Music Isn’t Medicine

I saw on Twitter recently that someone in the USA had tweeted ‘music is therapy’. They were at a conference and expressing their enthusiasm about an experience they’d had there. I didn’t do anything socially unacceptable, like replying to the tweet with my pedantic objections. I just thought to myself ‘no it isn’t’. But then I thought – what’s the motivation for saying this?

Another thing that happened, related to this, again on social media: a friend and colleague recently qualified as a music therapist, with flying colours in fact. She put this up on Facebook. She’s a highly respected performer of many years’ standing, and another musician wrote ‘you’ve been doing music therapy for years’, which was obviously meant in a nice way. People who don’t know much about music therapy, when they hear the term, tend to think first of all about the potential therapeutic properties of music itself, which is quite natural. On the BAMT website there’s a good video by Kalani Das which explains why this is an error (www.bamt.org ). However, music therapists do sometimes perpetuate the idea that music is intrinsically therapeutic, and that this is part of what we have to offer. It’s a good selling point perhaps.

The problem is partly semantic. Things can be ‘therapeutic’ without being ‘therapy’, just as things can smell nice without being perfume. Furthermore, music isn’t necessarily therapeutic, any more than talking is. Shakespeare or Eastenders might be therapeutic, Newsnight might not be. With music, the effect depends on context, and on what the music is. Some music has an anti-therapeutic effect on me, there being certain musical sounds which can transform my mood markedly for the worse.

Of course, some music is therapeutic, and can make me feel a lot better than I did before listening to it. This might be where a misunderstanding arises, because most of us have had this experience. If we didn’t, we probably wouldn’t bother listening to music. When we listen to music that we like, we’ve usually chosen it. There might also be something in a piece of music that we feel connects to us on a personal level, making us feel that we have shared emotional experiences with the composer or performers. One interesting question might be, is this feeling of connection intrinsic to the music itself, or is it a side effect? Is the ‘good’ feeling something transferred to us from the performer or is it arising within us? In a music therapy context, it doesn’t really matter; because music therapy doesn’t operate within a performer to audience dynamic, and, in the immediate term, doesn’t necessarily make the client feel ‘better’.

Leaving aside the fact that the music in therapy usually involves active musical participation on both sides, in contrast to a performance, it’s not the aesthetic or emotional content of the music that has the primary therapeutic effect. It’s not about the universality of music so much as the specificity of the therapeutic context. That feeling that you get from the half-diminished chord in ‘God Only Knows’ is probably not the active ingredient in music therapy. Music is a means of connection (among others like talking, body language, turning up on time etc.) but it's not the music itself (and there is such a thing as 'music itself') which is the therapeutic agent. Music therapy is, to a great extent, about the purposeful use of music to make links. These links might be interpersonal, inter-psychic or intra-psychic. The links, whether between the therapist and the client, different group members, the client’s array of internal objects, or the client and their attachment figures, are the therapy. Here it is again: the links are the therapy. So, snappy tag-lines (and magic chords) aside, music isn’t medicine.