Dissertation - World Federation of Music Therapy

ESA can be considered a qualitative enrichment of the quantitative ’sequential
analysis’. The focus of interest is ”the dynamic aspects of phenomena, such as
interactions between or among people or the unfolding of folk tales and other stories.
The objective is to discover the structure of these processes, i.e., the ’rules’ that
govern the sequence of interactions or events. Quantitative researchers use statistics
like transitional probability or time-series analysis to discover regularities in the
sequence of events. Qualitative researchers are more interested in the conceptual
logic of event structures, i.e., in models’ that show the relationships among events.
David Heise calls the logical structures ’production grammars’ (1988, p.187), since
they are a set of rules. A production grammar is expressed either as a list of relations
among events or depicted in a diagram” (Tesch 1990, p. 64, italics added by me).
Tesch distinguishes between structural analysis and interpretational analysis, and ESA
belongs to the first group.
Even if ESA is not defined by Tesch as a ’narrative method’ it is obvious that ESA is
well suited for the analysis of clinical events like BMGIM sessions. ESA has been
used by Grocke (1999) in her study of ”Pivotal Moments in GIM”, and by Marr
(2000) to analyse music and imagery sequences of four participants ’travelling’ to the
music program Grieving (Keiser 1986). ESA was applied ”to discover how the
temporal music sequence, and specific musical elements, influenced imagery
processes and development” (Marr 2000, p. iii). In this analysis I use the same graphic
table model as Marr, correlating musical episodes (based on the phenomenological
description and the SMMA analysis) with the imagery sequences of the participants.
The coding system is different from Marr’s. She made a distinction between temporal
events (“imagery as it occurred in time, or as a chronological sequence”) and
Emotional events (“images reflect emotional or feeling content, or the participant
described or expressed emotion”). I find these codes too broad for my purpose, so in
this analysis I use the code column for a registration of image modalities in order to
study any eventual patterns in the distribution. ’Comments’ indicate important
correlations between music and imagery, based on my own hermeneutic
interpretations of the music.
A necessary precondition for the ESA is a complete and very precise transcription of
the imagery, as it unfolds in time. Only when this transcription is combined with the
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