| Abstract | The last decade has witnessed considerable growth in the fields of music therapy and music, health, and well-being. Music therapy has set new professional standards of practice, defined modern principles of education, diversified its practices, and established new protocols for supervision. Performers and composers are also giving music a higher profile in other healthcare settings. Ongoing work in health musicking and community music therapy, for example, attest to the broader ways in which
music and musical thinking can interrelate with, and serve, health-centred aims. The coronavirus pandemic, meanwhile, raised urgent questions about the relationship between music and health, and about music as a means to support society during a time of crisis. Virtual music-making was a lifeline for many musicians, a bleak reminder of lost freedoms for others. Clips of family members and other musicians serenading patients through hospital windows were shared and lauded. Live-streamed
rehearsals and concerts kept fragile musical communities connected. Each of these examples, from regulated music therapy to amateur choirs reluctantly resorting
to Zoom, underscores the significance of music in our lives, and especially of its power to comfort
and heal. This chapter contends that, taken together, these various spheres of enquiry and activity
point to the emergence of an applied health musicology. We do not intend to examine this field sector-by-sector, although our conclusion will reflect further on its possible ramifications. Rather, the chapter brings together a music therapist and a public musicologist to examine how musical judgements benefit (or might benefit) music therapy, and, conversely, what musicologists can learn when music is used in such a direct, public-oriented way. While music’s therapeutic effects have
been known for centuries, and music therapy has existed as a formalised profession since the 1940s, neither the aesthetic context and value of clinical practice, nor music therapy’s specific relationship with musicology, have received sufficient attention. Discussion has instead tended to focus on the replicable outcomes of music therapy as an empirical science. Quantitative, evidence-based research is the standard method by which most music therapy studies are evaluated. This is understandable; music therapists, after all, use music to help evaluate and create interventions for individual, clinical needs. Yet, this focus discourages music therapy from being understood or examined as an act of applied musicology and creates an unhelpful schism between empirical and creative practice. It also limits our ability to describe and understand music qualitatively as an open, creative modality between client and therapist. This situation probably explains why the fields of musicology and music therapy rarely coalesce (including their pedagogy and training being entirely separate in the majority of educational settings) and why links between musicology and therapeutic processes are established or scrutinised so rarely. Nevertheless, this suppresses our ability to ask certain questions. For example, in what ways can musically informed decision-making benefit music therapy? Are there established genres or emerging subgenres that have latent impact
in clinical-artistic processes? And if we accept that co-creating music with clients has artistic and clinical value, then what are the implications for longstanding musicological categories such as performance, audience, and even criticism? To address these questions, this chapter will examine how different types of modern and minimalist music have been, and could be, used in music therapy. Although it may seem unnecessary to suggest that music therapists should be receptive and responsive to the influence of contemporary musical trends in their work, even the most open-minded and musically informed therapist must navigate several paths if they are to do so: to gain awareness of such music; to assess its potential for clinical practice; to form strategies for its use; and, ultimately, to deliver these in a personalised way. This chapter continues, then, by addressing the relationship between musical style and music therapy in greater detail. It will chronicle the clinical embedding of improvisation and specially written materials, before considering the use, and prospective use, of pre-existing music, including Jóhann Jóhannsson’s IBM 1401, A User’s Manual (2006) and Max Richter’s Sleep (2015). |
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