Music listening as therapy

Stipendiat ved Institutt for musikkvitenskap (IMV)

My anthropological project explores the claims that music listening may contribute to a person’s well being and, significantly, that interpersonal communication about “private” music listening may enhance music’s therapeutic potential. These claims stem from (and will be re-tested in) conversations with and observation of two different groups of music listeners.

One is a group of residents, music therapists, and recreational therapists at a residential facility for people living with AIDS in New York City. I have come to know the facility’s residents and employees through weekly volunteer work 2004–08 and through previous academic fieldwork there 2006–08. The fieldwork conducted in this period provided the foundation for my MA thesis in Ethnomusicology from Columbia University in 2008.

The second group are Scandinavian and American music therapists using the music therapy technique called the Bonny Method of Guided Imagery and Music (BMGIM). BMGIM is a receptive music therapy method based on music listening. Hoping to gain as intimate a knowledge as possible of the spectrum of beliefs and practices that constitute BMGIM therapy, I will complete the training to become a certified BMGIM therapist by 2013/2014.

Both of my ethnographic sites are marked and unique arenas for music listening. In one of the sites I am observing and documenting music’s felt effects on men and women overcoming serious medical challenges and the social stigma attached to AIDS while they live within the walls of a North American health-care institution. At the other “site” I study how music therapists approach, and how they are trained to approach, music listening as a therapeutic, transformative tool to be used to the benefit of their clients.

Studying music listening within these sites raises questions about music’s relationship to the body. The men and women in both groups claim they are able to feel the music they listen to “in their bodies”. Sometimes when they listen to music they describe seeing “things”—landscapes, other people, themselves as others, or even that while listening to music they feel as if they are “seen” by others. Sometimes they tell me that such experiences with music also make them feel better. I argue that these claims should be viewed as relevant information to modern medical discourse and institutions.

The people involved in my study reflect upon and display deep knowledge of how their day-to-day emotions effect their levels of health and vice versa. AIDS is a lethal and highly stigmatized disease to which so far there exists no “cure-all.” However, through successful combinations of medicine (mainly anti-retroviral drugs) and other, more holistic approaches to healing, people living with AIDS can be enabled to live “normal” lives with a close to average life expectancy.

My ethnographic work documents how people whose lives are challenged in different ways refuse to be defined by their medical classification. It documents how important their knowledge of themselves as “something else but their disease” is to their individual levels of health. Among such ways of knowing “the self”, my work focuses on music listening. I do so because I believe that musical experiences—and communication about these—provide vital clues to how a persons mental and/or physical healing may best develop. A person’s engagement with music points to that person’s individual reveries, fantasies, and remembered life stories. These are regions of human life that are neither defined by nor made absolute by our medical diagnosis, yet, I argue, they are crucial to our identity and to our personal health.