During the third class meeting of Music in Everyday Life, we spent the first half talking about music therapy and the second half talking about music and torture. To the extent possible, I'm trying to juxtapose two topics that are seemingly in conflict with one another. If I'm lucky (as I was with these topics), they actually have more in common than not.
We started by discussing music therapy in general. I had them read a few chapters from Ted Gioia's Healing Songs. In the book, Gioia argues that institutional music therapy (as defined by the American Music Therapy Association) has moved away from the holistic body-mind-spirit approach of traditional music healers and has moved toward the specialist body-centric view of Western medicine in general. We watched a video of Gabrielle Giffords and the role of music in her rehabilitation. We then posited a kind of "folk" music therapy: I asked students (in light of our second class meeting) if they've ever put on music to feel better, to improve their mood. We argued that this, too, is a kind of music therapy, albeit not the strictly sanctioned kind. We discussed the role of music therapy in addressing issues of the body, mind, and spirit.
In an effort to give them an example of the kind of traditional chanting-as-healing-practice that Gioia discusses, I turned off all of the lights and we performed Pauline Oliveros's Teach Yourself to Fly. It wasn't terribly successful: I think the students were too self-conscious and/or didn't take it seriously.
We then moved on to talk about music as torture. I had them read Suzanne Cusick's article and we watched a recent documentary in which Christopher Cerf, a composer for Sesame Street, travels around the world in an effort to understand how music is used as a torture tactic. (This is well worth the time--it's about 45 minutes long and will give you the jibblies.) We talked about the use of classical music as a deterrent in public transit stations, as well as the use of an LRAD (Long-Range Acoustic Device) during the G20 Summit in Pittsburgh:
I asked the students if they had ever turned up their music in an effort to "torture" their parents. We used this to bridge the (perceived) gap between music therapy and music as torture: if we can talk about formal and informal music therapy, can we talk about formal and informal music torture? We spent the remainder of the class addressing these questions:
We started by discussing music therapy in general. I had them read a few chapters from Ted Gioia's Healing Songs. In the book, Gioia argues that institutional music therapy (as defined by the American Music Therapy Association) has moved away from the holistic body-mind-spirit approach of traditional music healers and has moved toward the specialist body-centric view of Western medicine in general. We watched a video of Gabrielle Giffords and the role of music in her rehabilitation. We then posited a kind of "folk" music therapy: I asked students (in light of our second class meeting) if they've ever put on music to feel better, to improve their mood. We argued that this, too, is a kind of music therapy, albeit not the strictly sanctioned kind. We discussed the role of music therapy in addressing issues of the body, mind, and spirit.
In an effort to give them an example of the kind of traditional chanting-as-healing-practice that Gioia discusses, I turned off all of the lights and we performed Pauline Oliveros's Teach Yourself to Fly. It wasn't terribly successful: I think the students were too self-conscious and/or didn't take it seriously.
We then moved on to talk about music as torture. I had them read Suzanne Cusick's article and we watched a recent documentary in which Christopher Cerf, a composer for Sesame Street, travels around the world in an effort to understand how music is used as a torture tactic. (This is well worth the time--it's about 45 minutes long and will give you the jibblies.) We talked about the use of classical music as a deterrent in public transit stations, as well as the use of an LRAD (Long-Range Acoustic Device) during the G20 Summit in Pittsburgh:
I asked the students if they had ever turned up their music in an effort to "torture" their parents. We used this to bridge the (perceived) gap between music therapy and music as torture: if we can talk about formal and informal music therapy, can we talk about formal and informal music torture? We spent the remainder of the class addressing these questions:
- What does our society's use of music as both therapy and torture reveal about how we value music?
- What is the relationship between music and the mind, body, and/or spirit that is revealed by both uses of music?
- Are there certain genres that are more conducive to therapy? To torture? What musical characteristics lend themselves to one or the other (interesting question considering that rap, heavy metal, and children's songs are all high on the list of music for torture...)