Research featuring aesthetics, emotion, and the creative process

The intersecting and overlapping roles of aesthetics, emotion, and the creative process have always occupied a central place in the work of music therapy. The forms, qualities, and experiences of music as an art form comprise those elements of the practice that perhaps most patently distinguish it from other therapies. Models and approaches such as Creative Music Therapy (Nordoff & Robbins, 2007) and Aesthetic Music Therapy (Lee, 2003) along with theoretical frameworks such as Music-Centered Music Therapy (Aigen, 2005) all emphasize the fundamental role of the experience of the music itself as the basis of health, human development, and therapeutic change. Inextricable from the aesthetic experience is the affective potentials it embodies. If, as Langer (1953) has asserted, music is indeed a symbolic expression of feeling, then musical aesthetics are a sort of “map” of emotional possibilities for the participants of music therapy that are pertinent to the goals of the work (whether those goals concern affect itself, working through feelings, or harnessing emotion as part of addressing other clinical purposes). The core mechanism by which aesthetics and emotion collaborate in music therapy is the creative process. Creativity means to bring into being that which did not previously exist. This includes not only ways of integrating available materials into novel structures, but also new ways of experiencing, seeing, feeling, and understanding, as well as otherwise unexplored ways of negotiating challenges and impasses, all by drawing upon the inherently imaginative properties in music. Of course, in music therapy, the creative process unfolds immanently within the context of the therapeutic relationship.

This issue of the Nordic Journal of Music Therapy includes four articles, each of which features certain ways that aesthetics, emotion, and/or the creative process inform music therapy practice. First, Jan Sonntag (p. 216) examines the construct of Therapeutic Atmospheres as an aesthetic concept in music therapy for persons with dementia. The author defines Therapeutic Atmospheres as “a category of fundamental wellbeing – a resonating space making it possible to be aware of oneself and to experience well-being in the perceptible presence of others but without pressure to act or emotional pressure” (p. 223). The author takes a naturalistic, ecological approach that honors the everyday lives of persons with dementia, while considering how the aesthetic and relational dimensions of music establish a creative working space conducive to emotional expression, humanization, and actualizing potentials for quality of life. Next, Myriam Scholer, Fabienne Lemétayer, and Lony Schiltz (p. 229) explore a multivariate understanding of creativity in music psychotherapy. The authors report upon their research, in which they applied a combination of an expressive, nonverbal tool for assessing the evolution of creativity (principally as divergent thinking) during the therapeutic intervention (“Test of Creative Thinking – Drawing Production”), and a method for measuring music making via systematic elaboration of clinical observation “frames,” together which revealed a quantitative, poly-dimensional representation of the creative process in music psychotherapy. The latter component – the observational “frames” – consisted of defined periods of time during which specific sound production behaviors were tracked, such as rhythmical inventions, melody development, harmony development, tempo variation, integration of sound parameters, complexity of form, musical creativity, aesthetic qualities, and musical dialogue. The authors discuss the findings in terms of their implications for the development of a client’s identity in clinically relevant ways. Next, Yasmine A. Iliya and Brian T. Harris (p. 248) report upon their research, in which they consulted nine creative arts therapists (all who were women), via questionnaires and interviews, about their experiences of singing an imaginal dialogue with deceased loved ones as a bereavement intervention. Through a process of qualitative, inductive thematic analysis, the researchers derived a number of themes (including, for example, elicitation of profound emotional expression, containment and support, and emotional and spiritual connection to the deceased), each holding potential for deepening the music therapy field’s understanding of how this intervention can benefit clients experiencing the challenges of bereavement. Finally, Ehud Bodnera and Einat Assa Polanskya (p. 273) report upon research in which they examined attitudes of music therapy students, music therapy professionals, and other therapeutic professionals (clinical psychologists and medical clowns) regarding the emotional valences (i.e. positive versus negative) expressed by music therapy clients via the aesthetic, creative act of musical improvisation. Specifically, the researchers examined how the research participants perceived different emotional valences as contributing differently to the meaningfulness of therapy. Based upon the research findings, the authors consider ways in which an integration of principles from certain specific branches psychology might inform the field of music therapy (and related practices) in beneficial ways.

The various insights resulting from each of the four articles in this issue enrich the music therapy field in different ways, on the three vital topics of aesthetics, emotion, and the creative process. Simultaneously, the diverse approaches to researching and thinking about these aspects of music therapy, as featured in these articles, shed light on different ways of studying these core components of the discipline, thus providing further potential for deepening knowledge and understandings about the work for the benefit of clients, clinicians, students, and others.