Aesthetic Perturbation: Using a Chance/Aleatoric Music Therapy Intervention to Reduce Rigidity in Adult Patients with Psychiatric Disorders

Abstract

Examining music therapy from a compositional, music analytical, and musicological perspective, Lee (2003) advo- cates for clinicians to explore theories of music to help influence theories of therapy, as well as for the development of new clinical methodology. For example, Curreri (2008) explored composer John Cage's concepts of experimental music wherein the term Aleatoric Music Therapy was used to describe the clinical use of chance and indeterminate procedures with an adult patient diagnosed with depression. Moreover, Cage's philosophy of disorganized sound (Cage, 1961) was used as a method for deconstructing the patient's habitual ways of thinking.According to composer John Cage (1961), ambient sounds interact in a nonlinear fashion, are void of any hierarchal musical function, purpose, or intention, and arise from the entire space surrounding the listener. This experience of disorganized sound was for Cage the basic music in which he interrupted when his chance or indeterminate compositions were performed (Wolff, 1996), placing the performer and listener alike in a situation where time ceases and all sonic events create an illogical and imperfect musical landscape, void of personal taste, likes, dislikes, and sentiment.John Cages' music is considered illogical because it is a departure from conventional organized composition (Retal- lack, 1996). Consequently, Cage never stopped finding unusual ways to compose his music (Kostelanetz, 1989, 1996), surprising his audiences with innovative musical departures, frustrating expectations by causing, for the purpose of this paper, aesthetic perturbation in the listener. Aesthetic perturbation is defined by the author as the act of challenging the patient's aesthetic system by engaging the group participants in an aleatoric/chance performance, catapulting the participants into a new, unusual, and illogical musical experience.Aleatoric/Chance MusicThe term aleatoric music derives from the Latin word alea, which means a game of dice or the throw of a die or dice, hence the term aleator, meaning dice-thrower (Rae, 1994; Revill, 1992). This method of composition can also utilize the tossing of coins, picking cards out of a hat, and so on, to determine how the piece of music will be composed and/or performed (Griffiths, 1981, 1995). Aleatoric methods used in musical performance can vary from composition to compo- sition depending on how the piece is to be shaped and/or arranged by the performer (Kostka, 1999). Twentieth-century classical composers, such as Pierre Boulez, Witold Lutoslaw- ski, and Karlheinz Stockhausen utilized aleatoric/chance procedures in their compositions (Griffiths, 1981, 1995). However, some composers, mostly John Cage and his supporters, wanted less control over their music to give more creative responsibilities to the performer by using chance operations/procedures as a form of composition (Kostka, 1999).Chance procedures used as a form of composition subjects the entire piece of music to indeterminacy (Kostka, 1999). By using chance operations, one is not concerned with order or personal taste, but is concerned with open experiences (Cage, 1961), attending to sounds as they materialize. The aleatoric composition is free from expectations because the music relies on chance and not on memory, likes and/or dislikes. The composer creates original performance paradigms that require both performer and listener to contribute to the musical outcome (Struble, 1995).Unsurprisingly, some practitioners of chance argue that the quality of music is not an important factor when creating aleatoric/chance compositions because quality equates stan- dards and judgments, which represent prejudice and conven- tional belief systems (Cage, 1961). Chance composition is viewed as a process of discovery through experimentation and open-experience (Cage, 1967, 1973) by creating pieces of music, not in terms of creating a musical object (Stravinsky, 1970; Vare` se, 1998), concerned with organized sound, quality, style, expression, hierarchically arranged pitches, rhythm, form, etc. …