What is the Music of Music Therapy? An Enquiry into the Aesthetics of Clinical Improvisation

In many places in the Western world where music therapy occurs, improvisation is a significant and widespread practice in clinical work. The question of the nature of improvisation in music therapy is the topic of this enquiry, with particular reference to musical ontology and aesthetics. I examine how a consideration of ontology enables a distinction to be drawn between the music made within the clinical setting, known as clinical improvisation, and music that is made elsewhere. The context for this enquiry is the music therapy practice of the UK. Through an examination of the recent history of this practice, I establish two distinct approaches to clinical improvisation in the UK, music-centred and psychodynamic. I show how there are different ontologies of music ‘at work’ between these two approaches. I also demonstrate how these distinctions manifest in the question of the location of the therapeutic effect: is it in the music or the therapeutic relationship? Finally, I examine the nature of clinical improvisation in relation to performance. I explain how a consideration of distinct ontologies of music within clinical improvisation indicates a further distinction between the music of music therapy and art improvisation that is made elsewhere

What Has Schopenhauer's theory of music to contribute to an understanding of improvisational music therapy?

Schopenhauer has been described as the ‘musician's philosopher’ for the detailed attention he pays to music, assigning the medium a ‘pride of place in the arts' (Budd 1985: 76). Whilst his theory has received ample criticism (Han 1997) on the grounds of conceptual inconsistencies, what is of significance for music therapy is the way in which Schopenhauer cites music as the inner essence of man. Unlike the other arts which form representations of the world, music is not a representation; music therefore has the capacity to say the unsayable, revealing aspects of the world that verbal language is unable to reveal (Bowie 2003). It is of further significance that Schopenhauer has frequently been cited as a precursor to Freud, in particular upon comparing Schopenhauer's theory of man's inner essence or Will with Freud's theory of the unconscious. This article explores the relevance of these theoretical links to the work of some pioneering theories of the modern western improvisational music therapy practices developed in the 1970s by Paul Nordoff, Clive Robbins and Mary Priestley. Schopenhauer's theory of music is shown not only to have had broad influence as a philosophy of music (Goehr 1996), but also to have contributed inadvertently to conceptual thinking in music therapy. </jats:p