1 Aims of the Book Making Room for Music and Sound in Inquiry
This book attends to the place of sonic imagination in inquiry. Although music is often a central focus of research either as a therapeutic intervention or as something to be otherwise critiqued in terms of craft, composition, or historical context, there remains a gap in academic arts-based research (ABR), where music functions as the central tool of inquiry. Literary fiction, poetry, visual arts, performance, movement, and dance are examples of art forms that are recognized as valuable avenues toward insight into complex subjective experiences. These art forms are increasingly being used as primary tools for data collection in academic research. Importantly, these arts are used in inquiry by researchers who are either experienced or inexperienced in the chosen art forms. Music and sound, however, have somehow remained largely untapped as research tools outside of music studies. Why?
Answers to this question are explored under the assumption that music and sound can be used more broadly as an effective tool for ABR among researchers who are experienced or inexperienced in making music. Regarding possible obstacles preventing this, one hypothesis posits that music’s uncanny ability to converse with and express deep and complex feelings actually fuels its repression (and/or oppression) in practices of inquiry. Related to this hypothesis is the assumption that music and sound have been sidelined in equal degree to other embodied or body-focused approaches to research. The relationship between the body and Western discourse brings attention to the colonization of music, something that can express as a fixation on certain uses of sound and tuning (e.g., the highlighting of consonance). Beyond serving as an obstacle to using music in inquiry, such fixations might actually function to shrink capacities for listening to and imagining Other sounds. If such capacities are indeed plastic, it would not only follow that stretching them is possible but also an atrophy of them would be possible as well.
The psychological and physical dynamics of capacity described above are central to the explorations of this book. The conceptual terrain involved is complex as it traverses and integrates several fields of study, including depth
Introduction and Theory
psychology, somatic studies, sound studies, ethnomusicology, and research methodology. For this reason, Section I of the book is devoted to introducing and unpacking the main arguments being made, the key terms from each of the relevant fields involved, and the contexts that frame that conversation, both in terms of socio-historical location and some of the author’s personal locations.
Section II of the book moves from theory to practice and offers thick description of an example of music arts-based research (MABR) entitled Sonic Stretching: Listening for Shadow in Depth Psychological Inquiry1. The Sonic Stretching methodology is described, which integrates heuristic, hermeneutic, arts-based, and grounded theory research. The compositional methodology is described (in Chapter 6) as a possible example of using music and sound as effective and systematic research tools. Section II concludes by reviewing and augmenting standards of rigor for using MABR, as well as discussing suggestions for further research. Appendices are included at the end of the book that offer listening protocols as well as links/URLs for a repertoire of existing Sonic Stretching pieces.
1.1 Introduction to Central Arguments of the Book
The term ‘Sonic Stretching’ is used in this book (and the research it describes) to refer to engaging sonic imagination in response to sound and to growing that imaginal capacity toward a broader tolerance of dissonant, or different, sonic material. Sonic dissonance is held as a symbol for cognitive dissonance, and as such is used as a symbolic proxy for Other, or Shadow in Jungian terms. In the Sonic Stretching research, a conversation unfolds between academic literature, participant-listeners, the experience of the researcher, and the creation and sharing of experimental music pieces. Through this conversation, the research explored how listening to intentionally designed sonic pieces might serve to stretch a listener’s capacity for hearing and engaging with Other. Musically Othered realms of sound, including ‘noise’ and silence, were valued and made central in the research by way of sonic pieces that included information typically thought of as non-musical.
A hope behind doing this research was to position the medium of sound in a way that made it more easily accessible even as it might be “opening us past our perceived peripheral auditory limit, to hear and experience what is beyond our assumed parameters of consciousness” (Kroeker, 2019, p. 177).
Practices of deepening conscious awareness around listening, practices like those offered by the Sonic Stretching protocol, have the potential to serve research by creating a broader capacity for empathy and understanding across cultures and other interpersonal divides by working to grow windows of tolerance for experiencing dissonance. However, working with dissonance as an imaginal or symbolic proxy for Shadow foregrounds how the
experience of dissonance, like the experience of Other or Shadow, is completely subjective.
