Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 10 Number 1, April 2009
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Busch, Veronika, Tempoperformance und Expressivität: Eine Studie zwischen Musikpsychologie und Musiktherapie, Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang, 2005, 313 pp., ISBN 978-3-631-54067-1, EUR 59.70/USD 86.95 paper.
Reviewed by
Loyola Marymount University
Veronika Busch’s book, Tempoperformance und Expressivität: Eine Studie zwischen Musikpsychologie und Musiktherapie (Tempo Performance and Expressivity: A Study between the Psychology of Music and Music Therapy) is a lightly revised version of her 2005 Halle-Wittenberg dissertation and is worthy of translation and the close attention of the music therapy community. (The book is volume 16 of the series, Schriften zur Musikpsychologie und Musikästhetik.) It explores the connection between emotional expressivity and musical behavior experimentally through the collection and analysis of data on the responses of chronic pain patients to variations in musical tempo performance. Busch thus relates musical time consciousness to the capacity for emotional expression, self-regulation, and interpersonal communication.
The author begins with an extensive review of the literature on musical psychology, primarily from 1990 forward, focusing on time consciousness in music. A chapter sketching the chronic pain literature follows, emphasizing the concept of a reduced range of emotional expressiveness in chronic pain sufferers and the effects on general health of this reduction. An additional chapter outlines the notion of music therapy, distinguishing among medical, psychoanalytic, behaviorist, and humanistic-existential models.
Busch takes a skeptical view—due to a lack of reliable data on its efficacy—of the medical model, in which the practitioner uses music as an adjunct to pharmacological or other traditional medical treatments to “heal” certain physical conditions such as elevated heartbeat or other somatic reactions to stress. Busch is likewise unsympathetic to the psychoanalytic model of music therapy, following the theories of Freud, Jung and Adler, that attempts to use music to expose and reorder unconscious drives. Apart from more general critiques that can be made of these systems, the author notes that the underlying assumption that musical structures are closely analogous to psychic structures has already been successfully challenged in the literature. While Busch is diffident regarding the behaviorist model of the human person, she acknowledges that S. B. Hanser has successfully employed music therapy based on behaviorist principles in both general pain treatment and obstetrics.
Busch is more sympathetic to the humanistic-existential model of music therapy, which treats the human person not as passively subject to external or internal forces but as an ethical and aesthetic agent. In this context, the purpose of music therapy is seen as the formation and strengthening of a consciousness of personal identity and agency. The author takes brief note of another integrative form called regulative music therapy that works in a group rather than an individual setting.
While most existing avenues of research in music therapy rely exclusively on quantitative or qualitative approaches (depending on the underlying model), Busch argues that quantitative and qualitative approaches must be brought together in order for music therapy to be simultaneously scientific and holistic. The author has developed her own research in close cooperation with a controlled study conducted in Heidelberg at the German Center for Music Therapy Research on the effects of music therapy on chronic pain, so she devotes part of a chapter to describing the Heidelberg model and its research basis. The model is nonreductionistic and attempts to incorporate biological, psychological, and social strategies for intervention in chronic pain management.
The Heidelberg model recognizes connections between chronic headaches or back pain and a reduced range of emotional expressivity, so that the activation of emotional expressiveness (by and through music) becomes an important part of effective treatment. As the patient’s range of emotional expressiveness shrinks with an increase in the intensity and duration of pain, there is an observable restriction in range of tempi and tonal range when making music. On this basis, the Heidelberg model seeks to treat chronic pain by increasing the range of musical expression by tempo and tone, so that an increase in musical variation will result in a reduction in the subjective experience of pain. Busch gives a detailed description of this treatment method and of a previous study showing a 71% effectiveness rate at the reduction of experienced pain in comparison to a control group. The mechanism of pain origin and pain treatment lie in a correlation between reduced expression of emotion and muscular tension.
Busch’s own research questions stem from earlier studies of the effectiveness of the Heidelberg model. She asks: (1) whether the self-estimation of emotional expressiveness differs between chronic pain sufferers and healthy subjects; (2) whether there is a difference in musical performance with regard to tempo between the two groups; (3) whether music therapy results in changes in self-estimation of emotional expressiveness; and (4) whether music therapy results in changes in tempo in musical performance. The answer to all four research questions will turn out to be “yes.”
Busch’s study operates with a test group and two control groups. The test group consists of chronic pain patients undergoing music therapy, while the control groups consist of chronic pain patients without music therapy and healthy subjects, respectively. Data are generated based on three central tests: one that determines the subject’s preferred tapping tempo, another to determine the subject’s maximal tapping tempo, and a third (using a metronome episodically) to diagnose the subject’s flexibility with regard to tempo in relation to the subject’s heartbeat.
Busch’s extensively documented experimental process leads to the conclusion that chronic pain is essentially a feedback loop effect involving muscular tension, atrophy, and reduced range of emotional expression leading to an increase in muscular tension and atrophy. The further factor that the author has documented for the first time is a correlated dysfunctional time perception on the part of the chronic pain sufferer that hinders the synchronization of inner and outer processes and disorders both emotional regulation and social communication. The mechanism of the effectiveness of music therapy therefore seems to be that by improving the range of emotional expressiveness and enhancing temporal perception, the clinical use of music (especially of active music-making on the part of the patient) can tie into the feedback loop and reduce muscular tension and the resulting atrophy, thereby reducing chronic pain.
Busch’s book, which has many more facets than can be captured effectively in a brief review, is fascinating most of all because of its ability to connect theories of musical aesthetics to the generation and analysis of empirical data in psychology. Her extension of the Heidelberg model of music therapy will doubtless influence clinical practice. One may expect neuroscientists to follow up on Veronika Busch’s work by investigating the precise neural mechanisms of the effects she documents here. Aestheticians, especially philosophers of music, will find much here as well that can be integrated into wider theories of the roles that composing, performing, and hearing music play in human experience.