[Original Voices: Essay]

Interpretation in Music Therapy: Music and the Movement of Life

By Julie Migner-Laurin

Translated from French by John-Paul Grosso, B.A hon, MPhil, Phd (c)

Abstract

This theoretical article explores philosophical roots of the interpretive task in music therapy. Drawing from creativity practices and interpretation traditions such as philosophical hermeneutics, the author focuses on Gadamer’s concept of dialogue in the understanding of art. Distancing itself from the objective-subjective dichotomy of the scientific model, the truth of the artwork is viewed as participative, as it always requires an encounter, a form of presence. As clinicians, it encourages us to recognize and make the most of our own sensible response to music. Art therapist Shaun McNiff advocates for a temporary suspension of clinical meaning in order to expand the interpretive possibilities in creative art therapies. The patient’s creation is viewed as an Other, complex and mysterious, which whom we are invited to relate.

Through a clinical example, this paper examines how we understand and respond to our client’s music. The notions of intuition in the act (Kimura) and being played (Gadamer) show that along with our conscious decisions and interventions, we also follow the movement of music itself. Therefore, its meaning tends to transcend the materiality and the personality and connects us to our human condition. It is an invitation to open our hearts, listen deeply and respond creatively to the music played in therapy.

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[…] Interpretation is a complex necessity for the music therapist.
Carolyn Kenny (2006).

A question that continually arises amongst music therapists is: how ought the meaning of the music created in the therapeutic context be interpreted? - and it proves to be a particularly challenging one given the "non-specific semantics of music" (Thinès, 1991). As Jankélévitch (1983) points out: "we can make the notes say whatever we want, and assign them any anagogic powers imaginable: they will not resist! [...] music can bear any burden without complaint." In general, when we guide a patient through a creative process in therapy, it would seem reasonable to conclude that we are seeking to draw out clinical material. For this reason, the interpretive act in music therapy can be psychologizing if it presumes that the content of a given sound discloses the personality of its author and can provide a glimpse into their soul.

Perhaps such a perspective doesn’t do justice to the practices of interpretation and musical creation. There can be little doubt that the therapeutic context plays an important role in determining our point of view, but in respect to these phenomena, it is essential that one question the accuracy, relevance, and impact of such inferences on the clinical process and the patient themselves.

Shaun McNiff, an American art therapist, thinks that the interpretive act in art therapies cannot be adequately understood using a diagnostic approach alone: “I see interpretation as offering more” (1987, p. 45). Its materiality, the expressive qualities of the medium, the process, the meaning given by the patient, as well as intersubjectivity and poetic narrative are all interpretive possibilities that are equally likely to nourish the therapeutic process. According to McNiff, we risk abusively projecting our own theoretical constructions onto the creation of the patient if we impose our interpretation in an authoritarian manner. He argues that the recognition of the interpreter's unique subjectivity is a more humble, and more human starting point that enriches the interpretive act in art therapies.

These concerns echo Hans-Georg Gadamer’s reflections on the truth of the work of art found in Truth and Method (1976/1996). Objecting to the romantic understanding of art, he maintains that the work's meaning is not hidden away in some fixed objective form in the author’s intentions. The meaning of a work always surpasses the understanding of its creator because it is being continually re-interpreted with each new reading. All understanding is therefore situated, that is to say, coloured by the outlook of the interpreter (which includes the author himself: he does not correspond to his work).

So then, how can we distinguish a just interpretation from a subjectivist[1] or an opportunistic[2] one? (Warnke, 1991). In order to avoid these pitfalls, we may be tempted to adopt the positivist position and focus on the most tangible facts - the most certain and neutral aspects of phenomena. Music therapy is not immune to this temptation. We must ask ourselves if analyzing formal components is an adequate means of accounting for musical experience and its meaning. Can music still say something when it is cut apart and put at a sobering distance from direct experience?

A phenomenological approach to music illustrates how we tend to experience the artwork as an irreducible presence as opposed to a flattening of its constituents (Guillot, 2001). The very way that music presents itself to us implies a participatory truth, which is not wholly based in either the objective status of the work or the subjective experience of the interpreter. Gadamer proposes a dialogical model to account for this particular method of understanding. In true dialogue, what is at stake is not the intention behind what the other says, but what it may bring about (Warnke, 1991). This important nuance changes our relationship to the other: rather than attempting to persuade them to adapt their views in accordance with our own, dialogue aims to discover the true value of what another says to us. Though often quite demanding, when this commitment to the value of the other’s perspective is coupled with an acceptance of our own shortcomings, we find ourselves unshackled from the fetters of our subjective world.