In a time where diverse and inclusive translation and transmission practices are being called for across academia, attending to music, sound, listening—and the inevitable dissonance that comes with these terrains—can facilitate a more nuanced and inclusive multisensory palette for use in academic inquiry. Yet, the inclusion of sound beyond the constraints of what is typically considered music brings with it a certain potential for tension. This tension may challenge, or stretch, listeners’ comfort zones in terms of sonic imagination, and thus offers a potential for psychological work. The ability to empathize is an ability that implies a needed capacity for tolerating other perspectives. In the case of sound, some listeners have this capacity. In others, however, a stretching of tolerance capacities might be needed for such reception to be possible.
Because the dynamics of judgment involved in a listening experience are largely unconscious (Becker, 2004), the field of depth psychology is uniquely positioned to offer an important perspective on the dynamics of listening and tendencies regarding what people choose to listen to, or perhaps, more importantly, what they choose to not listen to. The subjectivity of experiencing music and its emotional impact has made it difficult terrain to cross with academic research, even as ABR has gained traction. The recent gains in qualitative research methods regarding the valuation of subjective knowledge2 are making room for voices outside of traditional forms of academic translation (white, male, positivist) so that there is an opening for inclusive, multisensory work to finally come through and be heard.
Because exchanges of power transpire in the processes of translation3, it has long been a hope of scholars in fields committed to discovering shared meaning (like depth psychology, somatic studies, and ABR) that the inadvertent reinforcing of exclusive discourse might be mitigated by involving mindful reflection upon the inherently subjective nature of research and its many contexts (Watkins & Shulman, 2008). With the influence of philosophical hermeneutics4, there is widespread acknowledgment of the need for precise examination of the processes of interpretation and translation, including the process of choosing what formats and media to include and exclude in our renderings of meaning.
Tracking the footprints of power through various modes of translation is no small problem, especially for academic fields concerned with the phenomenology of Body and Soul—of Soma and Psyche, as “translation and the ineffable are mutually exclusive” (Bellos, 2011, p. 156). Proponents of ABR point to art as a language that can speak of the ineffable and those less tractable aspects of human experience. As ABR practitioner and professor Shaun McNiff describes it, artistic inquiry affords a flexibility that enables it to navigate complexity, subtle nuance, and the seemingly illogical and
contradictory terrains of human emotion. Although, he admits, “these factors also present considerable difficulties for those seeking predictability and control” (2018, p. 79).
Here, examining questions about how music and sound might be invited into academic and psychological inquiry more fully may point to more pervasive dynamics of power in discourse. Political economist and author Jaques Attali (1985) writes that “listening to music is listening to all noise, realizing that its appropriation and control is a reflection of power, that it is essentially political” (p. 31). There seems to linger a fear in relation to music—perhaps a fear that music can translate the numinous, the embodied, and the emotional realms of feeling too well. Perhaps the more unfettered or free forms of music are avoided in academic research and even in therapeutic inquiry precisely because they are so effective at evoking and expressing a very wide spectrum of feelings.
Such effects, or abilities, are exactly what make art valuable in various forms of research. Patricia Leavy (2015) explains that ABR is a practice that works to inspire new perspectives by creating a kind of bifocal vision through the complementariness of science and art, as it is “arguably able to encompass a greater degree of complexity than other representational forms … [which] may allow researchers to get at and express a multiplicity of meanings, or layered meanings, not communicable in other forms” (p. 133).
