Musical Self Research Articles

Toward a conceptualization of the musical self: A theoretical-methodological approach to subjectivity in independent musicians

The objective of this study is to advance a theoretical and methodological proposal for the analysis of subjectivity construction in independent musicians. Existing social and cultural theories of subjectivity have not satisfactorily addressed the artistic experience of musicians. We present an analytic model that highlights the place of language from a perspective informed by dialogical theories and which also incorporates the aesthetic dimension of subjectivity in the occupational field. By analyzing six narrative interviews, we offer a qualitative insight into how independent musicians subjectively experience their musical activity. We constructed dialogical dimensions associated with four subjective movements in the interviewees’ discourse: aesthetic, activity, authorship, and reflectivity. Our findings about the configuration of musical subjectivity yielded three core points of articulation: musical self, existential self, and musical-occupational self. The musical self emerges as a particular subjective configuration, since creative activity represents a point of vital and occupational grounding where the boundaries between work and subjective experience appear to fade. Employing the aesthetic dimension of subjectivity made it possible to add complexity to the articulation and integration of various subjective elements of a psychological and social nature that have traditionally been studied in isolation.

Staging a Musical Self through Paper, Canvas, and The Screen: A Taxonomy of Musicians’ Self-Portraits from the Renaissance to the Digital Age

. Musicians have engaged in visual self-representation at least since the Renaissance and have continued the tradition to modern times with contemporary practices including selfies and generative technology and AI art. The practitioners include so-called classical composers (Schoenberg is a well-known case) and performers (Caruso, for instance), but also pop singers and musicians (Joni Mitchell and Patti Smith, among others). The media used varies from oil on canvas to drawings on paper, from traditional photography to digital media. In some instances, there are grave, pompous self-representations, but caricatures also abound (e.g., Donizetti). There are also some miscategorized self-portraits (i.e., portraits misattributed to their subject) and many more purposely fake or mocking self-portraits including contemporary Roman musician and comic Federico Maria Sardelli, which would indicate that the category of “self-portrait” adds value and prestige to any visual artifact. Furthermore, many visual artists, especially during the Renaissance, present themselves as faux musicians, possibly as a sign of nobility or education. Slowly but surely, women have also claimed a space in the realm of musicians’ self-portraits since many of them, belonging to the higher echelons of society, were both visual artists and active musicians (Maria Antonio of Bavaria, Ducreaux and Schröter, among others). In some instances, the musician is truly obsessed with his or her own image to the point that, in addition to visual self-representation, he or she also provides written autobiographies and even musical self-portraits in sound (Spohr and Schoenberg, for instance). In the end, any attempt to create a taxonomy of “musicians’ self-portraits” amounts to a serious interrogation of the usual categories of “self-portrait,” “musician,” and “artist” and to the staging of a vulnerable, doubtful self that wants to be reasserted. Keywords. Self-portraits, Oil on canvas, Drafts on paper, Photography, Selfies, Digital and AI art.

Historical and contemporary perspectives on the development of analytical music therapy Training

ABSTRACT Introduction: analytical music therapy (AMT) is an international model of music therapy that is an integral part of advanced training for music therapists. AMT training entails the study of music psychotherapy, techniques and strategies, individual and group supervision, as well as personal AMT therapy, by exploring music therapists’ inner life. AMT training prepares aspiring music therapists to meet the challenges of the profession. Music therapists from all over the world have received AMT training and have applied their knowledge in various settings. Moreover, they have an opportunity to examine their worldview, values, personality, musical self, and interactions with clients. Method: To provide a better understanding of the historical perspectives, interviews with experienced educators and significant historical figures and literature review were performed. The significant information was contextualized, and verbatim statements from the interviewees were included. Results: Mary Priestley created AMT, Johannes Eschen and Inge Pedersen integrated the experiential component of AMT training into music therapy programs in Europe, and Benedikte Scheiby was instrumental in developing a postgraduate training program in New York from 1997 to 2018. She was an integral part of the new AMT training initiative at Molloy College, the first university-based AMT training program. Discussion: This paper identifies historical perspectives, its current state, and the benefits and challenges of AMT training. Various viewpoints of AMT training are discussed. This analysis can help music therapists to honor the pioneers’ legacy and to contribute to the further development of AMT.

