The Psychedelic Listener: Theorizing Music in Therapeutic Practice by Stephen Lett a Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillme
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The Psychedelic Listener: Theorizing Music in Therapeutic Practice by Stephen Lett A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Music Theory) in the University of Michigan 2019 Doctoral Committee: Professor Marion A. Guck, chair Associate Professor Karen Fournier Professor Charles Garrett Professor Erik Mueggler Stephen Lett [email protected] ORCID iD: 0000-0002-4324-7703 © Stephen Lett 2019 Acknowledgements Over the past several years I have had the pleasure of developing this project in dialogue with a supportive group faculty throughout the University of Michigan. This project started as an outgrowth of an idea I had following a seminar with Marion A. Guck. I would like to thank Marion for offering me the space to develop this project, which (like some of my writing) quickly ballooned into unforeseen territory. When I struggled to contain and synthesize the expanse of ideas, practices, histories, etc., Marion held the space for me. And when I came out with a pile of writing going off into numerous tangents that I struggled to draw together, she helped me clarify my thinking through her generous and critical comments. This project began in earnest during an independent study with Karen Fournier where I began both to read the literature on Guided Imagery and Music and to explore how I might make my interest into a music theory project. I thank Karen for being open to this project and supporting my very early attempts to make some sense of GIM and also always offering a candid take on my writing about music theory. Another source of inspiration for this project was Erik Mueggler’s “Body, Text, Landscape” seminar. There I began to think about the potential of ethnography in music theory. I would like to thank Erik for his generous feedback on my early proposal drafts. I am also grateful for his feedback at my defense where he brought to light many of the tensions within my text. I will be forever grateful to Charles Garrett for agreeing to join my committee at an incredibly late stage in this project. I am continually astonished by the insight and generosity of ii his feedback. His reading of this text helped me to better synthesize the disparate lines of inquiry, and led me to realize that I had never actually written a conclusion to most of my chapters. Beyond Michigan, I would like to thank Fred Everett Maus for offering me sage advice during a conversation just as I was beginning to formulate this project. Alexander Rheding generously took the time to read proposal drafts and chapter one, offering supportive and helpful feedback. The GIM community has been incredibly generous to me. I would like to thank: Roberta Justice for introducing me firsthand to GIM in practice; Martin Lawes for offering feedback on chapter one; Marilyn Clark for housing me in Baltimore and generously taking the time to answer my questions; and Dorothea Dülberg for keeping in touch about her research on Bonny. Finally, I would like to thank “Anna” for being open to letting me observe her practice and to her clients that agreed to be recorded for the project. Many colleagues from across the University of Michigan have read and offered valuable feedback throughout the process of writing. During the spring of 2016 I had the privilege of receiving funding and space to write through the LSA and Sweetland Center Dissertation Writing Institute. There I received helpful feedback on a draft of chapter four from an interdisciplinary group of colleagues from the social sciences and the humanities. In the spring of 2018 my writing was funded by a SMTD Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Faculty Allies grant. I would like to thank Gabriella Cruz for organizing and finding funding for the writing group and Ho-Chak Law, Lena Leson, and Austin Stewart for offering feedback on chapter one. A number of other colleagues have read parts of this work. Carla Maria Kayanan, Priyamvada Trivedi, Ryan McCulloch, Meredith Juergens, James McNally, and Anne Heminger all waded through my early drafts and helped me find some direction. I would like to especially thank James iii Dinardo for pushing me to see my project in terms broader than music analysis. I am also grateful for William van Geest’s infectious enthusiasm for this project—an enthusiasm that helped reorient me when things got tough. Kerry White and Matthew Leslie Santana offered invaluable feedback on my ethnographic vignette in chapter six. I would also like to thank them both for their emotional support and opening me up to intellectual currents I had yet to resonate with. Taking part in the Deleuze Interest Group—a Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop— was central to the development of my thinking. I would like to thank all members of the group for helping me begin to make sense of Gilles Deleuze when I was completely out of my depth— they helped me learn how to swim. Two members of DIG have remained interlocutors throughout this project. Randeep Hothi made me think about writing desire and joined me in my ventures into a neuroscience reading group. Nathaniel Gallant introduced me to everything I know about the critical study of religion, and continues to offer me ongoing assistance in working through the genealogy of concepts central to GIM theory. I would also, of course, like to thank my friends and family. I have been lucky to have a fantastic friend network in Ann Arbor—thanks largely to being in a cohort with Asaf Peres. My family has also offered support and enthusiasm, even if they aren’t quite sure why it’s taking me so long to finish this degree. I thank them for their love, understanding, and interest. Lastly, I would like to thank Vivian. I look forward to our continued journeys as intertwined travelers through the flows and blockages, miseries and joys of (intellectual) life. iv Preface If you are here (and you are not a committee member, a friend, or a colleague of mine), then my title has done its productive work. But I may have misled you. So below I’ll quickly unpack what I actually mean by it. The beginning of my subtitle indicates the disciplinary space this dissertation addresses: music theory. Although this is the text’s home base, my purpose throughout is to open music theory up to thinking about music occurring outside of that field. In fact, my premise is that all it takes for anyone to be doing music theory is for them to be thinking about music—whatever “music” means for them. That’s it. Professional music theorists, I believe, can learn valuable things from such “non-theorists.” This is my starting point. Although I hope to demonstrate the value of this stance through my text, I don’t offer an explicit argument for it. I seek, rather, to demonstrate its value through my own practice. Practice. This is the final word of my subtitle, and it gestures towards the domain of music-theorizing that I engage: thought about music in “therapeutic practice”. Beyond designating the domain I’ll be studying, however, I mean for the word “practice” to offer a counterpoint to the first word in the subtitle: “theorizing.” Of course, the usual distinction is between “theory” and “practice,” but I chose the gerund form of my home discipline to signal that this too is a practice—that in theorizing music we are carrying out a practice. And insofar as we assume that there are different ways of orienting to practice, I am implying that there are also different ways of orienting to theorizing. This project, then, is about seeing how we music v theorists might incorporate the orientation towards music-theoretical practice performed in the therapies I explore in our own music-theoretical work. In saying that I study people theorizing music in therapeutic practice, though, I am casting a much wider net than I actually engage here. Indeed, most of what follows is only peripherally related to the most obvious space where music is theorized in therapeutic practices: music therapy. While some of the individuals I study are music therapists, many are not. My focus, rather, is on psychotherapeutic practices that incorporate music—two kinds of psychotherapy in particular. One is a kind of “receptive” music therapy called Guided Imagery and Music (GIM), in which a client lies down, relaxes, and listens to music selected to evoke psychodynamic responses. Although developed by a music therapist and considered a music therapy, many psychotherapists with no other music-therapeutic training practice GIM. The second kind of psychotherapy I extensively engage is the therapeutic practice out of which GIM evolved: psychedelic psychotherapy. As the name implies, psychedelic psychotherapy involves drugs—LSD, mescaline, and the like. Beyond denoting a set of psychoactive substances, however, the term refers to an image of the psyche that individuals on psychedelics may come to understand through their experience on the drug: that your “mind” is connected to (and can become more and more alienated from) a transpersonal “Mind.” The drug, that is, helps manifest your mind more fully by opening it up to Mind. Both of these senses of the term psychedelic are helpful in speaking to what I mean by my title: “The Psychedelic Listener.” Psychedelic as a psychopharmacological category speaks to the historical origin of this image of listening in the practice of psychedelic psychotherapy. In speaking of the psychedelic listener, then, I mean to situate this image of listening as emerging vi out of the countercultural undercurrents of that historical moment—from the late 1950s through the early 1970s.