By including and valuing the knowing ways of art alongside science, an integration of typically constructed binaries can occur. Such binaries include those of the left brain and right brain, of Feminine reception and Masculine proception (archetypally speaking), of unconscious disorder and conscious order, of mind and body. Regarding the constructed schism between mind and body, music has an especial capacity to take a listener away from wordbased language to a more directly embodied experience where “the performance of music, as well as the experience of listening to it, merges the mind and body” (Leavy, 2015, p. 299). A dialogue is thus made possible “between conceptual thinking transcendent of local conditions and immediate embodied psychic experience” (Rowland, 2008, p. 4). With the bilateral lenses of mind and body both engaged (along with their parallel expressions in science and art), the perceptive and receptive processes of translation can cross-reference. This kind of cross-referencing, or integration and bifocality of perspectives, offers more potential for examining the complex nuances of subjectivity and context—and perhaps more potential for the ineffable to waft in as well.
Music’s integrative and expressive abilities have the potential to translate other schisms or gulfs of supposed difference as well. Cultural divides, and the common grounds that actually live underneath them, have been studied via the context of music in fields like ethnomusicology, cognitive neurology, and linguistics 5. In such fields of study, music can be seen as exhibiting a
Aims of the Book 7
kind of transcendent quality. For Jung (1966), music represents the dynamic motifs of the collective unconscious. Those representational motifs, or patterns, translate across cultural divides by way of symbols and, as such, can be considered archetypes or “psychic universals” (Stein, 1998, p. 89). In other words, music is metaphorical. Metaphoric or symbolic translation (art, if you like) thus offers “a trans-disciplinary way of knowing and communicating available to every person, like verbal language and mathematical processes” (McNiff, 2017, p. 25). Music is one such discipline.
Despite the apparent usefulness and fit of music as an expressive and translative, even archetypal or directly transmissive medium, it remains largely untapped as a tool for ABR. Most research dealing centrally with music is either an analysis of musical content or a study of music’s efficacy as a therapeutic intervention, neither of which actually constitutes ABR (Leavy, 2015). Perhaps stranger than the apparent disconnect between music and ABR is the disconnect between music and depth psychology. Even as C.G. Jung revered music as “the art of feeling par excellence” (Jung in Almèn, 2008, p. 118), besides some anecdotal referencing it remains conspicuously unused as a tool for inquiry in depth psychology as well. Regarding these apparent disconnects, two related hypotheses are useful to address. One is illustrated by the observation that “while novices routinely experiment with many of the [ABR] approaches … this is less so the case with music as inquiry” (Leavy, 2015, p. 139).
This observation suggests that part of the underutilization of music in ABR may be due to a perception of required training needed for Western6 musical fluency in order to use it as a tool for inquiry. The mystique around Western music theory and technique may veil a broader potential for using music as a tool for inquiry. Jung himself “who was scarcely shy about venturing into new fields of study, apparently felt disinclined to weigh in about music” (Almèn, 2008, p. 117). This may provide an example of how even masters of symbolic alchemy have tended to shy away from exploring sonic forms in their inquiry for fear of not being proficient or fluent enough to use the form.
Western classical music as a form may provide a vast palette of evocative symbols for translating archetypal material, and it has no doubt offered a potent agent for exploration and change for many listeners. However, in Psyche Sings: Depth Psychology and Music Therapy (2019), Jungian analyst and musician Joel Kroeker claims that “unfettered musical discourse gives psyche a voice” (p. 81). This statement speaks to the idea that (Western) music theory, as useful as it may be, also functions as a bind on the translation work music has the potential to do. Classical music is bound by culturespecific tunings and theory7. These binds, or fixations, become problematic when trying to use music as a tool for symbolic translation with a palette more inclusive of Shadow (in Jungian terms) or those qualities that are
considered different or dissonant. Kroeker’s statement above also begs an important question: How exactly does one ‘unfetter’ musical discourse?
There are certainly artists who engage in the practice of working toward unfettering music, and some do this to the extreme (e.g., in noise music, or sound art and the avant-garde, which I will return to). Throughout history, artists and scientists have attended to finding and pushing the edges of imagination, a terrain that often invokes spaces of dissonance and tension. But is there a space where this kind of practice—a practice of unfettering musical discourse—can be tempered enough to be useful and ethical in the contexts of both academic and therapeutic inquiry? This question points to an assumption that unfettered music—wild, emotional music; shadow music— is often held in academic settings (consciously or not) as being subversive and is subsequently repressed or oppressed or in Jung’s case just turned away from. Turning away from the ‘unfettered’ aspects of sound and music is, then, a turning away from Psyche and may consequently be part of what sustains the disconnect between music and research.