Walking with Stevens

Walking with Stevens Lisa Goldfarb I HAVE OFTEN WONDERED why I first found Wallace Stevens's poetry and prose so compelling, and have revisited many times how I became involved with reading his work. It was when I was nineteen in my first undergraduate seminar on Modern British and American Poetry that we read Stevens alongside other canonical figures: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and Frost are the ones I recall; I also remember there were no women on the reading list. My professor at the time played a tape (yes, an audio tape; it was 1975) of Stevens reading "The Idea of Order at Key West," and, while I loved the poem and was entranced by its musicality, I was unimpressed with Stevens's monotone. Unsure of what to write for a required paper, I took the rare step of visiting my prof's office, and he suggested that I do a close reading of "Credences of Summer." I didn't know why he made that suggestion, but after I read the poem once, I was hooked, and I have returned to it over and over, and to Stevens ever since. Maybe it was the idea of basking in a midsummer moment that gripped me—"lovers waiting in the soft dry grass" (CPP 322)—or, more likely, one of my favorite musical moments in the poem, when "The trumpet of morning blows in the clouds and through / The sky" (CPP 325); it also could have been the beautiful tripartite structure of each canto, with each successive stanza intensifying the one before. Whatever might have commanded my attention then, though, was not enough to explain why I have pursued the study of Stevens as intensely as I have. While I have never been a reader who searches for her personal counterpart in poets and writers, still, the differences are bold: I am a woman, a Jew, from a modest middle-class background. My struggling ancestors might have been among those in the urban parks in the early 1900s on the Lower East Side of New York whom the young Stevens might have wanted to avoid on his long, circuitous walks from Lower Manhattan to points north and west of the city. I have spent a good deal of my scholarly life focusing on the music of Stevens's poetry, and I certainly see how my musical self—I have played the piano since I was eight and continue to study—found a sympathetic poet in Stevens. But one day when I was traveling from my home in the Riverdale section of the Bronx to NYU in Lower Manhattan to meet Bart Eeckhout, whom I had met in Oxford a few years earlier, I was struck by another similarity. I am always early for my trains (really, early for everything), [End Page 125] and, as I stood on the train platform (the commuter train on Metro North, not the subway), gazing over the Hudson River at the Palisades, I found myself thinking how, about a century earlier, Stevens could have been walking through the woods on the opposite side of the river. His early journals and letters tell us that he returned there repeatedly to escape the city; he took walks through what was then the countryside in every season: in fall, the leaves crunched under his feet; in winter, he marveled at the beauty of the bare trees; in spring, he reveled in the birdsong he heard and the robins who made the woods their home; in summer, he lay on the ground to feel the moist earth under his tired body. After all, he might have walked many miles through Manhattan, up through Spuyten Duyvil to Yonkers, where he took the ferry to the other side. And we know that once out of the city, Stevens loved the sights, sounds, and smells of nature. Since his walking "somehow or other" entered the rhythm or "movement of the poems" (L 844), perhaps here in Stevens's habit of walking was a deeper connection. As a young man, Stevens walked to know New York City and to get beyond its boundaries, and this habit continued throughout his life: he walked from his home...

Uke, flow and Rock‘n’Roll

Community ukulele groups’ fertile contexts for participatory and amateur musicking are increasing in popularity. Though researchers have begun to describe contexts for community ukulele groups, more research is necessary to understand participants’ perceptions of their lived-experiences within the space of the jam sessions. Therefore, the purpose of this phenomenological case study is to describe the lived experiences of adults participating in a community ukulele group. Several research questions guided this study. First, what do they experience during jam sessions, and how do they describe their experiences? Second, how do these experiences relate to their sense of musical self? Third, what mechanisms impact their perceptions of their experiences? Three distinct but related ideas constitute the theoretical framework for this study: Turino’s concept of participatory performance, Csikszentmihaly’s flow theory, and Turner’s concept of communitas. Data were individual interviews and small-group re-enactment interviews with eleven community ukulele participants. The essence of the experience was that liminal space emerged in the context of the jam sessions and supported communitas that resulted in temporary transformation of identity and transcendence of concerns. This essence was supported by three themes: characteristics of liminal space, manifestations of communitas, and transformation and transcendence.

