Everybody Is a Star: Recording, Performing, and Community Music Therapy

Abstract

For most of human history, music was an essential aspect of communication and sense of connection within a tribe or village and was deeply integrated into the rituals, ceremonies, and celebrations that related to the deepest needs of the community (Netti, 1956). The current belief that music is primarily entertainment to be enjoyed separately from life's more serious obligations dominates contemporary culture with musical products such as CDs, DVDs, and concert performances produced by professionals within the highly lucrative entertainment industry. (Lieberman & Estgate, 2002, Negrus, 1 996). This perception of music as basically a form of recreation permeates our society right through to our health and rehabilitation institutions. According to Anthony Salerno, founder of numerous residential rehabilitation centers:The fact is, the vast majority of people who work in our profession, not to mention the clients, families, advocates, regulators, policy makers, legislators, elected and appointed officials, and the community at large - too often think of music therapy as only a recreational activity and they regard recreational activity as a method of residents keeping occupied. The fact that this belief is endemic is disturbing, but factual (personal communication, October 24, 2007).Many music therapists work within recreation departments of institutions and are often expected to facilitate large groups, making it challenging to establish an authentic alliance with many, if not most, clients. It is possible the music therapist may consciously or unconsciously align more with needs of the institution than the needs of the client by seeing a lot of clients, increasing the visibility of music in the facility, attempting to generate an appearance of fun, and generally making things look good from an outward perception.One problem in determining what is, and is not, music therapy is that music lends itself to these types of activities. Concerts, festivals, parties, living room sing-alongs and similar enjoyable social gatherings are familiar aspects of most people's musical lives. In my experience, even under the worst conditions from a traditional therapy perspective, music is still a generally positive and uplifting experience for most clients in rehabilitation programs and institutional settings. Music makes people feel good. We play music. As such, it may appear inconsistent with the principles of serious work.Pinker (1 997) dubbed music auditory cheesecake because he could discern no evolutionary benefit to mankind's universal and enduring practice of it. That our prehistoric ancestors made music is clear as evidenced by the discovery of bone flutes more than 50,000 years old (Tramo, 2001 ) and the fact that the limbic system, an ancient part of the brain in evolutionary terms, has been demonstrated to be strongly responsive to music has led some researchers to conclude that music predates spoken language (Menon & Levitin, 2005). Brown (2001) proposed that early pre-language humans utilized a music-language that conveyed information as well as emotional meaning using discrete pitch levels and expressive phrasing. Eventually, what Brown has termed Musilanguage, would split into two specialties, music and spoken language.Although some studies on the evolutionary benefit of music have looked at it from a sexual/courtship perspective (Miller, 2000), Benzon (2001) hypothesized that the brain and music evolved together and that music continues to play the role it did in humankind's beginning, what he called the forge in which the new forms of social being emerge. As human civilization developed, music has reflected its period as much as it has illuminated the future and stretched social boundaries. To offer a few relatively modern examples, in the Middle Ages, the Church restricted the use of certain harmonies that are now common. In the 1 9th century, the Waltz was considered immoral. …