How Music Helps in Music Therapy and Everyday Life

Gary Ansdell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317120810
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Why is music so important to most of us? How does music help us both in our everyday lives, and in the more specialist context of music therapy? This book suggests a new way of approaching these topical questions, drawing from Ansdell's long experience as a music therapist, and from the latest thinking on music in everyday life. Vibrant and moving examples from music therapy situations are twinned with the stories of 'ordinary' people who describe how music helps them within their everyday lives. Together this complementary material leads Ansdell to present a new interdisciplinary framework showing how musical experiences can help all of us build and negotiate identities, make intimate non-verbal relationships, belong together in community, and find moments of transcendence and meaning. How Music Helps is not just a book about music therapy. It has the more ambitious aim to promote (from a music therapist's perspective) a better understanding of 'music and change' in our personal and social life. Ansdell's theoretical synthesis links the tradition of Nordoff-Robbins music therapy and its recent developments in Community Music Therapy to contemporary music sociology and music studies. This book will be relevant to practitioners, academics, and researchers looking for a broad-based theoretical perspective to guide further study and policy in music, well-being, and health.

PART I
Musical Worlds

Music is a world. Every one of us has his own experiences in that world. There are endless depths, infinite varieties and facets of musical experience for the listener, the student, the performer, the composer, and for the therapist….

Paul Nordoff and Clive Robbins

Music is a resource – it provides affordances – for world-building.

Tia DeNora

Chapter 1
Musical Ecologies

What does it mean when this performance takes place at this time, in this place, with these participants?

Christopher Small¹

Emerging Musical Worlds

Sesha lives in a well-designed community home with five other adults with profound physical and cognitive disabilities. Her father Jeffrey² shows me how nicely thought out the physical and visual surroundings are, but how problematic the auditory environment is for someone like Sesha. We listen. Background recorded music (and its volume) is chosen by care staff. Jeffrey says he can see that it’s often not to any of the residents’ tastes. A further background ‘soundscape’ consists of food blenders whizzing, a TV left on, a hoover, someone’s habitual moaning. Because of the residents’ various challenges they become a captive audience to these unwanted sounds, whilst their musical worlds remain deprived.

A day later, I have a quite different experience of Sesha’s relationship to music when I visit the family home where Sesha is staying for the weekend. The last section of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony fills a large room with high-quality sound through high-quality speakers. Sesha seems powerfully involved with the music, following the contours of energy and excitement. Her father sits beside her, sometimes taking her hand and allowing Sesha to pump it up and down, not exactly in time with the music, but in close sympathy with the music’s energy coursing through her. Together they enjoy the music, and take pleasure in each other’s pleasure.

On a Saturday evening, I go to London’s Wigmore Hall with my old friend David for a song recital by the baritone Thomas Hampson. The venue is an exclusive one, the tickets are rare, and I’m only there because David books early. I find the plush antique environment reassuring: it somehow reflects back to me an ideal image of myself as a connoisseur – socially and culturally competent (though, tellingly, I identify less with the audience, most of whom are considerably older than me). Such concerts are part of how David and I meet socially, and there’s now a satisfying history to our sharing pleasure together this way.

The atmosphere is formal, and people’s conduct follows the reassuring rituals of a classical concert. An announcement is made – ‘Please, no coughing’ – as a recording is being made that night, and people concentrate and mostly inhibit expressive movements, save in the right places. All attention is on the performer, as people savour the musical icons (Schumann and Wolf) that Hampson brings to life, and the qualities of his voice and interpretation. In the interval people, drink wine and along with social gossip talk of the music rather as if it too were a fine wine – a matter of refined taste and judgement. Thomas Hampson sings beautifully, and after long appreciative applause he pledges to come more often ‘to this shrine to the art of music’.

People are chatting, laughing, joking… cups clatter, chairs and tables scrape, a short buzz of feedback comes from an amplifier as an electric guitar tunes up to notes from a piano….

A guitar fiddles around with fragments of riffs and scales, bending notes Blues-style, then a gentle harmonica emerges from the blend, leading to a few minutes of loose dialogue between harmonica and guitar….

Across these sounds, a sharp voice chimes: ‘Did you know it was Sally’s birthday yesterday!? Did you? Did you?’ It pierces the atmosphere, then disperses rapidly….

