Song Discussion as Music Psychotherapy

Music therapists use four fundamental types of music experiences to engage their clients and help them to achieve specific aims. These experiences have been termed music therapy methods (Bruscia, 1998a), and they include improvisation, re-creation, composition, and receptive experiences. In receptive methods, the client takes in live or recorded music as a listener and responds in some manner, whether internally (e.g., imaging or relaxing) or externally (e.g., drawing or discussing). One variation of a receptive experience - and the topic of this paper - is song discussion, in which the client and therapist listen to a song together and then discuss the meaning and relevance of the song to the client's life (Bruscia, 1998a). Song discussion can occur in both individual and group therapy.As Grocke and Wigram (2007) point out, many different terms have been used to describe what amounts to multiple variations of song listening and discussion with clients. We advocate for the term song discussion as distinct from other labels that appear frequently in the music therapy literature as synonymous. For instance, music discussion is a broad term that implies listening to and discussing any type of music; this process could conceivably revolve around purely instrumental (non-lyric) works rather than song material. We avoid the term lyric analysis because the word analysis suggests an official or academic scrutiny of the text, a process that is likely to take place on a cerebral rather than an emotional or interpersonal level. To us, lyric discussion connotes discussion of the words of a song without much (if any) attention to the music that undergirds the text. We believe that song discussion should allow for conversation not only about the lyrical aspects of the song but also about the rhythmic, tonal, expressive, and formal elements of the music and, in particular, the nature of the marriage between textual and musical elements (addressed in greater detail below).In this article, we make a distinction between song discussion as we practice it and other experiences involving song, such as the following: 1) music communication in which the client or therapist presents a song or instrumental piece that helps the individual express something of significance about the self, the therapeutic relationship, or the therapeutic process (Bruscia, 1 998a); 2) unconscious song recall, in which a song is evoked from the client's unconscious for analysis (Diaz de Chumaceiro, 1998); 3) song improvisation, which sometimes involves verbal or musical discussion of a song that is improvised by the client and/or therapist in the session (Austin, 1998); and 4) song composition, in which the client and therapist may discuss the lyrics of a song that has been or is being created by the client (Baker & Wigram, 2005; Freed, 1 987). Additionally, the type of experience to which we refer herein is, by and large, one in which the therapist pre-selects the song for discussion rather than one in which "the client or clients choose the song (or piece of music), either by bringing a CD to a session or by choosing a CD from a collection in the therapy room" (Grocke & Wigram, 2007, p. 1 58). A discussion that flows organically and/or unexpectedly from another music therapy experience, such as may occur in song choice (singing the client's preferred songs) (Noone, 2008; Martin, 1991) is also different from what we describe here. To be clear, the type of song discussion that we write about in this paper has the following features:1) The experience Is planned In advance by the therapist before the arrival of the client(s) rather than evolving from another type of music experience.2) The song material is typically selected by the therapist rather than by the client(s).3) The song material is selected according to therapeutic usefulness (rather than therapist preference, for instance) as well as the therapist's understanding of key psychological and interpersonal dynamics and processes related to the experience (described in detail below). …