application and research.
Bright, whose expertise in move forward along with the rest of arts medicine
music therapy with the elderly is internationally
acknowledged, points out most appropriately the
need for the music therapist to take into account
cultural differences among clients. Bright’s
scholarship and erudition are clearly present as she
wisely advises the music therapist to be aware of
ethnic origin, religious culture, social milieu, and
age and illness factors that take on peculiar
meanings in specific societies.
Hooper’s paper points out the lack of objective
and persuasive data concerning effects of music
therapy interventions. In reporting his own research
about a microcephalic, myopic, spastic quadriplegic,
Hooper offers a reporting model that combines both
qualitative and quantitative approaches. His
repeated measures design indicates that the
presence of music therapy during sessions may
have increased interactive behaviours. Mueller and
Warwick discuss music therapy with autistic
children. Once again, qualitative and quantitative
reporting methods are used effectively and indicate
that mothers can be helped to reduce intrusive,
demanding behaviours in favour of discovering
music as a common ground for interaction and
communication.
Smeijsters and van den Hurk discuss music
therapy and anorexia nervosa. These researcher//
clinicians espouse a form of research that, while
respecting scientific rigour and quality, offers a
paradigm that is conducive to the particular needs
of music therapy interventions. Sutton’s paper is
about a language-disordered child and the happy
illustration of the alternative communication
possibilities that music therapy can offer. The title of
the paper, ’The guitar doesn’t know this song’
demonstrates the child’s unique and charming
perception of the difficulty involved in expressing
oneself on an instrument of this complexity.
Wigram’s paper in this section is an excellent
report of the use of music therapy with a client
exhibiting self-injurious behaviour. Specifically, the
research examines the use of low-frequency sound
and sedative music with these patients. Although,
as Wigram himself acknowledges, problems with
confounding variables still exist in studies of this
kind, he is to be applauded for his continuing
meticulousness of research method and reporting
techniques. His work is a fine example of the
direction in which the most outstanding music
therapists are headed.
Music Therapy in Health and Education is
worthwhile reading for therapists and researchers,
and makes an important contribution to the
literature. Its problems with uneven research
reporting and content are reflective of the issue in
general in the field of music therapy and music
medicine, and indeed, in arts medicine research.
Margaret Heal and Tony Wigram are to be
congratulated for their fine editorial work and
mighty efforts to bring these research and clinical
papers into print, and for having the courage to
raise issues of quality and scientific rigour that must
be addressed as music therapy and music medicine
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into a new era of health care.
Rosalie Rebollo Pratt
Peter Kivy, The Fine Art of Repetition: Essays in
the Philosophy of Music, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press,1993; 373 pp., ISBN
0-521-43598-6.
The Fine Art of Repetition is a collection of essays on
music by Kivy that spans thirty years of writing.
The range of topics in this collection is wide,
including the role of music in education, the nature
of music and its performance, philosophies of
music, music criticism, and the aesthetics of opera.
An ability of Kivy which gives this book one of its
qualities, is to link philosophical discussion about
music to the work of non-musically orientated
philosophical writings of authors such as Kant,
Plato, and Einstein. At the same time this
perspective of his work is combined with references
to the works of musicians and musicologists:
Gretry, Mattheson, Wagner, and Gluck among the
former, Hanslick, Cone Dahlhaus and Schenker
among the latter. The use of philosophical comment
by composers to unravel what music may mean at
various stages of its history grounds Kivy’s
arguments in historical contexts that can supply
valid comparisons for contemporary views of
music. Such historical comments also serve to
remind the reader that musical meaning is the
product of its time as much as of the music itself.
Musical meaning resurfaces throughout the book
as the focus of discussion. Particularly, Kivy revisits
a number of times the distinction to be made
between expressive music set to texts (and seen as
the basis of much music to the end of the eighteenth
century) and absolute music, which he terms ’music
alone’ (pure instrumental music that developed in
the early nineteenth century). The problem created
by this distinction, which gives rise to Kivy’s
arguments, is whether absolute music means
anything, if it does how this might be achieved, and
whether one meaning is the meaning. To present
and explain his ideas in this debate Kivy uses the
witings of other philosophers as his impetus.
Of specific interest to music educators will be the
essay Music and the Liberal Education, in which Kivy
suggests reasons for the inclusion of music in the
curriculum and a discussion of what music should
be used as its content. This line of debate leads to
analysis of the reasons for selecting certain pieces of
music as the texts of music education, and moves to
the perennial question of teaching a musical canon
of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, which is content-
based and is meant to introduce students to the
so-called ’great works’ of music (seen as musically
equivalent to Shakespeare and Austen in literature),
or whether there is some other way of selecting
material. While appreciating the debate and its
implications for music education, not all readers
will agree completely with all of Kivy’s arguments.