The problem with reducing musical phenomena to a psychological theory or a scientific model is that we attempt to stabilize it’s meaning once and for all: music can’t be fixed, it is in perpetual motion. This attitude neglects the intangible and mysterious aspect of life. In so doing, we reject the other’s uniqueness. By refusing to explore more uncertain and fragile realms of understanding, for fear of exposing our own vulnerabilities, we turn our backs on the opportunity to be transformed and learn something new.

So what kind of truth can we discover if we choose to listen to music on its own terms – if we approach it through its otherness?

A Clinical Example

Alex[3] comes to my office for music therapy sessions. He is in his forties, works with troubled youth and describes himself as a very sensitive person. A self-proclaimed music lover and amateur musician who has just re-discovered the violin he had neglected since his college days, he calls music his "crutch", his means of escape from the harsh realities of life. He relates that a difficulty asserting himself and a conflictual relationship with his mother are his reasons for wishing to consult a music therapist. In therapy, he expresses both a marked need for expressing disappointment with her, and at the same time feels a strong urge to protect her from his girlfriend’s criticism. Eventually, he came to realize that there is a dimension of his mother's personality he wants to preserve despite its darker character. For the first time, he describes his mother in a more positive light and paints the portrait of a woman with the gift of wonderment and a sensibility for the beauty in others.

We agreed to explore this theme with an improvisation on the violin as I accompanied Alex on the piano. Before beginning, we entitled the number, Beauty. He requested a waltz rhythm, something "neither too bright nor too heavy" and we sprang into a melancholic minor mode that steadily increased in vigour and finally levelled off with a smooth finish.

Understanding and Responding: In the Moment

As music therapists, when we accompany patients on an instrument, our aim is to respect, understand, and nurture the patient's expressivity. In order to do so, particular attention must be paid to the other's reactions: their body, commitment to the work, and the overall character of their sound-making. Naturally, clinical and relational issues are avenues that permit an understanding of these dimensions. Being aware of Alex's apprehension for asserting himself leads my accompaniment to be as unobtrusive as possible in order to avoid invading his psychological space (and reproducing the maternal dynamic). Yet, such an orientation cannot wholly determine how I ought to play, let alone what to play, or what chords to choose.

Here, the instruments employed (him on violin, me on piano) provided a framework in which I was given the role of harmonic support (in other words, the responsibility for "coloring the music": darker, brighter ...). The patient's melody certainly provided tonal cues, but they remained open to countless possibilities. In this case, the waltz developed around a minor key, with some major harmonies towards the end. How did this happen?

The notion of "intuition in the act”, coined by Kimura (1991, p. 182), describes the particular kind of understanding required in music therapy: "the act of play, as such, is continuously trying to perceive itself. However, this perception is not in and of itself an objectification since it offers no object to experience." In fact, the aesthetic choices made in music therapy - selecting certain chords in order to achieve a particular effect - are not based on an objective methodology. As Heidegger explains, this non-objectifying process of interpretation is founded in the very conditions of our existence since, "The path toward the possible that perpetually beckons our existence forward does not move us forward in a clear and resolute manner. […] The word 'understand' in fact points to how the Dasein[4] penetrates the possible with its own momentum, an admittedly non-verbal, deluded, and hesitant penetration" (Salanskis, 2003, p. 26).

Playing is therefore a "being played", insofar as the one who plays experiences the game as something that transcends them (Gadamer, 1996/1976). When improvising in music therapy, it is in a certain sense the movement of the music itself that we follow, as a "form that determines itself" (Maldiney, 2007). A form embodied in a unique and personal perspective, that nonetheless points beyond the content of individual inclinations. Music beckons us to follow its movement and draws us along with it. In other words, neither the source nor the completion of what is being played can be found in the individual: because the musical language is rooted and steeped in community and tradition. As music therapist and theorist Carolyn Kenny (2006) reminds us, music is not closed upon itself: it is the living embodiment of a myth that connects us to the flow of history and reveals our intimate commitment to the human condition.