Os selfies e o corpo tombamento: reflexões a partir de uma autoimagem sonora

O presente artigo faz parte de uma pesquisa-formação que aconteceu na Escola de Arte e Tecnologia Spectaculu, no ano de 2016, com 29 estudantes de Fotografia e Tratamento de Imagem, na disciplina “Olhar”, que possui o objetivo de potencializar suas experiências estéticas. A metodologia de pesquisa-formação (MACEDO, 2000; JOSSO, 2004; SANTOS, 2002) se desempenha de forma criativa, buscando se debruçar sobre a experiência educativa para produção de novos conhecimentos e abordagens. E, nesse encontro, o termo ‘tombamento’ ficou cada vez mais evidente, a partir de um dispositivo usado em sala de aula, chamado ‘Autorretrato Musical’, que se trata de uma autoimagem conectada a uma música. O processo deste dispositivo se divide basicamente em três etapas: desenho de si e escrita de suas redes de formação; falar sobre si e escutar o outro; criação e produção da autoimagem sonora. O objetivo deste artigo, portanto, visa tratar sobre essa experiência, transando relações da noção de ‘tombamento’ com efeitos de presença e sentido debatidos pelo autor contemporâneo Gumbrecht (2010). Conclui-se que o ‘tombamento’ é um manifesto ético-estético em si, ou seja, no próprio corpo da geração contemporânea, composta por uma juventude ‘afrontosa’, que se formou na/com a periferia e a internet, criando novas narrativas e referências para os seus e ganhando novos espaços de ação, que foram apropriados pelas mídias massivas e alvo de muitas críticas. Mas, para vivencia educativa e para pesquisa formativa, o processo de criação de si e a reinvenção das formas de fazer são combustíveis indispensáveis.

(In His Own Words): The Poetry of John Rahn's <em>Sea of Souls</em>

WHEN COMPOSERS DRAW: PERSONALIZED MUSIC, FORMALIZED THOUGHT ELIZABETH HOFFMAN AN ESSAY IN TRIBUTE TO JOHN RAHN E OFTEN SAY: THE MUSIC (OR THE SOUND) did something or other. Not merely to or for us but by and for itself. Musical behavior as metaphoric action—movement that seems self-driven—is a familiar construct. Still, such sonic actions are hard to define, whether heard in sound or read into graphic depictions. Are perceived musical behaviors rationalizations? Are they emotional congruences? Are they anthropomorphizations of sonic materiality? Or are they symbolic, even allegorical? We should probably avoid the word “or” here; these rhetorical questions point to a complex ideogram encompassing many conceptual angles. Our impressions of musical agency often leap forcefully in front of our simultaneous awareness of the composer’s historical actions, or our observation of performers’ physical actions. A sensation of sound-in-action is something different. Stravinsky, for one, was attuned to this and requested attention to his abstract musical W 150 Perspectives of New Music constructs in themselves: “my music is to be ‘read,’ to be ‘executed,’ but not to be ‘interpreted’” (Craft 1959, 135). Therefore, when composers themselves reveal anything about their unconscious shaping of their own music’s behavior, this is worth unpacking. How a composer imagines, intuitively, an embodied connection with their “musical self” gets at the very core of the creative process. This essay will look first at attempted approaches to defining musical action in general, and then will explore in detail two composers’ experiential self-definitions, represented in idiosyncratic drawings. Modeling musical behavior, for all the reasons above, is no easier than defining it. Written scores are extreme abstractions. When we say that a sound that “moves” or “moves toward” another, or that a note “catalyzes” or “announces” another, we describe something captured only crudely by standard Western notation. For sure, in print and in performance, we use many directives including phrasing and tempo to intensify or clarify music-as-action. But musical scores mostly fall short in connecting the dots. They are incapable of capturing the blurring of successive sounds that would be required for modeling a possible sensation of relational bodies interleaving, a gestural arc in which one musical body (whether a note or a sound, a point or a swath) reaches forward and the other reaches back through time and across space. A sense of movement in 3D space collapses on the page. Especially without being able to manifest acoustic phenomena, models are left to conjure things akin to maps. Each step in a map could be an endpoint deriving from rules, or, in theory, it could emerge with far more baggage: i.e., the entire previous sequence of branching agential decisions. The latter would be more compelling, if voluminous, and would be speculative unless created by the composer. Only the composer, after all, can truly attempt self-reflection. This tautology goes to the heart of this essay. In the discussion below, the connective paths that can model musicas -action will be thought of as inclusively as possible. The music’s motivations may be obvious or hidden. An action may impact itself or another sonic entity. Paths will be postulated simply as conceptual routes along which any actions—or transformations—take place; this essay thus admits the validity of a Lewin-like account of musical action asserting transformation of one thing into another. The crux of the matter, still, is that neither “some really new thing” from “two similar [ones],” nor “the magic metamorphosis from one thing” “by acts, to a new . . . thing which is quite different” seems to get at the nuanced mechanisms or materiality that might explain a real stretch of music and contextualize it “firmly within musical action” (Rahn 2007, 58–59). When Composers Draw: Personalized Music, Formalized Thought 151 As John Rahn describes, complex math is one avenue of ongoing exploration (ibid., 59–70). Graphic imagery offers additional insights. Drawings, when created by composers, have the potential to reveal their musics-as-action specifically as the composers imagine them— their size, their speed, their gait, their directionality, their energy, all as qualitative representations. This essay focuses on non-representational musical drawings by two composers—Stravinsky and...

