narrative that was revealed in a pilot research project.
The Relationship of Music Improvisation and Narrative in Autobiography: A Pilot Study
Background of the Research Study
Based on my clinical experiences with persons living with schizophrenia, I became aware that the chronic symptom of poverty of speech that affects so many persons living with this illness could be assuaged when a music therapy method such as clinical improvisation was used. In my clinical work, I had witnessed that improvisation improved and enriched intrapersonal and verbal interpersonal communication, perhaps because it mimics one's first experiences with dialogue within the infant-caretaker dyad.
As a PhD student at Temple University, I wanted to investigate the question of whether referential music improvisation could contribute to the construction of a life narrative, and if so, what was the nature of music improvisation's contribution to the verbal narrative; and secondly, to determine if there was any difference in the verbal narrative when the story preceded the improvisation and vice-versa. This small research study was carried out with four fellow PhD students in music therapy in the context of a course in music psychotherapy offered by Dr. Kenneth Bruscia in January 2004. This research was inspired by Bruscia's (1987) Improvisation Assessment Profiles (IAPs) in which salient aspects of the person's musical narrative are compared and analyzed musically in a number of improvisations in order to yield pertinent information about their psychological characteristics. Rather than analyze the music using the IAPs, this study focused on the process of creating the music improvisation in conjunction with the verbal narrative of one's life story.
Method
Each of my colleagues participated in the autobiography by improvising and narrating various segments of their life story. Two techniques were developed and compared: 1) Narrative-Improvisation Method (NIM) and 2) Improvisation-Narrative Method (INM). All participants were co-investigators in the sense that they commented on their subjective experience of the particular technique used from the perspective of a music therapist. One student used the NIM for the entire autobiography, while another did the INM. Two students chose only two autobiographical segments and used both methods, one for each segment. All verbal and musical narratives were recorded and played back for each participant. Afterwards, questions were posed regarding each person's experience of the process, the difference they observed between the verbal and musical narratives, the impact of listening to the recording, and each person's reaction to the order of verbal and musical narrative, i.e. the specific technique used, NIM, INM, or both. The following is a summary of the most pertinent themes.
Summary of Results: Pertinent Themes
Impact of the Experience of Using Narrative and Improvisation
All four participants found the experience to be powerful. This was evident through observations of the participants' body language and affect, as well as by their spontaneous comments during the experience and in the days following the experience. That the process of using autobiographical narrative and music improvisation provoked contemplation of one's life is not surprising, but it was unexpected that this group of participants who have been habituated to the use of music and words as a means of expression, would find greater meaning in the experience than they expected.
Both participants who did the full autobiography reported that they derived a sense of wholeness and meaningfulness from it. One person was surprised to discover that his entire life seemed to have direction, whereas he had not seen the connection among various parts of it before. He derived good feelings from the sense that his life was meaningful. Another found the experience to be meaningful because it created a sense of wholeness. She felt that the recorded music was an important record of her life that she wanted to keep. The experience was also powerful in terms of the effect it had on the participants' emotions and feelings. This was observed in somatic responses in some participants and in their body language during all phases of the process.
Two persons found the experience had difficult moments but felt relief in either playing or listening back to their improvisations. For one participant, the experience moved her to share something that she had not often shared with others; she had a strong somatic reaction to reliving it in the verbal narration, and she felt relieved and unburdened when she was able to express her emotions about it in the music. Another felt validation that she could hear her life's difficulties in her music.
When participants listened to the narrative and improvisation playback, their emotions became much more intense, a result that was not anticipated at the outset of the research. For example, while recounting the life story in the narrative, some participants felt removed from the emotions and perceived the experience to be a more "in the head," however, while listening to the narratives, the connection to their feelings was re-established. In a similar way, listening to both narrative and improvisation awakened more memories and associations, deepened memories, brought details to mind, and increased feelings and emotions connected to the memories. Because of these powerful experiences in the listening component of the data collection, I separated the NIM and INM into two processes in the coding: creating the narratives and improvisations and listening to them.
A comparison of the two processes of narrative and improvisation revealed two main themes: 1) moving between the narrative and the music, and 2) the order of the process, i.e. NIM or INM. The theme of "moving between" was analyzed according to how the music improvisation and narrative were experienced by the participants to be interconnected in contrast with aspects that were perceived to be in opposition.
Moving between the Narrative and the Music: Connection
The connection between narrative and music was experienced when the music brought up feelings and emotions in the context of the story that was told through the narrative. The participants felt that the story needed the improvisation in order to be complete because the music expressed feelings and emotions the participants had about the story, while the story provided a focus and a context for the feelings and emotions expressed in the music.
