Beyond Objectivism and Relativism?

Music therapy as a modern discipline requires a body of knowledge established through systematic inquiry. What counts for knowledge and what counts for systematic inquiry? Since the days of Francis Bacon there has been a tradition within natural sciences to let count only those things that can be counted. Since his days the natural sciences have been extremely successful, due to the adherence to empiricist principles. Through the use of refined and controlled methods, with possibilities for replication and testing of results, a large body of accumulated knowledge has been built. Much research in the social sciences and in the professions has been based upon principles derived from the natural sciences. This has also been a strong tradition in music therapy, at least in America. In Europe, research in music therapy is relatively new, and has in many cases been developed in academic milieus that have favored interpretive and qualitative approaches to research. This has been done with the best reasons in the world. If a social researcher which a music therapy researcher arguably is uncritically adopts the philosophy of the natural sciences, he misses and misunderstands his object of study. Human life is embedded in culture and social structures and will not be understood properly if the researcher does not see himself as part of the same field as the object of study. Social phenomena have meanings that are constituted in social fields, and in order to develop any true understanding the researcher must understand how the people he studies understand themselves and their situations. The term double hermeneutics has sometimes been used to illuminate this; the social researcher is interpreting social agents that already are engaged in acts of interpretation. The relevance of the young and already quite strong tradition of qualitative research in music therapy should therefore be beyond any doubt. What is probably not so helpful is the tendency seen in some milieus of polarizing the traditions of quantitative and qualitative research, maybe to the degree of suggesting that say quantitative research is not adequate or interesting for music therapists. In an era where authorities and health agencies demand documentation and favor evidence-based approaches, this may be to insist on the discipline's marginality. Even if one does not include this political perspective, there are good reasons to warn against totalizing one tradition of research. Music therapy is in a multi-paradigmatic situation as a discipline and profession. Schools and models of music therapy exist side by side, based on different assumptions about the world, about music, health and therapy, and about our possibilities for producing knowledge. There are good reasons to believe that these schools and models together produce a broader spectrum of interesting questions and answers than one tradition of therapy and one tradition of research would do alone. Music therapy researchers should not forget the philosophical and ethical problems connected to objectivism in the study of man. To totalize relativism as an alternative is apart from being self-contradictory not very fruitful, nor the only option available. More than one philosopher have tried to develop a theory of knowledge that may go beyond objectivism and relativism. A brief editorial text like this is not the occasion though for engaging in complex discourses on epistemology and human rationality. Without necessarily having the final or even the best available philosophical "solution" it is at a more pragmatic level possible to suggest that music therapy as a broad and open field of knowledge will suffer if one tradition of research dominates or even represses others. The first article this spring is a qualitive study of meaning making and metaphors in music therapy. The three other original articles represent three different perspectives on quantitative research in music therapy. Two of them are clinical studies, one reflecting upon methodological issues and one upon theoretical implications of an empirical investigation. The last article summarises a questionnaire based survey trying to collect data on the value of music to one of the populations that music therapists work with; girls with Rett Syndrome. These articles are followed by an essay that summarises some of the recent contributions on the relationship between music and biology, one of the natural sciences that now informs and challenges music therapy theory. In our series of classical articles we present a text from Music and Medicine, an influential book in early American music therapy, advocating the view that the effects of music therapy has to be demonstrated scientifically. Introducing the article, Penelope Gouk editor of the recent book Musical Healing in Cultural Contexts asks "Objective Science or Just a Metaphor? " Sandane, June 2001 Brynjulf Stige