Aesthetic Perspectives in Music Therapy * - World Federation of ...

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Frohne-Hagemann, I (2001) Aesthetic Perspectives in Music Therapy. Music Therapy Today (online), November, available at www.musictherapyworld.info experienced in the right place at the right moment, could by all means have a moral value and be compatible with mind. Art was mainly seen as a valve of affect and one should be in touch with it in a correct way. As in Plato's opinion art served to metaphysics. In the world of art one was to meditate about ideas and the senses were to be domesticated. Such an aesthetic position, defined by W. Welsch as a "metaphysical position", was present throughout classical antiquity. Despite of a passionate admiration for everything spiritual, it is a basically anti-sensory position. The senses and the "body" are actually a means to pass from sensory experiences to extrasensory ones. Therefore, the metaphysical position is essentially an "anaesthetizing aesthetics" (Welsch, 1990, 27). We find such a metaphysical position also in music therapy when music is used to transcend and/or dominate our drives rather than to express our personal emotions. It is present when music is used in order to arrange and structure the soul and the client is to follow the music as his/her teacher. We can find the same position not only in some music therapy conceptions, as for instance Anthroposophical Music Therapy, but also in GIM or in Analytical Music Therapy, or whenever that we deal with the concepts of transcendence or sublimation. We could reproach Freud for not having valued drives and the Id, because he wanted to submit them to the Ego. According to Freud being sensory should be sublimated. This can make sense in many cases but each music therapist has to ask him/herself whether he/she uses music in order to restrain or to increase the "body's" wisdom and whether the sense perception itself is sufficiently valuated as a subject of reflection. Medieval aesthetics Back to history. In medieval aesthetics the purpose of art was not only to highlight beauty but also to show the essence of the invisible in through the visible, that is to reveal divine signs to the world. What could not be perceived by the senses, was to be represented aesthetically using light and colours, thus through sight. The invisible needs symbols in order to be represented. This explains the wide use of symbols and allegories not only in the pictorial arts, but also in music. What cannot be perceived by the senses certainly is much more interesting than that which can be perceived. In music we perceive not only sounds but also take into the awareness energy fields and relations (Zuckerkandl, 1963) which refer to symbolic meanings. They also play an important role in music therapy. However, as for the interpretation of symbols and a general interpretation there are different trends. Among music therapists some scholars consider the aesthetical representation and interpret the extemporary work of art according to certain theoretical criteria while others prefer to concentrate on the aesthetical processes as for instance intensifying, 4
Frohne-Hagemann, I (2001) Aesthetic Perspectives in Music Therapy. Music Therapy Today (online), November, available at www.musictherapyworld.info widening, shortening, , distorting, sharpening, inverting , merging or transposing musical motifs, figures and forms in their relation to psycho dynamical processes. The second group is the one I prefer. Instead of trying to understand the symbol as an accomplished piece of aesthetical presentation I try to understand the symbolization. Symbolization is a way to create Gestalt configurations and an aesthetic dimension used f. ex. in Morphological Music Therapy (according to Salber, 1991, 6 Gestalt factors). Here the process of transformation is more important than the created product. Two dimensions concerning aesthetical perception come clearly out: some music therapists focus on the music as the accomplished creation of patients while the others highlight the act of creating in itself. As far as I know this last aesthetic position did not matter in the past. Renaissance Up to the XV century visible objects were considered as signs of a divine invisible reality. During the Renaissance, instead, objects now expressed themselves. If an object was considered beautiful, this meant to acknowledge the structural laws expressed by its appearance. Artists started to apply the laws of perspective. Things can appear smaller or bigger, thinner or larger, clearer or darker. Indeed, the discovery of perspective established a relationship between the object and the observer, the eyes. However, aesthetic perception remained fixed on the object and was still basically visually oriented. There was no awareness of the sensory resonance of the "body" on the perception of the object. It is necessary to underline that the western aesthetics with its concepts of experience and truth has been and still is strongly influenced by the Greek "theoreo" (I see). Cognition, and therefore theory, are connected to the eye which is as part of the brain. This might be the reason why aesthetics were mostly applied to the pictorial arts and not so much to music. Aesthetical concepts like vision, gaze, survey, perspective, lightening and so on have a visual nature and convey a different kind of knowledge if compared with the sensory knowledge of hearing, feeling, touching and tasting. This second kind of knowledge has a "bodily" nature based on feelings, contacts, empathy and resonance. What is the difference between "hearing some voices" and "have some visions"? The answer is that somebody who is "hearing voices" is regarded to be a psychiatric case, whereas a person "having visions" could be qualified to become a candidate at the State General Elections. The valuation of the importance of the eye goes along with a narrow-mindedness for the other senses which means a reduction of knowledge! Romantic Age During the Romantic Age in the XVIII century an aesthetics of feeling (Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Burke) became to appear. What was perceived as beautiful could be considered as such, apart from the objective appearance of 5
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