Healing Sounds: an Anthropology of Music Therapy

HEALING SOUNDS: AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF MUSIC THERAPY MICHELLE BÉRUBÉ Thesis submitted to the University of Ottawa in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Masters in Anthropology School of Sociological and Anthropological Studies Faculty of Social Sciences University of Ottawa ©Michelle Bérubé, Ottawa, Canada, 2018 ii Acknowledgments I would first like to thank my thesis supervisor, professor Ari Gandsman. Thank you for giving me enough freedom to get lost in my rambling thoughts, but then steering me back in the right direction with your careful suggestions. Your door was always open when I hit a tough spot. Thank you. I would also like to thank all the music therapists who contributed to this work by sharing their insight with me. Without their participation and input, this thesis would not exist. Thank you to my family for always supporting me, loving me, (and feeding me). I never could have done it without your encouragement. And thank you to Ashwin, Meagan, Fred, Barb, Kat, Stéphanie, Emily, Myriam, Mauricio, Allie, and all the others who kept me from becoming a work-obsessed hermit over the past two years. iii Table of Contents Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………………………..……………….…..1 Affect……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….………..2 On Aesthetics and Experience…………………………………………………………………………………………………..13 What is Music Therapy?................................................................................................................15 On Therapy and Therapeutic Uses……………………………………………………………………………………………26 Methodology……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………27 Chapter 1 – “Out of the Head, Into the Body”…………………………………………………………………..….30 Music as a Shortcut………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….31 Entrainment – or, Music as Movement………………………………………………………………….…………………36 Embodied Memory………………………………………………………………………………………………………….……….41 When Music Causes Harm………………………………………………………………………………………….…………….44 Chapter 2 - Tuning the Relationship………………………………………………………………..……………………51 Creating a Rapport…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..51 Shared Experiences………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….55 Musical Conversations……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..60 Networks in Music……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………64 Aesthetic Relationships…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….67 Chapter 3 - The Creative and the Healing…………………………………………………………………………..…73 Thinking Creatively…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..76 Musical Environments………………………………………………………………………………………………………………80 The Art of Creation…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..84 Music of the Spheres………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..88 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….…..93 iv Abstract Music therapy has been recognized as a legitimate health practice in Canada since after the Second World War. While research shows the emotional, social and health benefits of music therapy, researchers have failed to agree on the reason music can be beneficial to health. I argue that affect could be the key to understanding the myriad ways in which music, and music therapy, can have a positive effect on health. Through the lens of affect theory, I explore embodiment, relationship-building and aesthetic creation as three areas in which music can allow the harnessing of affect towards health goals. I note music’s powerful affect on the human body and movement, and the ways in which these affects are mobilized towards specific clinical goals. I explore the various human-to-human and human-to-sound relationships that are mobilized, created or strengthened through music therapy interventions, and how they relate to health and to the affect of “becoming”. Finally, I note the strong evidence for musical and aesthetic creation as a part of self-care, both by music therapists and by their clients, and argue for a broader understanding of how creativity impacts health, by allowing people to affect their environments and “become themselves”. 1 Introduction One of my earliest memories is being handed two spoons and taught how to bounce them on my knee to keep the beat while my mother’s cousin played the violin. When I was a little older my father sat me down at the piano and we played Heart and Soul and chopsticks together. I dabbled with the recorder and the clarinet, took some guitar lessons in high school, and taught myself how to accompany a singer on the piano from a Disney songbook. My father is a music aficionado, who was always introducing my brother and I to classic jazz, prog rock, and folk music (but not country music. Never country music.) My brother is constantly singing his new favourite songs around the house, and plays enough instruments to form an entire band all by himself. Growing up it was rare that I would go a single day without music. On the other hand, my mother has worked in health her whole life. A veterinarian, it wasn’t rare that she would serve as in-house physician when we were sick or injured. Later she transitioned into public health, and started working with people rather than pets. We discussed medical research we’d read about at the dinner table, and we debated the various public health initiatives she helmed. I followed in her footsteps too, in a way, training in first aid and becoming a lifeguard at sixteen, and then delving into medical anthropology during my undergrad. It perhaps comes as no surprise that when I decided to do my master’s I was intrigued by the intersections of music and healthcare. I was aware of music therapy before, but knew very little about it outside of “therapy that uses music”, so I began doing some research into the subject. At first I felt that the key to discussing music therapy as an anthropologist lay in the conventional aesthetics of the music – how fast or slow was the beat, what kind of instruments were used, how beautiful a piece of music was perceived to be. It increasingly became clear, however, that what I really wanted to talk about – where my interviews kept leading me, where I found the best grounds for reflection - was affect. I became less 2 interested in the specific aesthetic characteristics of the music I was discussing than in how music was felt. I also noticed that the therapists I spoke with emphasised the effects of music on their clients (clinical goals reached, emotions expressed, relationships built) more than the characteristics of the music itself (what they were playing and how.) When the specifics of the music were discussed, it was always in the context of how it made someone feel. Eventually, this led me to wonder: How is affect relevant to health and therapy, and how is it mobilized by music therapists to help their clients? Furthermore, how is music uniquely positioned as a conduit of affect in a therapeutic context? In order to explore these questions, it is important to understand a few concepts: Affect Affect is a contested concept. There are about as many definitions and perspectives of affect as there are people who write about it. Before we begin, it is important for me to define affect as I will use it, and draw a distinction between its sister concepts such as feelings and emotions, if only to prevent myself from getting lost in a fog of vague, blurry terminology. Perhaps the most influential musings regarding affect in the social sciences today are the works of Deleuze and Guattari (1980) who posit affect as a non-conscious form of interaction with others. Affect, in this view, is an ongoing process of “becoming”, where two or more entities interact with one another on an unconscious level to co-produce a new reality. Deleuze and Guattari use the example of a wasp and an orchid to explain their concept of “becoming” (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 10). On their own, an orchid and a wasp are two distinct entities with very little in common, but through processes like pollination they “become” something very different: a wasp-and-orchid hybrid that cannot exist without its two component parts. Without the orchid the wasp cannot eat, and without the wasp the orchid cannot reproduce. While it is tempting to reduce these interactions to concrete actions – the wasp pollinates, the 3 orchid is eaten – Deleuze and Guattari consider that there is a deeper level of interactions happening on a non-conscious level, which fundamentally change the nature – not just the actions - of the orchid and the wasp. This other level of interaction is what they define as affect. The same metaphor can be applied to many situations, with two or more entities interacting: a man and his dog, a student and teacher, and yes, musicians and the music they play. This bilateral process can also be referred to as “becoming-with”. It is important to note that affect according to Deleuze and Guattari is fundamentally deconstructive of the subject; the wasp and orchid do not exist as separate entities, and as such no experience of affect is truly subjective. It is through affect that entities, which are de-territorialized (in the rough sense of “taken out of context”) by their conception as subjects, can be reterritorialized (or “put back in context”). An orchid cannot exist in a vacuum; if it did it would lack everything that we associate with orchids, if it managed to exist at all. It is only through its relationship with the wasp (and the soil, and the sun, and the rain), that the orchid as we know it, the orchid-in-context, exists. Brian Massumi (1995; 2002) expands upon Deleuze and Guattari’s reflections with a distinction between feelings,

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