In the field of depth psychology, it is acknowledged that the lived experience of the Body, the Soma, is territory that has also been relegated to Otherness and Shadow (Conger, 1998; Stromsted, 2014). Because the body is a feeling interface and sound is a medium that has direct physical (vibrational) impact as well as imaginal or psychological impact, it may be that sound has been sidelined in equal degree to the body in the context of academic transmission. This parallel is suggested by Leavy (2015), who points out that as studies of the body and somatic experiences increase, there is also an increase in research projects exploring music.
In the context of psychology specifically, “the disappearance of the body from psychoanalysis was based on fear that the young ‘science’ of psychoanalysis might be inundated by the forces of Eros that it had summoned up” (Marlock, 2015, p. 15). In the realms of psychological inquiry and academic research, Eros has apparently been condemned to the shadows as not only shameful and invalid but as fearsome and threatening as such. Because evocative music elicits and translates physical and emotional feelings (Eros), perhaps it has been condemned for the same reasons. The stubborn condemnation of the embodied, sensuous, and Erotic may be part of why engaging unbound, or unfettered, free improvisational, shadow-inclusive music as an interface for inquiry—as a voice for Psyche—continues to live at the margins of even progressive work in academia, like ABR and depth psychology.
This is problematic in terms of inclusive inquiry for many reasons, one being that feeling functions as a safeguard against the atrophy and complacency of “anesthetic culture” (Hillman, 1989). The body and its capacity to feel, to take in and process, helps us to make order and meaning in the world. As knowledge is held as an important form of power, the capacity to feel (an important knowledge in its own right) can also be considered a valuable
form of power, and growing that capacity would thus be an act of empowerment. The systematic devaluation of growing capacity for feeling and for relating with discomfort and pain specifically has arguably led to intolerance (or an atrophy of tolerance). Although people may use “numbing as a way to protect ourselves from feeling overwhelmed” (Kossak, 2015, p. 46), might that numbing also come about if we don’t practice feeling?
With respect to feeling, music touches, sometimes very deeply. Jung recognized this and acknowledged music’s capabilities and capacities for emotional and therapeutic work, but he “found it to be so emotionally activating that he discontinued listening” (Winborn, 2019, p.xv). This resistance to the evocative nature of music brings attention to the question of what situations might cause someone to choose (consciously or not) to diminish their own internal connection, or reception, to feeling; to decide they do not want to be touched, or ‘activated’. Trauma experts describe the functionality of having a nervous system that, once it crosses a certain threshold of feeling that exceeds its capacity of tolerance, employs mechanisms for survival that numb and even disconnect the physical and psychological systems as needed8. But what about a culturally conditioned repulsion of feeling—a conditioned rejection of reception, including listening?
More specific to music and sound, the seemingly innocuous habit, or conditioned response, toward a sense of entitlement to consonance and easy listening lessens the capacity for hearing disruptive or different sounds. Jung writes that “were psychology bound to a creed it would not and could not allow the unconscious of the individual that free play which is the basic condition for the production of archetypes” (1953, p. 16). This statement is directly applicable to the expressive medium of sound, the binding creed in this case being certain culturally conditioned styles of music. Inclusive, indepth inquiry using music/sound would require a spectrum, a sonic palette, capable of including the shadowy depths, the abject, as well as that which is considered ‘good’ or acceptable by common measures of discourse. In terms of sound, the terrain of Shadow would likely include sonic qualities that are rejected as less-than-valuable in the context of traditional, popular, or classical assessments of musicality (arguably, those more heavily conditioned by cultural indoctrination).
