Musical Healing in Cultural Contexts

Penelope Gouk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351556927
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

How do people use music to heal themselves and others? Are the healing powers of music universal or culturally specific? The essays in this volume address these two central questions as to music's potential as a therapeutic source. The contributors approach the study of music healing from social, cultural and historical backgrounds, and in so doing provide perspectives on the subject which complement the wealth of existing literature by practitioners. The forms of music therapy explored in the book exemplify the well-being that can be experienced as a result of participating in any type of musical or artistic performance. Case studies include examples from the Bolivian Andes, Africa and Western Europe, as well as an assessment of the role of Islamic traditions in Western practices. These case studies introduce some new, and possibly unfamiliar models of musical healing to music therapists, ethnomusicologists and anthropologists. The book contributes to our understanding of the transformative and healing roles that music plays in different societies, and so enables us better to understand the important part music contributes to our own cultures.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

Penelope Gouk

This volume is a collaborative work by a group of scholars whose goal is to promote interdisciplinary and cross-cultural discussion of the healing powers of music.¹ How do people use music to heal themselves or others, and how do such practices change through time and space? Are the healing powers of music universal, or culturally specific? There is something about music's effects on people which arouses interest far beyond the confines of any single profession, and clearly has tremendous appeal to a broader public. It is no accident that virtually all contributors to this volume have been trained in music or dance and still practise their skills non-professionally. We feel that the central part that such activities play in people's lives, and the benefits (or otherwise) that they bring, should be more widely recognized.

The origins of this book go back to 1995, when I embarked on a study of the relationship between music and healing in the early modern period (fifteenth-eighteenth centuries). It seemed appropriate to discover how colleagues in history, musicology, anthropology and other social science disciplines were addressing the kind of issues I was interested in, as well as practitioners themselves. What soon became evident is that although there is a wealth of literature by music therapists, other arts-therapy professionals, psychologists, psychiatrists and neuroscientists about music's healing properties, comparatively little on this area has been produced by scholars engaged in social, cultural and historical studies.² Organizing a meeting seemed the obvious starting point for generating wider interest in this theme within the scholarly community, and the symposium on ‘Music, Healing and Culture: Towards a Comparative Perspective’ (London, 20–21 August 1997) was the outcome.³ This occasion provided a rare, but extremely welcome, opportunity for dialogue between those whose primary concern is to treat patients, and those whose job it is to reflect on such processes and place them in cultural context. One of the most fruitful sessions was the final plenary discussion where we addressed the practicalities involved in producing a book. It became clear that our aim was twofold: first, and foremost, to generate interest among those who do not think of themselves as being experts in this area (e.g. the majority of historians, anthropologists and cultural scholars), and second, to introduce those who are experts to some alternative models of practice, both past as well as present.

Inevitably, there are limits to what can be achieved in any collection of essays. It important to acknowledge that what this book does not claim to do is survey current practices within music therapy or related forms of therapy. By the term ‘music therapy’ I mean the activities of qualified practitioners working with clients/patients who cannot deal with specific psychical or physical conditions without professional assistance. Such activities involve patient assessment procedures, goal-oriented treatment processes and appropriate forms of evaluation.⁴ None of the essays here is by a qualified music therapist, although the 1997 symposium included a presentation on the profession's search for an adequate theoretical foundation.⁵ To learn more about the enormous variety of music-therapy work which takes place in psychiatric units, hospitals for severely learning-disabled people, schools for children with special needs and other medical and educational institutions worldwide, it is advisable to consult the profession's own literature.⁶ Likewise, there is no account here of the widespread use of music in medicine, namely the use of music therapy in the treatment and prevention of physical illness and disease. Music is routinely used in hospitals as a support or adjunct to other forms of treatment, if not as the primary form of intervention (e.g. in surgery, pediatry, intensive care, labour and delivery, terminal illness), and new applications are constantly being developed.⁷ This is an area about which medical historians know almost nothing, and would provide a fascinating subject for future research, not just by music therapists interested in the origins of their profession.

