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

Frohne-Hagemann, I (2001) Aesthetic Perspectives in Music Therapy. Music
Therapy Today (online), November, available at www.musictherapyworld.info
the object. The romantic approach which put human feelings on the
foreground was prevailing. The "felix estheticus" became the new ideal of man
(Welsch, 1990, 28). This was the period when in 1750 Alexander Gottlieb
Baumgarten in his work "Aestetica" (Schweizer, 1988) reconsiders the
meaning of aisthesis from which he takes the concept of sense perception and
sense cognition. Man should become aesthetical himself through the arts.
Such a conception could make us believe that man's sensibility, sensitivity and
the wisdom of the "body", thus aisthesis, was to be recognized.
But it was not like that. The "education of sensitivity", meant as an
"ennoblement", to quote Schiller, marked the ultimate detachment from the
primary sensory condition (Schiller, quoted in Welsch, 1996, 117). According
to Schiller (1759 - 1805) art shows man what he could become, by realizing
his becoming a complete being through playing. "Man is a complete human
being only when he plays" (Schiller, quoted in Fricke, Göpfert, 1984, 618).
However, Schiller did not mean by playing a free game, or what is considered
today a free improvisation, but he thought that when playing we learn how to
take possession of the "world", that is to mould it in order to possess it. He
states that is necessary to modify everything actively in a way that nothing is
as it was before but becomes as we want it to be (Schiller, 11. Lettera, 603).
Schiller's theory reveals a lack of openness to submit oneself to an
uncomplete process, to devote oneself to the subject and let us be changed by
the material world. Schiller recommends, on the contrary, to control the
material world. The world must be moulded and created without surrendering
to it and its peculiarities. "Festgemauert in der Erden, Steht die Form aus
Lehm gebrannt; Heute soll die Glocke werden, Frisch, Gesellen, seid zur
Hand; Soll das Werk den Meister loben, Doch der Segen kommt von oben" (
the burnt clay shape is walled up in the earth; today the bell will be moulded,
my friends be ready to operate; if the teacher praises the work it is from above
that the blessing comes) (Schiller, Die Glocke). This again is the situation of
the traditional aesthetics.
We can see that the projects aiming at making the romanticism aesthetical did
not recover the concept of aisthesis. If senses are only meant to serve for
being educated and if they are not allowed to speak for themselves, it is better
to become insensitive and anaesthetized. Music teachers at colleges of music
teach their students not to sense their own feelings and not to express
themselves with the unprejudiced enthusiasm children still have. The
musician who is taught to restrain his abilities within the limits of aesthetical
perfection will go to the doctor for inflammated tendons or to the psychoanalyst
for being stressed. This is the other part of the process of becoming
anaesthetized. Shouldn't there be a correspondence between sensing and
moulding?
Also in music therapy there are therapeutical approaches based on the idea
that everything can be treated by applying perfect techniques and rules that
the patient's soul. If our Governments compels us to demonstrate the
effectiveness of music therapy methods and techniques but at the same time
they should accept the concept of "aisthesis" as a treatment tool. In therapy
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