Multicultural Music Therapy: The World Music Connection

Abstract

Music therapy, like music itself, is a multicultural phenomenon. The American music therapist inevitably will be dealing with clients from a wide diversity of backgrounds. To enhance the possibility of establishing musical communication with clients from varying cultural backgrounds, the music therapist should have a basic working knowledge of a wide variety of representative world music genres. Ethnic musics have a dual possibility in music therapy practice: for enhancing musical and interpersonal communication for clients of specialized ethnic backgrounds, and for motivating otherwise unresponsive mainstream music therapy clients into musical experiences through the exotic appeal of unfamiliar musical styles and approaches to music making. Unfamiliar music may also elicit relatively spontaneous musical and emotional responses not colored by previous musical and extramusical associations. Three musical genres are presented in this article, accompanied by didactic musical examples and discussions of their potential for music therapy applications. These are Indian classical music, Indonesian gamelan, and an African-oriented percussion ensemble. These examples demonstrate how the most basic elements of completely unfamiliar musical genres can be readily learned and applied in the music therapy setting. The article concludes with a discussion of a special value of non-western musics in music therapy: their integration of the other creative arts in performance, which provides a natural model for integrating the creative arts in therapy in this culture.