Dissertation - World Federation of Music Therapy

can be made between the aesthetic (non-therapeutic) and the psychological
(psychotherapeutic) potential of music experience and awareness.
As an alternative three psychological levels of music are identified and described.
One of the professional qualifications of a music therapist is to assess and evaluate the
medical, psychosocial or psychological potential of improvised or composed/recorded
music – based on the following or other, equivalent systematic criteria. It is of course
a theoretical construction to identify and label three ‘levels’ of music, so some
examples may help the reader to a clear understanding of the idea. Four examples of
composed music from the baroque period have been selected. The argument is that in
baroque music it is fairly easy to isolate one musical feature (or ‘variable’), which is
held stable, while other features (‘variables’) changes. However, in principle the
considerations presented here considered are valid within a psychodynamic,
metaphoric interpretation of music, independent of style, genre and origin
(improvisation or composition).
A favourite musical principle in the baroque period is called basso ostinato (with
cognate names like canon, ground, chaconne, ricercare or passacaglia). The basic
idea is well known from (but not quite identical with) the popular form of the canon,
e.g. Frere Jaques, where each of the three parts are identical and introduced with a
certain time interval. In the 3 rd movement of Mahler's 3 rd Symphony the first section is
such a Frere Jaques-Canon, however the melody is in minor and with a special
orchestral colour, endowing this simple canon with an uneasy, almost surrealistic
quality.
A typical baroque canon or chaconne has as bass part that is repeated unchanged from
beginning to the end of the piece/movement. The upper parts imitate each other with
specific time intervals, presenting the primary melodic material of the composition
(more or less like Frere Jaques). A composition of this type is
PACHELBEL: Canon in D (four string parts with basso continuo) 38 .
The bass introduces the ostinato in a solo over two bars. The meter is 4/4, and the
ostinato is composed of 8 notes of the same length (crotchets), beginning on tonic d
38 Recordings of all four baroque compositions analyzed in this section can be found on the audio cd
accompanying Wigram, Pedersen and Bonde (2002)
92