That being said, there is always a risk of missing the mark, of taking a musical direction that does not resonate with the patient's experience. This is why the therapist must remember to offer the patient an opportunity to respond to the music with their own impressions. In Alex's case, once the improvisation was concluded, he spontaneously commented that "this was it", that despite its somewhat cliché character, the music captured the beauty that his mother awakens in him.

Understanding and Responding (in deferral)

Responding to musical meaning with words is a perpetual challenge faced by all music scholars and therapists alike. Verbal feedback after an improvisation is often closely tied to the player's experience. Typically, a group of people who have participated in the same improvisation will recount their impressions of the experience in very different ways. While a satisfactory consensus can sometimes be reached with respect to the development of the main theme and overall character of an improvisation, the relationship each individual has with the music is decidedly personal. Putting these diverse perspectives into dialogue with each other is also one of the essential tasks of music therapy.

To this end, McNiff (1987) proposes a temporary suspension of one's clinical judgment. He suggests approaching the creative aspects of the interaction, to try and connect with it, to be available for it, regardless of the experiences and intentions at play. However, unlike the visual arts that offer themselves to our senses after the work has been completed, music is anchored to the moment since its sounding is always in the past and not immediately present at the moment we speak of it. While the hours and days that a painter might brush into a canvas remain fixed under varnish in plain sight, music shows itself to us in a fleeting and ephemeral matter of moments. This makes its autonomy, its otherness, much more difficult to distinguish.

Listening to a recording of the music created in therapy is a useful method for achieving the suspension of clinical judgment we mentioned earlier. It allows the listeners to distance themselves from the immediate context of a given moment in order to be more attentive to music, this music, and the unique message it has to share.

In so doing, we may discover that it is already interpretation. Our task is not to give it a meaning, but to allow ourselves to be touched by its meaning. Music, to put it in Heideggerian terms, "opens up a world." Is it possible to do music justice in words, and if so, how should they be said? Are we dealing with what Thinès called the , "Necessary passage into the poetic"?

An Encounter with Beauty: Death and the Movement of Life

So this waltz was inspired by the theme of beauty. Accepting to genuinely dialogue with it, in Gadamer's sense, means to listen to it and assume that it can tell us something true. And what might that be? What can it teach us about the beauty that Alex is exploring? We must approach these questions as we would a patient: with openness and humility.

This waltz seems quite introverted and not the least bit flamboyant, more fragile than pompous. Like a fine and delicate ball of cotton. Precarious. It's vaguely melancholic, perhaps even sad, but ultimately of a sombre tone. Any luminosity it expresses fades to black like the setting of the sun at dusk. The waltz meanders on this threshold, gradually and doubtfully moving from one side to the other, as if it were dizzy. Christian Bobin describes this sentiment well when he writes that, "when a face strikes us as beautiful, it is unaware of the light that brings out its features, and its presence is united with its eventual disappearance […] Beauty and death come hand in hand" (Bobin, 1986, p. 99, my translation). In the bounce of this humble waltz, beauty appeared to me as a sort of twisting motion oriented against the relentless march toward death, of everything that ends, that hurts, that leaves.

The sense of movement through time is also deeply entrenched in this waltz. The pulse that moves the music forward carries us along with it. Like life, it sets off in order to eventually settle. In the words of Jankelevitch, like an artwork, the movement of life is, "a vibrant and limited construction that sets itself apart from the infinity of death" (Jankelevitch, 1983, 164, my translation). A moving beauty is a living beauty, one that moves our hearts and minds. Subject to the rhythms of life and to the finitude of the human condition, but somehow free as well… This great paradox says something about the essence of music since it is through the experience of being trapped in time that music gives us a glimpse of eternity (Decarsin, 2001). What could be more beautiful than the song that suspends itself out of time, in a momentary eternity during which we are at one with what will eventually escape us…

Ultimately, the waltz may mean something altogether different to Alex. Perhaps he may not even find it necessary to put the experience into words. For this reason, the music therapist must be attentive to their patient as well as to the music, and only verbalize their impressions if they sense that the patient is ready and willing to hear them. To understand the other, we must avoid imposing our own point of view and instead endeavour to reach an agreement (Warnke, 1991).

On the Threshold

Music presents us with a whole world that we may encounter, on the condition that we are ready to stop at its threshold in order to listen, carefully. Setting aside our desire to assign music the status of a sort of blueprint of the patient's psyche allows us to perceive its existential dimension and reveals our interconnectedness and “possible sources of regeneration” (Kenny, 2006, p. 24). This hermeneutic attitude enriches and enlivens the therapeutic process by guiding us into a territory beyond the limits of both subjective introspection and our attempts to control life through instrumental means.