Self Representations and Music Performance Anxiety: A Study With Professional and Amateur Musicians.

Individual, social and situational factors might play an important role on the experience of anxiety during musical performances. The present research focused on the relationship between self-representations, including musical self, and performance anxiety among a sample of Italian professional and amateur musicians (N = 100; age, M = 23.40, 50% females). We predicted that higher self-discrepancies (actual vs. future self) would be associated with higher performance anxiety in a musical setting (vs. a non musical one), via musical self, and only in professional musicians. The results confirmed our hypothesis. Higher discrepancies between actual and future self-representations were positively associated with higher performance anxiety levels via the musical self only in participants who play instruments at a professional level. Furthermore, musical self influenced performance anxiety levels in a music related setting (i.e., a concert) but not in a non musical one (i.e., an exam).

A Conceptual Framework: The Musical Self as a Unique Pathway to Outcomes in the Acute Pediatric Health Setting.

This article reports on a project at the Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne in which the music therapy team synthesized their practice and related theories to propose a new conceptual framework for music therapy in their acute pediatric setting. The impetus for the project was the realization that in the process of producing key statements about the non-musical benefits of music therapy, the cost was often the suppression of information about the patient's unique musical potential as the major (mediating) pathway from referral reason, to music therapy, and to effective outcomes. The purpose of the project was to articulate how this team of clinicians conceive of the patient's musical self as the major theoretical pathway for music therapy in an evidence-based acute medical setting. The clinicians' shared reflexive process across six months involved robust directed discussion, annotation of shared reading, and documentation of all engagement in words and diagrams. The outcome was a consensus framework including three constructs: the place of music in the life of the infant, child, and young people, Culture and Context, and Musical Manifestations. The constructs were tested in a clinical audit, and found to be robustly inclusive. In addition to the conceptual framework, this project serves to demonstrate a process by which clinical teams may reflect on their individual practice and theory together to create a consensus stance for the overall service they provide in the one setting.