One participant experienced the connection differently according to which story was being improvised. He found music depicting early autobiographical stories about himself to be "programmatic attempts to…musically represent the first two verbal summaries," while stories that occurred later in his life and that were connected to relationships with others and his work were "expressions of present feelings about those two verbal summaries."
For all participants, the relationship of the music and words together deepened the process and brought new insights, particularly when the playbacks of both were listened to. During the playbacks, more memories and feelings were evoked and the narrative and music ceased to be separate events. The interconnectivity of words and music fertilized the ground for more memories, associations, feelings, emotions, and insights.
Moving between the Narrative and the Music: Opposition
Oppositional aspects of narrative and music were perceived in the difficulty of moving between a nonverbal medium and a verbal one. Some participants had thoughts, images, and feelings in the story that were different from the thoughts, images and feelings they had in the music. At times, the music revealed feelings that the words couldn't get at. For example, one participant found that listening to the narrative caused some anxiety because she became aware of difficult memories that she was trying to avoid talking about in the story. In the music, however, she felt that this conflict did not exist, as she could be with the emotions and memories without trying to avoid disclosure.
Another participant enjoyed the difference in the two processes because alternating between them was less fatiguing and provided her with a variety of experiences. She also felt that she was "going in circles" when she talked about her life, but she had the sense of "proceeding straight forward" when she played.
Order: NIM versus INM
Creating the narrative before the improvisation affected the way the music was approached. This was expressed in various ways by the participants, but the theme of freedom versus constraint and containment was present for all.
For two participants, the effect of starting with the narrative was perceived as constraining and was expressed by worry about how they would concretely express the story in the music, or by feeling that the music was a literal representation of the story. Another participant found this to be a positive aspect because the narrative organized her feelings and helped her to plan the improvisation. For her, doing the narrative first allowed the salient issue to emerge which resulted in a more focused improvisation. When the improvisation preceded the narrative, there was a greater sense of freedom. The focus in the music was on emotions, feelings, unanticipated associations, and evoked memories. One participant perceived the music sometimes to be lacking in focus, more disconnected, and more exploratory. She also felt that as the improvisation progressed, her feelings about the autobiographical story emerged and helped her to focus on what was most important to her emotionally. None of the participants voiced concern about literal representation or a programmatic bias in the music when using INM.
Emotion and Memory in the Creation of Improvisation and Narrative
During the data analysis, emotion, memory and cognition emerged as being intricately interconnected. Participants experienced a greater awareness of feelings and emotions during the experience of improvising. The narrative awakened memories, but these were perceived to be cognitive in nature and less related to emotion, so that the music evoked a deeper emotional experience than did the narrative. Feelings were experienced through somatic reactions during the music and the narrative for one participant; the experience of playing was a cathartic release that liberated her emotions, whereas in the narrative the physical feeling was an unpleasant tightening of the chest. For another, the physical involvement in playing instruments increased the connection with her body which in turn promoted the connection to her feelings and emotions.
During the improvisation, the experience of feeling and emotion emerged as multi-layered as participants became involved with their memories of the content of the past story and with the memories experienced in the past, as well as with their reactions to those emotions and feelings in the present while being involved with the creation of music. For example, through the music, one participant became aware of the lack of emotion associated with a particular period in the past and remembering this, felt sadness as she played this segment. Another felt that it was difficult to connect to emotions of past events that were about himself, and described these improvisations about the past as "a memory of the feeling." For this person, emotions emerged more strongly with stories that were more recent and included memories that were connected to relationships in his life. Thus the creation of music about the past created a complex fusion of emotions related to the past and to present perceptions of past events and emotional reactions to them.
Emotion and Memory: Playback of Improvisation and Narrative
Listening to the recorded playback of the improvisation and narrative provided a similar experience for all participants in that both processes evoked intense emotions, associations, and memories which became the catalyst for insights. It was easier to disconnect from the story when creating the narrative than when listening to it; new feelings, emotions and memories emerged while listening to both the story and music. During the listening, diverse feelings and emotions were expressed in tears, as physical discomfort, or as a sense of aesthetic beauty and wholeness. Sounds in the improvisation provided the stimulus for new associations and insights as participants made personal connections among musical elements such as timbre, instrumentation, and structure with feelings and narrative content. For example, one participant was surprised by the timbre and strength of her voice in one improvisation, where she had had a mental image of herself as powerless, and this realization led her to a new insight about herself.
Cognition: Creation of the Improvisation and Narrative
The creation of the narrative was considered to be a more rational experience than the creation of the improvisation. One participant felt that because her life story had already been told many times, there was a predictability to it which contributed to the sense of it being disconnected from feelings. Another participant felt that the verbal narrative afforded her the possibility of mobilizing her defences. Participants brought up issues of concern about the connection between narrative and music creation when using both the NIM and INM. These were: would everything in the story be represented in the music (INM); would the story be understood in the music (INM); and how could the story be played in the music (NIM).