Ethnomusicologist Judith Becker discusses the ‘habitus of listening’ where she notes that “we accumulate our listening habits and expectations largely unawares; only when confronted with an alternate kind of listening are we likely to reflect on our own conventionalized mode” (2004, p. 69). Here, it is important to note that without conscious attention toward ‘confronting’ one’s own listening habits and assumptions, it can be easy to fall into stylistic complacency—especially when engaging a medium like music that listeners typically want to engage, or consume, for easy pleasure. As lovely as music can be for relaxing and soothing the soul, it also has an equally important
complementary function in its capacity to activate and rile attention—often through dissonance.
In an act that is arguably dissonant, “the aim of individuation is nothing less than to divest the self of the false wrappings of the persona on the one hand, and of the suggestive power of primordial images on the other” (Jung, 1966, par. 260). In this way, the cultural persona as it is directly expressed in music can get in the way of practices of psychological individuation. These are the ‘fetters’ that choke Psyche’s voice. An effort to un-entangle such fetters might be equated to regaining an agency of imagination, an individuation process of liberation from the fetters of conditioning that lay fallow personal imaginal will. Rehabilitating the atrophy of imagination is, thus, a primary function of psychological inquiry, or psychologizing (Hillman, 1975). Sonic imagination, it would stand to reason, would be included in this endeavor.
1.2 Relevant Personal and Professional Contexts
My musical individuation process has primarily been about learning reception. When I was a baby, my parents were navigating difficult circumstances but speaking music kept a stream of creative life moving through the home. My father, who was my daily caretaker then, was studying meditation with Swami Rama at the Himalayan Institute, and creative improvisation at The Creative Music Studio in Chicago. At age 22, he had just left his homeland, family, and traditions in France to immigrate to the United States with my mother. That was the soup of music I first learned to speak, and it was not a language of only one dialect. It was a language expressive of translating and transmogrifying across boundaries. India was in the music through sitar and tablas (instruments my father played) and through the care of a spiritual father found in Swami Rama. Europe was in the music through my father’s childhood influences, cultural conditioning, and genetic heritage. Africa was present in the polyrhythms and improvisations we loved, and in the pioneers of free jazz. America was reflected in the idea of mixing and sharing those spaces and flavors. That music, itself, was not a kept or divided kind of music. Time and delineation were there, all effecting stylistic idiosyncrasies, but then the daily practice was one of dissolving all of those ingredients into a capacity for present-moment reception.
As a young kid, I spent a lot of time with my parents’ vinyl record collection, laying around for many hours with the album covers, visually soaking them up while listening to my favorite sides over and over. Favorites remain in my memory: Herbie Hancock and Mwandishi’s Sextant, Terry Riley’s A Rainbow in Curved Air, George Duke’s The Aura Will Prevail, Eberhard Weber’s No Motion Picture9, among other ECM artists like Art Lande10. After meeting Lande at an improvisation workshop offered at Naropa University in Boulder when I was 18, he became my musical mentor in improvisation,
Aims of the Book 11 composition, and jazz theory. These music teachings, as it turned out, were applicable to navigating life more generally. I felt I was carving out the capacity to hear, to listen, and to respond in the moment. At that point, I had worked to learn the Western dialects of musical language through several years of classical training on piano. I loved that music and played it with all my heart, but where I really felt inspired was in the unlearning of those forms, or, more precisely, in letting go of the implicit and explicit rules of harmony I had at least partially swallowed in that training. I went back to dissolving the rules and culturally imposed dividing lines and improvising in the space that was left over.
The Sonic Stretching research was, in part, a continuation of that practice of dissolving, of releasing introjected notions about what is and is not valuable or beautiful in sound (and by extension, in life). One of those introjected notions has to do with the value (and lack of value) given to certain uses of emotionality and wild abandon in music. Although it seemed to me that a gift of music, especially rebellion music like free jazz, was in its ability to translate and evoke emotion, my personal experience in studying music when and where I did (in the 1980s and 1990s in Colorado) was that a particular brand of emotion in music was acceptable only inasmuch as it was tempered, or perhaps constrained, by a very particular kind of intellectual (patriarchal) ordering. I have a hunch that this difficulty in translation is one having to do with emotional risk and may also have to do with complexity— two terrains that often involve engaging the unknown. In my experience, claiming feeling in music through expressing it, while given (often dramatic) lip service, was not well tolerated if it was perceived as genuinely risky; that is, it was unknown territory or not understood. If expressing emotional feeling was ‘out of control’ or uncrafted according to certain norms, if it was from the wild territories of Shadow, it risked ridicule, harsh judgment and rejection, or being ignored.