Attention returns to the music as the piano produces a sequence of jazz chords – bits of this and that, tryings-out, soundings… and the guitar recognises the chords and joins in… as does the harmonica, but in the wrong key. ‘E flat? No? B flat… got you!’

Then unexpectedly there’s a lull in conversation and people are listening, and the players orientate to their newly focused audience, swiftly choosing a song. The piano offers an introduction and the singer leads with authority….

‘I Left My Heart… In San Fran…cis-co…’, his voice stylishly curling over the room, commanding attention. There’s a slight discrepancy between singer and pianist over the tempo, but soon all the players fall in with the singer, weaving their own melody lines and rhythmic elaborations into the mix. Within a few phrases, the chatting crowd turns into a listening audience – there’s a gathering of attention and focus, someone quietly whistles, a few people sing snatches of the melody they know….

We’ve just sat through the first five minutes of a drop-in music session in a café for people with enduring mental health problems. Extraordinary music happens here each week.

I walk into a small park in Shanghai, an oasis of calm in an urban jungle where all types and ages of people are strolling through. Under a fixed shelter at the confluence of a number of paths, a group of about twenty elderly people are singing. I sit on a nearby bench and listen for half an hour.

There’s a leader, but also a constant flow of suggestions both from members of the choir and from their ever-changing audience. The singers occasionally look at song-sheets but seem to know most of the repertoire by heart. This has the casual feel of a regular event. They seem relaxed and enjoying themselves, interacting quite casually with people around them. A man asks me whether I’m enjoying it, and I ask him what they are singing. ‘They’re old-timers,’ he explains. ‘They like the old revolutionary songs of their youth.’

There’s a nice spontaneous sense to their singing, and it has a ‘porousness’ that somehow catches (and responds to) the flow of the park’s life around them. A nurse positions an elderly lady in a wheelchair in front of the singers, and soon she suggests a song and they willingly perform it for her. She taps her hand on the armrest of her wheelchair. Later a baby catches the attention of one of the women singers, and she turns to sing to the baby, who responds noisily. Then all of the other singers also orientate towards the mother and baby, who receives an entire choir’s performance for a minute.

Here are four very different stories of people and music in particular situations. Do they have anything in common? Are they all performances? How can we think further about what’s happening?

Traditional approaches to thinking about music would typically zoom in or zoom out to understand more about each scenario. For some scholars, the micro-level is key. A musicologist might zoom in to the internal structure of the ‘musical objects’ yet be less interested in the people involved. A music psychologist might, in contrast, be interested in how Sesha listens to music as a cognitive achievement of her mind and brain. An acoustician might be interested in how loud a cough in the Wigmore Hall needs to be to spoil the evening’s recording. A ‘critical sociologist’, in contrast, might take the opposite strategy of zooming out from the event in order to explain how music and concerts relate to broader social structure, illustrated by how David and I banked further ‘cultural capital’ to reinforce our already privileged social position by attending the classical concert. And a philosopher might reflect on Thomas Hampson’s comment about ‘this shrine of music’ and what music is as a phenomenon to be worshipped in this way.

In this chapter, I shall suggest an alternative way of thinking about such musical situations, neither just zooming in or zooming out, but taking a third perspective that music sociologist Tia DeNora (2000, p. 4; 2011b) has called a meso-level of analysis³ – one that tries to steer a middle way between micro-musical detail and broader non-musical abstractions. ‘Meso’ means ‘middle’ or ‘intermediate’, and it aims to stay looking, listening and thinking in situ, in the middle of the musical action. It follows and observes people and music within particular situations and their unique conditions – sometimes zooming in or zooming out, but mostly listening and watching from that crucial middle distance that allows us to see where, when and how musical action emerges and takes shape.

To understand more about the scenarios with which I began this chapter from a meso-perspective, we need to compare how people, music and situations interact by asking: When? Where? Who? With what? With whom? We then see how each scenario involves…

• …a particular place – inside a home, care setting, concert hall, café, park… all of which have specific atmospheres, functions and typical activities, conventions, and patterns of how people move in, through and out of them…

• …at a particular time – either regular times that signal a ritual-like accumulation, or unique one-off events, or domestic times (Sesha and Jeffrey mostly listen after dinner), or the formal duration of a concert…

• …with particular people – including their abilities and disabilities, their history and inherited culture, their personal preferences, talents, habits of action and practice, thoughts and memories, ways of presenting and ‘performing themselves’, their needs, and their gifts for others through and with music.