Musical Jews: Listening for Hierarchy in Colonial Algeria and Beyond

The scholarly literature on Muslim-Jewish relations in the Maghrib has long been divided between what Shlomo Deshen (1989:123) has called the integrationist model and the conflict model.1 The first evokes an image of Jewish integration within the Maghribi social fabric, with crosscutting person-to-person ties overcoming ethnoreligious insularity. The second evokes an image of Jewish marginality and insecurity, with ethnoreligious categories and their institutional instantiations profoundly shaping the fate of Maghribi Jewish communities living under Muslim-majority rule.2 Although more recent generations of scholars have been wary of making such sweeping judgments, the traces of such ambivalence (Bilu and Levy 1996) remain, with many contemporary researchers leaning toward a deep version of the integrationist model while positing a colonial production or intensification of Jewish marginality.3Such a state of play between two contrasting interpretations is by no means limited to scholars of Muslim-Jewish relations in the Maghrib. In Jewish Studies more generally, what Salo Baron (1928:526) critiqued as the lachrymose theory of Jewish history came to be countered by research that has highlighted examples of successful Jewish integration into a wide range of societies, eventually followed by a neo-lachrymose response that has highlighted Jewish marginality in Muslim societies in both the medieval and modern periods (Cohen 1994:9, Beinin 1998:14-19, Stein 2002:328). The Mediterranean itself has sometimes been presented as a prototypical space of contradictions, including tense cohabitation between peoples (Bromberger and Duran 2001:746 as cited in Miliani 2011:179). And in anthropology more widely, there is a lasting rivalry between interpretations of inter-ethnic relations that emphasize horizontality and symbiosis and those that emphasize verticality, with a strong temporalizing tendency in recent work that identifies the modern state as central to a shift from the horizontal to the vertical.4 Thus the longstanding debate about Muslim-Jewish relations in the Maghrib is a localized version of a broader theme.This article revisits the debate regarding Muslims and Jews in the Maghrib through a musical case study. For many contemporary Jews and Muslims living in the Maghrib and its diaspora, Jewish specialization in the musical arts in the modern period is evidence of Jewish belonging within the North African social fabric. Particularly in Algeria, where Jews tended to be conflated with the French settler population in colonial law and in post-independence nationalist and metropolitan memory (Shepard 2006, Katz 2015, Mandel 2014), Jewish musical prominence can be taken as a sign of Jews' at-home-ness in Algerian society in the not very distant past, and as the recognition of this fact by many contemporary Algerian Muslims (Bougherara 2002, Swedenburg 2005, Miliani 2011). In this way, the sound of Algerian Jews performing the Arabic-language classics conjures a picture of belonging and co-participation that counters the longstanding notion that Jews were not truly indigenous to Algerian society.Yet, there are ways in which Jewish musicality can be read along the grain of the idea of separation rather than against it. As is the case in many societies, professional musicianship has long been looked upon as a dubious occupation in Algeria, the wider Maghrib, and the Middle East and North Africa region at large (Pananti 1818:266-267, Broughton 1839:22, Nieuwkerk 1995, Racy 2003, Ciucci 2005). This is in keeping with the classic paradox pointed out by Allan Merriam (1964:133-143), who showed that for many societies, music-making is of great importance to the general population but constitutes a low-prestige occupation. Subsequent ethnomusicologists have extended Merriam's observations in several ways, including into the realm of ethnicity. Some scholars have pointed out that this low-prestige occupation is often taken up by members of outsider groups, either through a labor market mechanism (Nettle 1983:426-427) or through a projection of the sense of the collective's musical self onto its margins (van de Port 1999, Kapchan 1994). …

Music therapists’ experience of self in clinical improvisation in music therapy: A phenomenological investigation

How do music therapists experience themselves in clinical improvisation in music therapy? The aim of this inter-disciplinary study is to show how music therapists describe and experience the life-world of the self in clinical improvisation through phenomenological investigation. Informed by sociological social psychological theory proposing that the self develops in social discourses, this study explores the self within improvisation as a musical and inter-subjective space that is commonly used in music therapy practice. Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) of transcripts from semi-structured interviews with two music therapists revealed five central themes in relation to the life-world of the self in improvisation. These included mindful meeting of equals, importance of the fundamentals, flexibility and adaptability, personal fulfilment and, balancing the professional and musical self. These findings support the idea of improvisation as a social discourse and suggest that this may have significant implications for clients and therapists who employ such a means of relating.