The unruly unknown of emotion, while valued by many listeners in music, is often painstakingly shed, or at least (en)trained into the appropriate versions of expression in common musical practices and forums. At some point in my own such (en)training, I began to fear scaring listeners with the apparent differentness, or wildness of my sonic tastes; I felt my introjected Otherness beginning to take shape. Even now, the narrative that I need to ‘reign in’ all intense emotion (words actually spoken to me by mentors) like a horse that must be tamed and subservient—that narrative still plays on impulse, as does the backlash. In me, the compensatory rebellion against restraint has at times played out via total shutdown. But rather than quit music completely, I instead found myself learning about West African dialects of music language, where I danced further into territories of releasing fantasies of control in music and other languages of the body, both verbal and non-verbal, through sheer unending beginner-ness, and Otherness.
Introduction and Theory
These dynamics and my relationship with them were persistently confounding to me and have also supplied an undercurrent throughout my university studies. I often felt like I wasn’t getting a joke—I was told that there were formulas to learn in order to play music and that once you knew them, you just needed to let them go and play from the heart. Then I’d let go and play from my heart and was told it was wrong (by teachers, by male musicians around me at the time, by my own introjected judge). Perhaps I simply did not learn the structures or formulas well enough, or I did not practice and strengthen my ‘chops’ enough. Perhaps it’s simply a case of green impatience, or of me trying to move through the process backward in some way (as I am often disposed to doing). Even after my mentors decided to send students to me, and after teaching piano and music theory for 15 years, after playing concerts and gigs of many different kinds and sizes, I continued to feel somehow unfit as a musician, and so I continued to reject the formulas and work to play from my heart. I realize now that beyond the impulse to surrender into reception, there was also a longing to understand a stubborn feeling of being misunderstood in the world—of feeling Other in the world of music.
For those of us who have not yet graduated into the ego security of letting our most vulnerable feeling play (then be critiqued, ignored, or adored) without introjecting the inevitable judgment of listeners, the temptation is often to focus on technique and persona at the exclusion of real feeling (and vulnerability). The tentative relationship with expressing ‘real’ emotion feels familiar in the context of academic writing and research as well. In the contexts of sharing music and sharing academic work, I have found myself compelled to explore what feels, to me, like painful limitations and devaluations of a natural way of being and expressing, which involves unrepressed feeling and emotion, and a deep love of what is wild—free from the constraints of cultural conditioning and judgment—what is surprising, unknown and Other. Perhaps this has been an effort to love my own ‘music’ in the end.
Here, some may wonder whether such a personal inquiry process can be termed ‘methodology’. Describing the territory of research methodology, Robert Romanyshyn (2013) writes that “within an imaginal approach, the researcher is called into a work so that what lingers in the work as a piece of unfinished business can work itself out through the work” (p. 82). Perhaps out of an experience of not being heard or understood very often, a core longing, or question, that emerged as a piece of unfinished business in the Sonic Stretching research was “Can you hear me?” The related interest in ‘hearing the hearing of others’ thus began as a quest to understand why I have, myself, felt unheard and have also felt like an Other when it came to sharing music. In many personal and professional experiences, my perception has been that seemingly, no, many people could not or would not hear what I hear. Naturally, I next wondered if this was alterable, and so a
heuristic inquiry ensued, asking, “Can I help people to hear me?”, and “Might it not just be a failure of translation on my part?” Also, “If my translating is not the cause, what is getting in the way of being heard? Is it an issue of reception rather than translation?” Further, “Is the capacity for reception (on either side of the translation) limited or otherwise effected by personal and/or collective forms of trauma?” And finally, “Do other people experience this”?