To these dimensions we can add three more key factors – that the people involved are all:

• …using particular things – both musical things (organised sounds, songs from a specific repertoire, instruments, CDs and audio equipment) and non-musical things (‘props’ that match or support the occasion – such as tea cups or wine glasses, food, chairs and tables, stages, canopies, costumes etc.)…

• …involved in particular relationships – long term or just established, real or historical, ideal or actual…

• …becoming part of the action – nobody is really ‘just listening’ – all are doing something in some way.

For all their differences of type and scale, the four scenarios show musical worlds taking shape in relation to exactly where people are, what they are doing at that time, and what resources they have to hand. Reciprocally, people can be seen as shaping themselves and their relationships within these emerging musical worlds, exploiting the possibilities they offer. Music is always something between and amongst. Making music is making social life.

Musicking: An Ecological Perspective

Thinking about music in this way is to take a broadly ecological perspective. Although this concept is more familiar today in relation to the natural world, it makes a lot of sense to think of human social and cultural life as ecological too. The Greek origin of ecology combines oikos – the household – with logos – word, or in a more philosophical sense the order, principle or ‘logic’ of something. Thinking ecologically means exploring how people manage to live together more or less successfully within both their natural and their social environment. Recent movements such as ‘community psychology’, ‘health psychology’ and branches of sociology have increasingly used an ecological metaphor to explore how people thrive and sicken, adapt and develop in relation to their ever-changing physical, social and cultural environment.

Certain key principles are common to both natural and human ecologies. The most important of these is that everything in an ecology is connected and interdependent. Ecological relationships are often embedded or nested inside each other, a concept represented by the ‘Russian dolls’ model.⁴ Individual people, for example, are part of family structures, which in turn are nested within a local community, and so on – up to ‘macro-structural’ levels of government. A change at one level of an ecology ripples up or down to influence the others. A second key principle is that ecologies work through a subtle interdependence and exchange between living and non-living things and processes. Whilst each entity normally keeps its own boundary and identity, it is also porous and in continual interaction and transaction with other things around it. Processes of communicating, collaborating, improvising and recycling are key to keeping an ecosystem flexible, resilient and sustainable.

A meso-level of analysis helps us to see these ecological principles in action within musical situations. It means attending closely to how music is part of a complex process of interdependent interactions between people, practices and things within a particular place. We could see a ‘musical ecology’ in terms of the original Greek sense of household management – as one of the sub-systems that helps to make and keep our broader social world habitable.

Christopher Small’s (1998) concept of musicking (popularised through his book of that name) elegantly portrays such an ecological perspective on music⁵ – although, interestingly, he does not specifically name it so.⁶. In a sense, Small’s concept was old news. For decades, ethnomusicologists and anthropologists have been reporting how music is woven into everyday social life in traditional cultures. But this perspective had largely not filtered through to the mainstream. Thinking about music in our own culture has been obsessed until very recently with the idea of music as an object to be venerated, or sold as a product, or performed by talented others up on a stage. Each of these moves music away from its more mundane place in everyday life.

Small writes of how he struggled for years to get satisfactory answers for himself to the traditional ‘big questions’: What is the meaning of music? What is the function of music in human life?

It is easy to understand why those are the wrong questions to ask. There is no such thing as music. Music is not a thing at all but an activity, something that people do. The apparent thing ‘music’ is a figment, an abstraction of the action, whose reality vanishes as soon as we examine it at all closely. (Small 1998, p. 2)

A certain cognitive reframing has taken place in music scholarship and popular opinion i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Series Preface
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on Referencing
• A Note on Confidentiality
• Dedication
• Introduction: Music's Help
• Part I: Musical Worlds
• Part II: Musical Experience
• Part III: Musical Personhood
• Part IV: Musical Relationship
• Part V: Musical Community
• Part VI: Musical Transcendence
• Appendix A Note on Method
• Bibliography
• Index