The type of ‘music therapy’ that this volume does take some account of, however, is the general, non-expert kind – the only form which really existed before a recognized body of music-therapy professionals came into being. In this context, the term ‘therapy’ is being used to denote the general therapeutic effect which can be gained from being involved in any form of musical/artistic performance, either as a participant or audience. The critical difference between this kind of activity and ‘proper’ music therapy (as defined in the previous paragraph) is that it does not need the intervention of a trained therapist, and is chiefly a form of recreation: that is, an act or experience selected by the individual to meet personal wants in his or her leisure time, or as part of a liberal education. This kind of therapy potentially includes all creative activity, and regardless of the efforts of professionals to stabilize the boundaries of their discipline, it inevitably overlaps with their domain of expertise. Hence the choice of Musical Healing as the start of our book's title: this reflects a bias towards thinking of music as a form of healing (i.e. making strong, whole again) rather than just in terms of therapy (i.e. techniques of intervention involving distinct goals and desired outcomes). What might be especially interesting to explore is the changing relationship between these two domains, and how the differences between them have been constituted on both sides of the professional-lay divide.

As I have already indicated, there is no shortage of texts addressing the healing powers and therapeutic applications of music, in whatever sense these terms might be used. It is altogether harder to find material which locates such practices in any kind of historical or cultural setting. This is perhaps not surprising, since most people conducting research into this area are concerned with developing new therapies and have little time for history. Significantly, the most recent contributions to the study of musical healing have come from anthropology and ethnomusicology, most notably Marina Roseman's Healing Sounds from the Malaysian Rainforest (1991), John Janzen's Ngoma: Discourses of Healing in Central and Southern Africa (1992) and Steven Friedson's Dancing Prophets: Musical Experience in Tumbuka Healing (1996). Little further needs to be said about these books in this introduction, not just because Janzen and Friedson are among our contributors, but also because the influence of their work (and that of Roseman's) is manifest throughout the volume. The literature which is worth remarking on here is altogether more Eurocentric in focus, but nevertheless still has a lot to offer new readers.

Published just over fifty years ago, Music and Medicine (1948), edited by Dorothy Schullian and Max Schoen, was the first multi-author work in English devoted to the subject. The book comprises sixteen articles by scholars from a range of disciplines (see Table 10.1), together with an extensive bibliography by Schullian that merits further analysis in its own right. Music and Medicine is extremely important for what it represents both intellectually and institutionally, and accordingly has been made the focus of the final essay here. As I explain in Chapter 10, the book's appearance not only signalled a new phase of academic interest in music's healing powers, but more significantly marked the emergence of music therapy as a fully accredited profession in the United States. Typical of its time and place, the book celebrated the advanced status of Western medical science in contrast to more ‘primitive’ forms of health care, but at the same time traced the origins of music therapy to ancient Greece. Half a century later, such ethnocentric and elitist assumptions are no longer tenable, but we should not underestimate the difficulty of framing an alternative set of questions about music's capacity to heal. What such questions might be are considered in more detail below.

The only substantial historical work to appear since Schullian and Schoen's volume is Werner Friedrich Kümmel's Musik und Medizin: Ihre Wechselbeziehungen in Theorie und Praxis von 800 bis 1800 (1977). Based on research for the author's Habilitationsschrift at the Frankfurt medical school, the book surveys texts covering a thousand-year period and includes an impressive bibliography as well as illustrative material. As the author himself points out, there are few works which address music and medicine in any systematic sense, and Dorothy Schullian's classified bibliography is the only real precedent for his own. In taking a long-term view of the subject, Kümmel privileges continuity rather than discontinuity, and the decision to organize his material thematically further reinforces the impression of an unchanging medico-musical tradition before 1800. Among his key themes are music and the pulse; music and medical education; the foundations of the diatetictherapeutic functions of music; music as an aid to health, and its role in therapy (music therapy as such being a modern development). Within each subject area he cites sources from across different centuries, and thereby shows just how long-standing certain ideas actually are. For example, the role of music as link between body and soul, its use as both a stimulant and a sedative, and its particular associations with mental diseases, can be traced throughout the period. Readers should be aware that many of the issues touched on in this introduction (see below) were already being discussed in antiquity, and that Kümmel has also addressed them in some depth.⁸