This does not detract from the ideas, the manner of
their presentation, or the fact that Kivy has been
willing to discuss such an issue.
At a time when music education in many
countries is experiencing a period of change and the
consequent questioning of its existence that this
often induces, this collection of Kivy’s work will
provide music educators with much to think about
which may help clarify the role and value of music.
Steven Scher (ed.), Music and Text: Critical
Cambridge: Cambridge University
Enquiries
Press,, 1992; 327 pp., ISBN 0-521-40158-5.
Music and Text: Critical Enquiries is a collection of
papers that discuss forms of musical meaning from
cross-disciplinary perspectives. The cross-
disciplinary nature of the book is of two kinds. First,
many of the papers are by scholars outside
musicology, usually literary. Second, the
approaches used in individual papers cover a range
of hermeneutic methods, among them, semiotics,
structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction,
reception theory, and feminist studies. This double
layer of disciplinary difference gives the book an
intrinsic interest in addition to demonstrating the
applicability, or otherwise, of these critical methods
to the discussion of music.
Above all, this is a book about methodology and
its application to the questions of whether music
has meaning, what that meaning might be, and how
it may be constructed, mediated and received. The
fact that the majority of the music discussed is
composed to literary texts gives the writers in Music
and Text an impetus for the assumption of meaning
in the works examined. These range widely, from a
Lionel Ritchie song to a Schumann song cycle,
Haydn’s Creation, and works by Mahler,
Monteverdi and Handel. The preponderance of art
music in this list indicates an unbalance in the book
as a whole, especially considering the questions of
the reception of a rock song raised by Hamm in his
work on Ritchie’s All Night Long.
A recurring factor throughout this book is the
examination of how a piece of music could have
been received at the time of its composition
according to the aesthetic theories of its time. Such
reception is compared to subsequent receptions for
analysis of the ways that contexts of time, place, and
culture influence musical meaning. This form of
interpretation depends on the post-structuralist
view of the work as open-ended, another matter
raised numerous times by different authors.
While providing much for the music educator to
consider, Music and Text, in this reader’s opinion,
demonstrates a processual flaw in canvassing
debate from specialists in one field (literature) in
another field (music). This leads at times to opinions
on music that are not based on depth of
musicological understanding. Despite this, the book
is valuable reading, especially for the way it tackles
the use of current critical methods for
understanding music.
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Richard Anderson Sutton, Traditions of Gamelan
Music in Java: Musical Pluralism and Regional
Diversity, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991; 291 pp., ISBN 0-521-36153-2.
Sutton’s book is a study of types of gamelan music
in contemporary Java. It covers gamelans in
Surakarta, Yogjakarta, Banyumas, Semarang, and
East Java, and presents them as distinct musical
traditions with separate repertoires, performance
practices, and aesthetic stances. Each one of these
locations forms the basis of a chapter and is
discussed historically, and for the use of
instruments, relevant genres, repertory, and musical
concepts and style. The focus of the book is musical
regionalism, and discussion includes not only the
ways this can be delineated through musical
practice, but also the ways that this arose and
developed under the influence of historical events.
Apart from its usefulness as an academic text on
areas of Indonesian music, Sutton’s book has other
implications for music educators. Providing models
for the study of music from distinct cultures, it
selects criteria for application across a number of
musical cultures to show similarities and
dissimilarities, and uses the results to formulate
those relating to musical regionalism. Essential to
understanding the musical material of the book is
an
understanding of the historical and cultural
contexts through which it has developed, again a
model for use in the study of any music. In addition
to considering official and academic publications for
this information, Sutton includes profiles of, and
information gained from local musicians, presenting
a method of research suited to the study of many
types of music and one applicable for music
educators.
The contexts which influence the development
and existence of the music under consideration
include government policies of arts maintenance,
the role of public media in the dissemination of
music, and the importance of public education to
teach both the music and appreciation of its
traditions. In the chapter devoted to these issues,
Sutton provides music educators with insights into
some methods of music education in Java, and the
ways that these are perceived as exemplifying
government agendas.
While many music educators may assume that a
book about Javanese gamelan music is too
specialised for them, Sutton provides much
information that is generally applicable to
understanding music, how it develops, what it may
mean to its localised audiences, and ways that it can
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Peter Dunbar-Hall
Robert Philip, Early Recordings and Musical Style:
Changing Tastes in Instrumental Performance
1900-1950, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992; 274 pp., ISBN 0-521-23528-6.
This book results from research by the author
dating back to 1968 when he formulated a proposal