Cognition: Playback of the Improvisation and Narrative
Listening to the recording of the narrative and improvisation was perceived to be a less rational process than creating them. Emotions that had been expressed while playing the improvisation and memories evoked while creating the narrative were recognized and remembered upon hearing it played back. This reinforced the experience and had an impact on the insights gained for all the participants. The primary cognitive focus was on making meaning of the story and the music. This was accomplished by gaining insight into: the sense and meaning of one's life as a whole; the direction and value of one's life; and the parallel relationship between feelings and life events through the narrative and the music. There was also a cognitive process involved in representing emotion in the verbal and musical life story because emotions of past events were recollected and experienced in the present as a memory of the emotion.
Unconscious and Conscious
In both NIM and INM, music revealed feelings and emotions that were not conscious. Listening to the improvisations and narratives, and discussing them brought unconscious feelings and emotions into conscious awareness. Although participants were focused on the moment during the creation of the improvisation and the narrative, they became aware of unconscious feelings and emotions upon hearing the recorded playback as they emerged during the interview and discussion.
An example of a revelation of unconscious material occurred for one participant when she became aware of how her defences operated differently in the stories and in the music: in both NIM and INM, she was able to avoid difficult emotions when she created the verbal narrative, but not when she created the music. However, upon hearing the playback of the narrative, it was more difficult to avoid these emotions and memories because she felt that what was left out of the narrative had more of an impact upon her than what had been included. This created an internal conflict that she was not aware of until she heard the difficult emotions in the disconnection in the music. She felt a sense of validation when she heard these feelings and emotions in the music that had been defended against in the narrative. Insights about unconscious feelings, emotions, and thoughts also came to light through instrumental choices, sounds heard in the music, connections made between the music and the narrative.
Conclusion
From this research some conclusions can be drawn about how improvisation contributed to the autobiographical narrative for these participants. Improvisation: 1) increased the awareness of emotions accompanying the narrative; 2) deepened and intensified the emotions accompanying the narrative; 3) awoke memories and associations to the narrative; 4) provided opportunities for physical discharge in the expression of emotion while playing instruments; 5) brought unconscious feelings, emotions, and processes into conscious awareness; 6) provided a validation for unspoken feelings and emotions in the narrative; and 7) imparted a sense of completeness of experience to the life story.
The playback of both narrative and improvisation in the data collection process was a much more significant component than I had anticipated at the outset of the research. For these participants, the playback: 1) awoke new feelings, emotions, memories and associations to the life narrative; 2) deepened the awareness of feelings and emotions; 3) provided validation for feelings and emotions; 4) provided insight into relationships between the narrative and feelings and emotions through the story content and the music, and among the different stories within the narrative; 5) provoked contemplation about the individual's life; 6) facilitated the discovery of meaning in the individual's life in the context of the full autobiography; 7) exposed unexpected elements in the narrative and the improvisation; and 8) imparted a feeling of comfort and aesthetic appreciation.
Implications for Future Research
This research was conceived in order to begin to develop a clinical technique of autobiographical narrative and improvisation for use with a stable outpatient psychiatric population. The impact that the research session had on each of my fellow colleague participants has provided an encouraging indication of the potential inherent in the use of such a technique for research with a wide variety of populations. As a nonverbal medium, improvisation may be said to draw upon primary processes similar to the dream state which accesses more unconscious material, while the narrative, as a verbal medium, is a secondary process that calls upon organizational skills and cognitive processes. Using the two together provides an opportunity to engage in both primary and secondary processes. Moving between the two allows the participant to derive insights from the connections made between them. Given these results, another application of music improvisation in conjunction with narrative might be as a qualitative research technique to generate life stories that are richer in personal association and feeling states.
In conclusion, I suggest that despite their differences in form and content, music and narrative form a relatively happy marriage in art, therapy and research.
Notes
[1] In the context of this essay, I use the word "language" to mean a set of systems and symbols of sounds used by an individual to communicate with another individual or with oneself. I use the words "communicate" and "communication" to express the act of making one's ideas or feelings known to oneself or to another.
[2] In this essay, I use the word "emotion" to express an intensified feeling or feelings of a specific nature that can be identified, for example, anger or joy. I use the word "feelings" in the sense of a consciousness of or a vague awareness of an aggregate of sensations related to emotions.
[3] For a discussion of this subject, see Maus (1997).
[4] For a discussion of this subject, see Solomon (1977, pp. 21-24) and Freud (1959).
[5] Aspects of the information included in the case study of D appeared in a different form in the Canadian Journal of Music Therapy, Fall, 2003.
[6] D's words and titles will appear in italics.
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