Abstract
How is the music therapy profession viewed by people from other disciplines? How would music therapists like it to be viewed? This new text from Kenneth Aigen (a highly regarded music therapy practitioner and academic based in New York) is a performance of a profession at a new stage of maturity. The author himself invites attention and critique from readers with other specialisms, who might be seeking an overview of the current state of music therapy. The book is organized around five questions about music therapy, each question setting the theme for a section of the book. Although Aigen is even-handed in providing contrasting perspectives on those questions, he does not hide his own beliefs and opinions. This is not an Ordnance Survey map of music therapy. It is a local’s perspective on it, and it is a very good read.
The prime strength of this text is the way in which Aigen identifies and discusses significant strands from the last two generations of music therapy. As a whole, it is a master class in weaving the themes from our profession’s development into a coherent narrative. In this task, Aigen is careful not to present a homogeneous unity of practice and theory. Instead he embraces the heterogeneity of our field and hangs his text off a series of controversies that characterise this variety. While the book’s title is an appropriate signpost to those seeking to understand the study of music therapy, Themes and Variations in Music Therapy would also have been perfectly suitable.
Some sections in this text stand out for the ease and insight of their critique. For this reviewer, they are the sections on the connections between music therapy and pre-history or archaic music practices (Chapters 1 and 10), the relationship between instrumental and intrinsic value in music therapy (Chapter 6), and his discussion of a sub-division of music therapy called community music therapy (Chapter 11). These sections provide fulsome and highly readable considerations of significant questions and developments in music therapy. Throughout, Aigen’s writing style is a hybrid of familiar and formal, employing the rhetorical armoury of a rather sparkling vocabulary and a very engaging turn of phrase, employed to inform but also provoke.
Aigen’s intention in this book reads like an incitement to dialogue; three particular questions emerged for this reviewer in response to the text, and it feels like a fitting response to voice them here. First, Aigen articulates what he calls music therapy’s ‘hybrid nature’ (p. 12). Traditionally, this has been attributed to historical and geographical variations in categorizing music therapy either as a domain of music or of health studies within academic institutions, and to the flexibility that has been adopted by practitioners in relation to the workplace. It is clear from the literature of music therapy that we have spent a lot of energy trying to find the correct way to fit the two words ‘music’ and ‘therapy’ together. The perspective in this text is that there may not be one correct way, but a range of methods of assemblage instead. The apparent tolerance of theoretical dissonances is a hallmark of music therapy. This tolerance is seen also in the debate around product or process orientation (p. 165), and in the issue of music as being both universal yet simultaneously manifold (to paraphrase Ian Cross). The question this prompts is: what philosophical foundation is required in order to properly underpin this hybrid nature?
A second, and related, question concerns the traditional relationship in music therapy between phenomenon and discourse. Aigen criticizes the notion that music contains intrinsic ‘healing powers’ (p. 6) as a phenomenon separable from the context in which it is generated. He is, however, a well-established advocate of the music-centred approach in music therapy, which assumes the primacy of musical experience as the guiding principle – and indeed, power – of music therapy practice. In this way he might equally criticize the idea that music is entirely a social construction or understood purely via discourse. The question that emerges is, can this hybrid ‘thing’ called music therapy signpost a third theoretical stance, going beyond either the phenomenon or the text, beyond either praxis or discourse?
Third, this text raises important questions about ‘performance’. Aigen devotes a whole chapter to the role of ‘performance’ in community music therapy (Chapter 12). In relation to defining this sub-division of music therapy, he notes that after all other definitional questions are dealt with, ‘it is the performance aspect that remains’ (p. 151). This comment refers to the use in music therapy practices of performances in the sense of public musical showings, and to how central these performances are to the definition of community music therapy. Aigen gives a strong account of this long-standing conversation in some quarters of the music therapy academy. It is a conversation that stands to run for some time yet. The more pressing question is not regarding the ethics or theoretical incongruity of public musical showings within music therapy practice, but regarding the absence in music therapy literature of a philosophical stance on performance as informed by any of the modern names in performance studies or its allied philosophical fields. What would Butler, Shreckner, Schneider or Badiou offer to the discussion? How would they understand any or all of the music therapy profession as performance?
But if this text is actually about controversies, what controversies are missing? I would love to know Aigen’s thoughts on the potential impact upon music therapy of global consumerism, late capitalism and neo-liberalism; on the impact of new media, celebrity and digital technology; and on the significance of new socially-engaged music or fine art practices. I could have read more about the significance of research exploring how music therapy is applied in post-operative, pain-relief and ante-natal settings; but this, and perhaps the findings of other research from allied fields (such as Altenmuller, Zatorre or Cross) may be reserved for a future publication.
This text maintains a delicate balancing act of airing different sides of the various controversies it covers, yet not concealing the author’s own point of view. Oddly, at some moments this reviewer wanted more variety of opinion, and at other times, more polemic. Overall, I felt a desire for my profession to be seen not only as a broad church that can tolerate dissonances, but also as a source of strident assertion. For instance, after reading a lovely weighing of the question of music as an adaptive property of human evolution, my mind went to Oscar Wilde. If, as the argument goes, music is not primarily adaptive (that is, not especially useful) then should we not, like Oscar Wilde and John Cage, take more pride in its uselessness?
This text presents music therapy as a heterogeneous, pluralist, conflicted, tolerant, category-defying, ethical, reflexive domain. It does not try to solve the dilemmas of being hybrid, fractal, multiple or performative. It does, however, indicate that the time might have come for a philosophy of music therapy that can engage with those properties and how they interact. A philosophy of music therapy would acknowledge the ethical level at which most music therapy theory is based, and go on to address the implications of multiplicity, performance theories, and neo-phenomenology. I look forward to seeing how those themes become woven in future.