Contextualizando a música para melhorar a musicoterapia

Abstract

While undeniably effective in helping clients, music therapies rely on tautologies and abstractions to explain what is happening, and this limits any extensions to music therapy. This paper utilizes one contextual position which highlights the observable effects of musicking on people’s life contexts, especially social contexts, and how ‘internal, private events’ arise from the social world. The many musical behaviors, musical contexts and musical effects are reviewed. A comparison is made with language use showing that music is not a true language but that this has advantages for music therapies. The main effects of musicking fall roughly into three categories: emotional effects on the listeners; attentional effects or distractions; and discourses about music or interpretation. Like language, the ‘power’ for music to have these effects depend upon past social relationship reciprocities and not the music (or language) itself, and music can therefore help redefine or reframe people’s social relationship exchanges while playing or listening. Music can replace the over-use of language in our society and supplant bad or conflictual language-based thinking. Suggestions are made throughout of how music therapies might learn from a contextual analysis, the comparison to language uses, and from techniques of cognitive behavior therapies, narrative therapy, and hypnosis.