Chopin's “Duets”—and Mine

Beginning with a personal account of my early experiences of Chopin's B-Minor Prelude and A-Minor Waltz, I argue that “musical meaning” arises neither simply from the music itself nor simply from a listener's or performer's self projections into the music. Instead it arises intersubjectively, from a relationship that subsumes a musical self and a musical other within the virtual (i.e., imaginary or fictional) environment that fully engaged musical experience engenders. Such an intersubjective exchange is likely to be especially acute in the compositional process itself, as the composer creates through music an “other” in dialogue with his or her self. The actual relationship between this other and the composer's own character and experience is rarely possible to ascertain with any degree of certainty: the music is better understood as self-creation than as self-representation. But paradoxically, pieces that are somehow atypical for their composer sometimes epitomize that composer's musical character most strongly and can suggest autobiographical motivation more specifically than many of the composer's other works. Such is the case with Chopin's relatively few solo pieces that suggest vocal duets, whether straightforwardly, as in the C#-Minor Étude, op. 25, no. 7, or through marked contrast with a solo voice, as in the two op. 27 Nocturnes. In each of these pieces, Chopin explores a problematic relationship between two “others,” one of them unattainable or elusive. If one of them mirrors Chopin's musical self, perhaps the other, the more remote, can be understood as a musical image of the self that Chopin needed to develop in order to negotiate the “real world.”

The Public Face of Chinatown: Actresses, Actors, Playwrights, and Audiences of Chinatown Theaters in San Francisco during the 1920s

AbstractIn the twentieth century, elaborate and prosperous Chinatown theaters in New York and San Francisco (from the 1920s to the early 1930s) constituted a golden age of Cantonese opera in the United States, a vivid musical life that has been almost completely expunged from U.S. cultural memory. Seeking a historical narrative for this musical past—preserving those vivid sonorities and glamorous images that “threaten to disappear irretrievably”—entails an examination of the actresses, actors, musicians, and playwrights who enlivened the stages of these opera theaters, as well as the audiences who flocked to see them. In particular, this study sheds light on the significance of the performers named on the daily playbills and pictured in newspapers or on immigration bond papers. The images and sonorities extend beyond the bounds of the theaters to epitomize the Chinese community. The study not only offers a significant window into the interior layers of the music lives of Chinese America, but also reflects on the Chinatown community's sense of its musical and artistic self.

Possible selves as a source of motivation for musicians

Music can be a core element of the sense of self. Integration of the future, possible musical self within the self-concept helps to account for the enormous investment of time and energy necessary to become a musician. In this qualitative study, we explore the motivational dimensions of the possible musical self. Possible selves exist in multiple domains with both positive and negative elements. Respondents from a diverse, snowball sample ( N = 204) of musicians completed an online survey describing their hoped for, expected and feared musical selves. Coding of the responses identified major themes. The ‘hoped for’ selves yielded four main themes among 171 responses: improvement, social connection, success and enjoyment. The ‘feared’ selves yielded a total of five main themes among 160 responses: being a poor musician, injury/illness, financial difficulty, lack of knowledge and lack of social connection/recognition. The ‘expected’ selves yielded only one additional category, negative expectations. The balance or tension between the positive and negative elements of possible selves is analysed to produce a composite description of the possible musical self. Limitations of the study and links between the present results and possible selves theory are discussed.

The Aesthetics of Spiritual Practice and the Creation of Moral and Musical Subjectivities in Aleppo, Syria