Music therapy can be pointed to as a format that values music as a potent medium for emotional translation and inquiry. However, grappling with the questions mentioned above led me to intuitively shrink away from pursuing Western music therapy as a vocation. My limited experience of the field was that the musical training typically centered around American folk songs. I did not relate with these songs and the demeanor of the therapies I first encountered felt somehow coddling and naïve as well as alienating or exclusive. Wanting to disprove this initial judgment, I actually took college courses in a music therapy program at Colorado State University in 2014. Upon inspection of the program handbook, requirements for musical proficiency included American folksongs like ‘Home on the Range’ and ‘Take Me Out to the Ballgame’. Further, the proclaimed history of music therapy (not referred to as Western) was said to have begun and unfolded in the 1900s in Europe and America. Different modalities of Euro-centric music therapy since the 1940s were introduced, including those from practitioners and organizers like Eva Augusta Vescelius, Isa Maud Ilsen, and Harriet Ayer Seymore (Wheeler, 2015). These practitioners were well-off white women who each used music in conjunction with differing degrees of guided imagery and therapeutic relationships. There were also the more empirical approaches of Corning, Schorsch, Gaston, Altschuler, and Nordoff and Robbins, who were more concerned with the detailed pathways of musical effect, and with systematizing and codifying the approach and the field in general (Edwards, 2016).
Although there were what appeared to be effective and promising techniques and theories outlined in the class readings, as a student of jazz and West African music, the historical framework offered felt regrettably incomplete. Here, I have to admit that as a classically trained pianist, I came to love many classical styles of piano music. Still, what about the use of music and dance across the other continents and ethnicities that spanned back millennia before Europe even existed? What about the indigenous wisdom expressed in ancient music forms that is now being affirmed by neuroscientific measurement and yet is still consistently appropriated by Western academics and practitioners who insist that they (or their European, or Euro-American forbearers) came up with the ideas, and are thus due to profit from them while non-academic artists (who they likely learned from) starve and struggle? I could not ignore these questions or the feelings of incongruence that
they brought up. But when I tried to engage this topic in class, there was typically no response or thinly veiled defensiveness. Years later, when I made the same complaints regarding cultural appropriation in the field of Body Psychotherapy work, responses were similarly defensive. Perhaps my questions needed to be asked more gently—like with my music, maybe my style was rough and hard to hear, as I’ve been told. Or perhaps there is just not much appetite, or capacity, for such ‘dissonant’ counterpoint.
In any case, at the time that I was being introduced to these studies the realities of cultural appropriation were consistently showing up in my personal world as well. My husband at the time, a well-known and respected West African musician, talked a lot about his day-to-day struggles with students taking material that they learned from his music classes, and then deciding to teach classes themselves (though they were completely unqualified to do so). These students would often teach in the same geographical area, thereby usurping the student pool that would have otherwise supported the African teacher’s classes.
Aside from problems of appropriation in many forms of Western music therapy, there are also problems of association. My French father expressed his associations of Baroque music with the pompousness of the kings and aristocracy in France. He described how that pompousness contrasted in seemingly flagrant contempt against the lives of regular folks bound as serfs. For my mother born in Iowa to Irish farmer immigrants, poor and orphaned at age 12, folk songs are an instant reminder of how she felt alienated by the singsong belonging of those whom she saw as privileged Americans. In all of these cases, listening to the kind of music that is consistently offered as a standard in mainstream Western music therapy would likely be triggering, not relieving or comforting.
