What Has Schopenhauer's Theory of Music to Contribute to an Understanding of Improvisational Music Therapy?

Abstract

Schopenhauer has been described as the ‘musician's philosopher’ for the detailed attention he pays to music, assigning the medium a ‘pride of place in the arts' (Budd 1985: 76). Whilst his theory has received ample criticism (Han 1997) on the grounds of conceptual inconsistencies, what is of significance for music therapy is the way in which Schopenhauer cites music as the inner essence of man. Unlike the other arts which form representations of the world, music is not a representation; music therefore has the capacity to say the unsayable, revealing aspects of the world that verbal language is unable to reveal (Bowie 2003). It is of further significance that Schopenhauer has frequently been cited as a precursor to Freud, in particular upon comparing Schopenhauer's theory of man's inner essence or Will with Freud's theory of the unconscious.

This article explores the relevance of these theoretical links to the work of some pioneering theories of the modern western improvisational music therapy practices developed in the 1970s by Paul Nordoff, Clive Robbins and Mary Priestley. Schopenhauer's theory of music is shown not only to have had broad influence as a philosophy of music (Goehr 1996), but also to have contributed inadvertently to conceptual thinking in music therapy.