This essay analyzes the performance of dhikr (the invocation of God through prayer, song, and movement) in Aleppo, Syria, as an embodied practice mediated by specific repertoires of aesthetic and kinesthetic practices. In dhikr, aesthetic stimuli produce an experience of temporal transformation that participants narrate as ecstasy. Performing dhikr also conditions a musical self, which in turn allows for the habituation of spiritual states. This suggests the importance of investigating the interface of embodied practices, temporality, and the aesthetics of spiritual practice. (Aesthetics, temporality, music, Islam, Syria) ********** Although much has been written on Islamic art (Grabar 1973, 2003; Naef 2003), most studies have focused on the aesthetics of the word and image, the sound and texture of sacred texts and prayers, and the graphical depiction of divinity in, for example, the arabesque (Nelson 1985; Behrens-Abouseif 1999). However, less attention has been paid to the relationships of Islamic art to specific forms of Muslim piety, specifically the sensory techniques of Muslim worship that condition and enable spiritual states. According to the great twelfth-century Muslim scholar al-Ghazzali (1901-02, 1991), the spiritual life of the devout Muslim is formed not only through prayer but also through aesthetic practices. Among these are the art of sama' (audition), which denotes acts of listening and bodily practices associated with the achievement of ecstatic states. Following recent anthropological literature that strives to understand Muslim spirituality as mediated by bodily practices (Mahmood 2001; Hirschkind 2001), this essay examines the interplay of aesthetic and spiritual practices in Aleppo, Syria. It focuses on the dhikr, or ritual invocation and remembrance of God through prayer, incantation of sacred texts, song, and bodily motions that form a dance--practices generally associated with Sufism. Many participants in Aleppo understand dhikr to be an orthodox Sunni practice, and not something associated primarily with Sufism (Shannon, In press; Pinto 2002). Through the practice of dhikr, Muslims in Aleppo fulfill a Qur'anic obligation to invoke God and at the same time they may seek to attain physical and emotional states that promote spiritual transformation. Two musical processes, melodic modulation (tarqiyya) and rhythmic acceleration (kartah), structure the dhikr and, in conjunction with specific kinesthetic, visual, olfactory, and tactile cues, affect the sensate body to inculcate experiences of transformation and condition a spiritual and musical self. They do this by promoting transformations in participants' experience of temporality in the course of performing dhikr. In the context of debates within Muslim communities concerning the permissibility of music in Islam, this analysis reveals that musical practices are at the heart of this form of Muslim spirituality. RITUAL PRACTICE, THE BODY, AND MEMORY Scholars have addressed the inadequacies of anthropological studies of ritual that emphasize the element of belief (faith, doctrine, ideology, meaning) while neglecting the importance of the sensate body in ritual. In their analyses of ritual, anthropologists have tended to adopt a Cartesian mind-body dualism and promote a distinction between ritual thought and ritual action. Aside from the problems of cultural translation that studies of ritual and religion raise (e.g., Asad 1993), the effect of the British and American semiotic traditions of ritual studies has been to maintain an analytical separation between religious meanings, found in myths and sacred texts, and bodily experiences, understood as a neutral template upon which mythical and sacred meanings are inscribed. Similarly, Bell (1992, 1997) notes that anthropologists and other scholars of ritual and performance, such as Turner (1986) and Schechner (1985) have not only based their analyses of ritual behavior on the mind-body, belief-action distinctions central to Western epistemologies, but that in doing so they have also perpetuated constructions of ritual as a peculiarly thoughtless type of action, requiring the beliefs contained in myths to provide it with meaning, as in structural-functional anthropology's definition of myth as a charter for ritual action (Malinowski 1926). …

Behind the Mask: An Exploration of the True and False Self as Revealed in Music Therapy

This article looks at the concept of the True and False Self (Winnicott 1960, Laing 1960) and relates it to case material of music therapy with two children who were diagnosed as being on the autistic continuum. At the beginning of the therapy, both children showed great difficulty in expressing themselves spontaneously or creatively, resorting instead to rigid and stereotyped responses. Attempts to involve either child in shared musical improvisation were met with what I shall refer to as a musical False Self, or persona, which was used as a grandiose or omnipotent defence to protect the vulnerable True Self. I will show how it was necessary to accept and to work first with this musical False Self before the True Self could begin to emerge, spontaneously, creatively and authentically.

The Gendered Construction of the Musical Self: The Music of Pauline Oliveros

Journal Article The Gendered Construction of the Musical Self: The Music of Pauline Oliveros Get access Timothy D. Taylor Timothy D. Taylor Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Musical Quarterly, Volume 77, Issue 3, Fall 1993, Pages 385–396, https://doi.org/10.1093/mq/77.3.385 Published: 01 October 1993