As these are perspectives I care about, they inform my relationship to music, especially American folk music, to which I have no connection except in the sense that it was always alienating for both of my parents and my former husband. For myself as well, the standard repertoire typically offered in mainstream music therapies (at least as indicated by the music therapy training program handbook from Colorado State University I was privy to in 2014) was deeply aggravating; at one time I would have preferred a stick in the eye over hearing many of them, and the prospect of playing them was even worse as it felt not only inauthentic and forced but humiliating. The word, as I sense it, is that it felt revolting; that is, it triggered a reaction of revolt. Revolt against what? Perhaps revolt against the fetters of what counts as valuable music; what is considered ‘to belong’, which actually feels exclusive and alienating to me and to people I love.
The charge behind my rejection of much of the field of Western music therapy, as it was, makes my ‘unfinished business’ here evident. My experiences as the daughter and wife of immigrants (father from France, partner
Book
from Guinea, West Africa) and as the mother of a multicultural son inform my passions for diversity and inclusion but also fuel an interest in how people interact (or don’t) with what they perceive as Other. This brings to mind the importance of who I am thinking of as shadow, my Other, which in this work actually isn’t classical Western culture or music, or visual modes of transmission, or intellectual academic modes of translation per se. It is rather the attitude or belief in the possibility of supremacy in any of these modes—of better-than/less-than dichotomies and the consequent impulse to dominate by rejecting Other as less valuable.
More specifically, I find the inclusion and valuation of othered methods of knowing, including epistemologies of feeling and receiving, to not only be a matter of ethics but one of fidelity, quality, and integrity. “The imaginal approach to research is about the re-collection of what has been forgotten, left behind, neglected, marginalized, and unfinished” (Romanyshyn, 2013, p. 87). Sound, as a largely othered medium in academic research, but as a language native to my experience, consequently feels like an appropriate vehicle for me to explore inclusive methodology in ABR and depth psychological inquiry. As such, an underlying agenda of this book and the Sonic Stretching research involves exposing deeply introjected patriarchal discourse, a discourse of Western (Euro-white) male supremacy, as an incomplete mode of relating and knowing, especially as it functions within the fields of ABR, depth psychology, and music. The compliment to this agenda is a desire to revalue perspectives and modes of translation and epistemology which are delineated as Other, for example, non-classical, non-Western, non-Patriarchal, non-visual, but most importantly non-supremacy and non-exclusive modes and methods. Accordingly, this book began as an endeavor to decolonize my own music as well as my relationship to Others in sharing it. That is, it is an attempt at unfettering a musical discourse toward more inclusive methodologies integrating music, ABR, and depth psychology.
Notes
1 This research was originally conducted for a doctoral dissertation at Pacifica Graduate Institute.
2 See Moustakas (1990) on heuristic research methods, and Romanyshyn (2013) on alchemical hermeneutic study, which centralizes the contextual embeddedness of research/researcher in tandem with the paradigm shift in academic research toward valuing the unique, relational, and subjective perspective of researcher/researched.
3 Translation is defined as “a good enough match of transmitted mental images and meanings” (Bellos, 2011, p. 33). Further discussion of the meanings of translation follows in Chapter 2.
4 See Gadamer (1976)
5 See Koen, 2008; Sacks, 2008; Patel, 2008
6 The term ‘Western’ as it is used here and throughout the book points to “the ethnocentric worldview that emerged from the dominant cultures and institutions established in Europe and the United States” (Koen, 2008, p.16).
7 See Adorno, 2002; Cage, 1961; Beaulieu, 1987
8 See Siegel (2010) on windows of tolerance, Levine (2010) on pendulation and titration, and Kalsched (2015) on the self-care system
9 Herbie Hancock. (1973). Rain Dance [Sextant]. Columbia; Terry Riley. (1969). A Rainbow in Curved Air. CBS Records.; Eberhard Weber. (1973). No Motion Picture [Colors of Chloë]. ECM Records.
10 ECM (Edition of Contemporary Music) is an independent record label founded by Karl Egger, Manfred Eicher, and Manfred Scheffner in Munich in 1969. Records released on ECM by Art Lande included Red Lanta, with Jan Garbarek, 1979; Rubisa Patrol, 1976; Desert Marauders, with the Rubisa Patrol, 1977.
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