23.7. 1993 Vitoria-Gasteiz / Spain - World Federation of Music Therapy

long before -- inthe new-born ca se-- they are capable
of understanding our world. Every time I played "Silent
Nigth" in a recording by string orchestra and organ, or
play myself at the piano, to my a my niece, a baby of
two-month, she felt moved and cried each time.
In Creedmoor State Hospital, autistic and psychotic
children prefered emotional music to candy, or to go
outside to play.
The affection which the child feels througth music has
the advantage of being free of any negative content; it is
like feeling an ideal affection, an ideal maternal love.
Rhythm or melody?
That the new-born child is affected by music is
demonstrated by the universality of the cradle song
throughout man`s history. It is said that the importance
of the cradle song lies in its rhytm. I agree that a very
even, slow rhytm, can lead to sleep and that the fetus
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has lived and been lulled by the maternal heart rhytm,
etc. But it seems to me that the effectiveness and
durability lie not in rhytmic element but in the affective
content of the human voice, the singing voice, the
melody, much more than the rhytm alone.
It is not the rhytmic which is curative in these children
but the melodic, or harmonic element, which can
provoke emotion, and to evoke affection.
We know that the autistic child is as an automatoh,
sometimes, immersed in a series of stereotypes which
express his pathological anxiety. Rhytmic music, where
the rhytmic element predominates over the melodic
element, is the opposite of what these children need,
precisely becouse it can increase their automatisms.
We want to break these series of vicious circles in which
he is enclosed without being able to get out of them by
himself. For this reason, I am against any to much
rhytmic exercises, or to much rhytmic music, or
mechanical activity, in the first stages of treatment.