"The mystery that music evokes is not the inexpressible, but the ineffable, since we will invariably and indefinitely find something more to say about it" (Jankelevitch, 1983, p. 92, my translation).

Notes

[1] Understood as: strictly limited to the interpreter’s experience or opinion.

[2] That would be formulated according to the interpreter’s personal interests.

[3] Name and other details have been changed to ensure confidentiality.

[4] Notion developed by Heidegger in Time and Being (1927/2010). It literally means “being-there” and refers to the mode of existence specific to human being.

References

Bobin, C. (1986). Le huitième jour de la semaine. In L’enchantement simple et autres textes [Simple enchantment and other texts] (pp. 69-119). Paris: Gallimard.

Decarsin, F. (2001). La musique, architecture du temps [Music, architecture of time]. Paris: L’Harmattan.

Gadamer, H.-G. (1976/1996). L’ontologie de l’œuvre d’art et sa signification herméneutique. In Vérité et méthode, les grandes lignes d’une herméneutique philosophique [Truth and method] (pp. 119-139). Paris: Du Seuil.

Guillot, M. (2001). Puissance et phénoménalité du musical. In Viret (Ed.), Approches herméneutiques de la musique [Hermeneutical approaches in music] (pp. 93-110). Presses universitaires de Strasbourg.

Heidegger, M. (1927/2010). Being and time. Albany : Suny Press.

Jankélévitch,V. (1983). La musique et l’ineffable [Music and the ineffable]. Paris: Seuil.

Kenny, C. (2006). Music and life in the field of play : An antology. Gilsum: Barcelona Publishers.

Kimura, B. (1991). Signification et limite du langage dans la formation psychothérapeutique. In Actes du colloque « Psychiatrie et existence » [“Psychiatry and existence” colloquium]. Cerisy-Lasalle: Éditions Jérôme Million.

Maldiney, H. (2007). La rencontre et le lieu. In Philosophie, art et existence. [Philosophy, art and existence] (pp. 163-180). Paris: Cerf.

McNiff, S. (1987). Fundamentals of art therapy. Springfield: Charles Thomas Publisher.

Salanskis, J.-M. (2003). Heidegger. Paris : Les Belles Lettres.

Thinès, G. (1991). Phénoménologie de l’expérience musicale. In Existence et subjectivité, Études de psychologie phénoménologique [Existence and subjectivity, phenomenological psychology studies] (pp. 239-247). Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles.

Warnke, G. (1991). L’herméneutique et le problème du subjectivisme. In Gadamer, Herméneutique, tradition et raison [Gadamer: Hermeneutics, tradition and reason] (pp. 99-138). Bruxelles: De Boeck.

Other references

Garred, R. (2006). Music as therapy : A dialogical perspective. Gilsum: Barcelona Publishers.

Kenny, C. (2008). Interpretation, music, and music therapy. Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy. Retrieved from http://voices.no/?q=fortnightly-columns/2008-interpretation-music-and-music-therapy

Kenny, C. (2005). Reflections on music as knowledge. Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy. Retrieved from http://voices.no/?q=fortnightly-columns/2005-reflections-music-knowledge

Kenny, C. (2001). Music therapy theory: Yearning for beautiful ideas. Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy. Retrieved from http://voices.no/?q=fortnightly-columns/2001-music-therapy-theory-yearning-beautiful-ideas

McNiff, S. (2004). Art heals: How creativity cures the soul. Boston: Shambala.

Muller, B.J. (2008). A Phenomenological investigation of the music therapist’s experience of being present to clients. In Susan Hadley (Series Ed.), Qualitative Inquiries in Music Therapy: A Monograph Series. Gilsum: NH, Barcelona Publishers. Retrieved from http://www.barcelonapublishers.com/QIMTV4/QIMT20084_3_Muller.pdf

Ruud, E. (2010). Music therapy : A perspective from the Humanities. Gilsum : Barcelona Publishers.

Ruud, E. (1998). Music therapy : Improvisation, communication and culture. Gilsum : Barcelona Publishers.

Stige, B. (1998). Perspectives on meaning in music therapy. British Journal of Music Therapy, vol.12 (1), 20-27.