Song Discussion as Music Psychotherapy

Abstract

Music therapists use four fundamental types of music experiences to engage their clients and help them to achieve specific aims. These experiences have been termed music therapy methods (Bruscia, 1998a), and they include improvisation, re-creation, composition, and receptive experiences. In receptive methods, client takes in live or recorded music as a listener and responds in some manner, whether internally (e.g., imaging or relaxing) or externally (e.g., drawing or discussing). One variation of a receptive experience - and topic of this paper - is song discussion, in which client and therapist listen to a song together and then discuss meaning and relevance of song to client's life (Bruscia, 1998a). Song discussion can occur in both individual and group therapy.As Grocke and Wigram (2007) point out, many different terms have been used to describe what amounts to multiple variations of song listening and discussion with clients. We advocate for term song discussion as distinct from other labels that appear frequently in music therapy literature as synonymous. For instance, music discussion is a broad term that implies listening to and discussing any type of music; this process could conceivably revolve around purely instrumental (non-lyric) works rather than song material. We avoid term lyric analysis because word analysis suggests an official or academic scrutiny of text, a process that is likely to take place on a cerebral rather than an emotional or interpersonal level. To us, lyric discussion connotes discussion of words of a song without much (if any) attention to music that undergirds text. We believe that song discussion should allow for conversation not only about lyrical aspects of song but also about rhythmic, tonal, expressive, and formal elements of music and, in particular, nature of marriage between textual and musical elements (addressed in greater detail below).In this article, we make a distinction between song discussion as we practice it and other experiences involving song, such as following: 1) music communication in which client or therapist presents a song or instrumental piece that helps individual express something of significance about self, therapeutic relationship, or therapeutic process (Bruscia, 1 998a); 2) unconscious song recall, in which a song is evoked from client's unconscious for analysis (Diaz de Chumaceiro, 1998); 3) song improvisation, which sometimes involves verbal or musical discussion of a song that is improvised by client and/or therapist in session (Austin, 1998); and 4) song composition, in which client and therapist may discuss lyrics of a song that has been or is being created by client (Baker & Wigram, 2005; Freed, 1 987). Additionally, type of experience to which we refer herein is, by and large, one in which therapist pre-selects song for discussion rather than one in which the client or clients choose song (or piece of music), either by bringing a CD to a session or by choosing a CD from a collection in therapy room (Grocke & Wigram, 2007, p. 1 58). A discussion that flows organically and/or unexpectedly from another music therapy experience, such as may occur in song choice (singing client's preferred songs) (Noone, 2008; Martin, 1991) is also different from what we describe here. To be clear, type of song discussion that we write about in this paper has following features:1) The experience Is planned In advance by therapist before arrival of client(s) rather than evolving from another type of music experience.2) The song material is typically selected by therapist rather than by client(s).3) The song material is selected according to therapeutic usefulness (rather than therapist preference, for instance) as well as therapist's understanding of key psychological and interpersonal dynamics and processes related to experience (described in detail below). …