A disadvantage of this thematic approach, however, is that it is hard to see what changes in thinking and practice have occurred over time, or whether in a given period or place there have been significant disagreements about music's healing powers. Kümmel has taken an important first step by identifying sources which range from popular medical handbooks to learned treatises on music theory. But precisely because his discussions move easily back and forth across centuries, across countries, and across professional boundaries, the reader can have no sense of why any individual author wrote what he did (they are all male, I think), in what context it arises in his own work, how it fits into larger discourses, and whether it was commonplace or unusual for its time. Thus, for example, we may note that during this entire period books on music theory almost invariably include a passing reference to the healing properties of music – along with its other social and moral benefits – in their introductory material. This literary convention followed the pattern set by Boethius’ Fundamentals of Music (6th century ad), and in virtually every case the author has nothing substantial to say on the subject. From the medical perspective, it is also noteworthy that while the value of music as a liberal art is a common literary trope (again this derives from Boethius), in fact it is conspicuously absent from the formal medical curriculum.⁹

Where then, might we ask, does music fit into the field of medical knowledge and practice? And has musical healing been more widely practised in some cultures rather than others? Peregrine Horden's response to this challenge has been to edit a volume on Music as Medicine, which complements the present collection.¹⁰ His essays are organized chiefly chronologically, but their geographical range moves beyond Europe to embrace Islam, Hinduism, and Korean shamanism. With such material at our disposal we may begin to track major historical changes, and also to compare different belief systems and practices. Another strength of Horden's collection is that it explores some particularly important themes in depth. For example, the phenomenon of tarantism, its effects and methods of cure, has been a recurring topic of interest in the European medical community since the sixteenth century.¹¹ The influence of Marsilio Ficino (1433–99), whose Three Books on Life (1489) seems to be the original source of this interest, is another significant theme in Horden's volume.¹² Not altogether surprisingly, this enigmatic Renaissance philosopher also appears in the present collection (see below, as well as Chapters 5, 6 and 7), as indeed does tarantism (Chapter 10).

Given this overlap of interests, and especially since three authors have contributed to both volumes (Austern, Gouk, Kramer), the question of how our books actually differ from each other naturally arises. Part of the answer is already evident in the choice of titles: while Music as Medicine is explicitly described as a ‘history of music therapy’, Musical Healing foregrounds ‘cultural contexts’ and avoids the term ‘music therapy’ for reasons already explained. This is not to say that we consider history unimportant (indeed quite the reverse!), or that music therapy should be marginalized. However, ‘doing history’, or indeed practising any other kind of discipline presupposes a set of categories and assumptions that is worth making explicit if we really want to create a truly interdisciplinary approach, much less a cross-cultural one. The nature and purpose of history, for example, has traditionally been to hold up individuals, groups or nations as examples to propagate moral and religious values. Within the Christian tradition, history has also been understood as a goal-directed process, and since Francis Bacon's time as a cumulative product of mankind through the centuries.¹³ We are unable to escape the consequences of this kind of cultural grounding, but at least can acknowledge its effects.

Merely substituting the phrase ‘cultural contexts’ for ‘history’ is no solution to the problem, although it perhaps forces us to confront it more directly. Neither is it adequate simply to juxtapose historical and anthropological essays, as if by doing so we might overcome cultural bias. After all, the very categories history and anthropology themselves imply a shared set of assumptions about these subjects and how they are to be treated. Indeed, one theme which emerged strongly from our discussions at the London symposium was the need to combine disciplinary approaches. As we considered case studies from Africa and South America, for example, it became clear that the ‘traditional’ practices being described by anthropologists were inextricably bound up with histories of European global expansion. At the same time we also recognized that, in chronological terms at least, the most modern (or rather contemporary) beliefs represented in this volume are non-Western, based on ethnographic work carried out in post-colonial societies whose peoples have been exposed to European technologies since the sixteenth century. An unexpected link between Stobart's account of an Andean village and the African papers by Janzen and Schumaker, for example, was the impact mining had made on these communities and their means of self-expression. Having made this connection, we went on to consider more generally the relat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Introduction
• Chapter 2. Bodies of sound and landscapes of music: a view from the Bolivian Andes
• Chapter 3. Theories of music in African ngoma healing
• Chapter 4. Dancing the disease: music and trance in Tumbuka healing
• Chapter 5. ‘Spiritual medicine’: music and healing in Islam and its influence in Western medicine
• Chapter 6. The inflected voice: attraction and curative properties
• Chapter 7. ‘No pill's gonna cure my ill’: gender, erotic melancholy and traditions of musical healing in the modern West
• Chapter 8. Soul music as exemplified in nineteenth-century German psychiatry
• Chapter 9. The dancing nurse: kalela drums and the history of hygiene in Africa
• Chapter 10. Sister disciplines? Music and Medicine in historical perspective
• Bibliography
• Index