What's a Piano? Music Therapists Portray the "Musical Personality" of the Piano

Abstract

In their book, Music therapy in special education, Nordoff and Robbins (1971) referred to range of abilities that different instruments have and to ways in which they can be used in context of music therapy. They argued that:Each instrument possesses a character, a of its own that is created by its sound, its physical construction, and way it is played. This individual quality gives each instrument its special value. Children quickly feel and respond to character of an instrument we set before them. Through playing it and experiencing its sound, they can form a relationship to it that has purpose (p. 83).But what exactly is a musical personality? Possibly, we are looking at three different layers of personality. The first layer, which we might call the musicological includes musicological attributes of instrument that are physical and objective, such as its sound, its timbre, its size, and its shape. The second layer, which we might call the therapeutic personality includes therapeutic aspects of instrument, such as its capability for expression and its capability to enable therapist-client communication. To give an example, one might consider fact that piano is very big in size (i.e., a musicological trait). Therapeutically, this means that this instrument enables two people, client and therapist, to sit near each other, and, thus, to achieve intimacy. The third layer of personality, which we may call the projective personality includes characteristics that one projects upon instrument. This is based on notion that in therapy people tend to refer to objects as symbols and to project different upon them (Jones, 1916; Klein, 1930; Segal, 1957). For instance, people might give their car a name, refer to it as a he or a she, and even blame it for being lazy when it has mechanical problems. Projective traits are subjective in essence because different people project different characteristics upon objects.In this study, we would like to focus on these ideas and to try and portray musical personality of piano, one of most important instruments in Western music in general and, specifically, in music therapy. We are not interested in musicological attributes of piano; they can be found in numerous encyclopedias and lexicons (Baines, 1966, 1992; Sachs, 1940). We are, however, interested in therapeutic of piano and in that people project upon piano1 . In following sections, we will first discuss instruments in general and underlying psychological connotation that they may have. Then, our focus will be directed to piano. We will review what has already been said about piano and about its unique therapeutic and psychological attributes. Finally, we will describe how we attempted to achieve goal of this study.About Psychology of InstrumentsIn ancient world, instruments were believed to possess magical powers (e.g., Alvin, 1966; Sekeles, 1996; West, 2000). For ancient man, it was natural to believe that sounds produced by instruments were voices inherent in things that produced them (West, 2000). In modern era, we have technological explanations to understand how instruments work and to know how they produce sound. Nonetheless, instruments still fascinate us and have a mysterious appeal to us (Alvin, 1966). Like ancient man, we too, identify ourselves with our instrument, which is a prolongation of our body and transforms our bodily psychomotoric impulses into sound (Alvin, 1966). Children might grant instruments an inner life of their own and refer to them as persons, traits, and characters in their lives. Adults might preserve some of these infantile patterns of thought and psychological perceptions.Music therapy theoreticians have, indeed, referred to instruments in a symbolic fashion, granting them psychodynamic meanings and interpersonal roles (Alvin, 1991; Amir, 1999; Benenzon, 1981; Nordoff & Robbins, 1977; Priestley, 1987). …