What Can Music do for Me? Chapter 3 Tia deNora
-Lili Koblentz
This blog on the third chapter of Tia deNora relates to my previous blog on chapter 5. In my previous blog, I introduced the major project of the music class where I am completing my Secondary Praxis course. Students were asked ‘What does music do for me?’ Where the fifth chapter deals with a large scale things, like social organization, the third chapter deals with individual people and their connection to music. Mentioned in the article was the idea of music affecting our emotions. This is certainly true of me. There are certain songs I simply cannot listen to. For example, Blink 182’s ‘Adam’s Song’ brings up incredibly painful memories for me, both of times when I personally was feeling very depressed, and the years I spent with a friend who spent most of his life in a deep depression. Listening to this song, as well as any other song concerning suicide makes me feel physically ill, causes a heavy amount of anxiety, and has a tendency to shoot my mood very far down. Conversely, songs I first heard when I was very happy generally make me very happy as well. I have discovered that I have the ability to control my mood through music.
Music therapy is a way that music is used to help people on an individual level. Evidence of music therapy goes back as far as World War I , II, and earlier – where soldiers suffering from physical and/or emotional trauma attended musical performances. Their response to the music was so notable that the nurses and doctors immediately pushed to have musicians hired at the hospitals as a part of therapy. Music therapy is enacted through playing and listening to music, among other things. The idea that something that sounds our lives as musicians can so thoroughly affect people is awe-inspiring. Music therapy can help many people – children with mental handicaps who have been mainstreamed, adults who have emotional issues, and the elderly who are slowly developing mental deficiencies; it has been shown to be an effective means of treatment.
I have one worry about using music as a therapeutic tool. If a person uses music solely as an emotional manipulator while they are sad, they might end up linking music with being sad, thus ruining listening to music for enjoyment. A friend of mine was involved in art therapy after her mother passed away. Before she entered, she was a fantastic artist, and the idea was that she could channel her talent towards healing. However, once she was through therapy, she rarely drew or painted again. Using what once made her happy as a coping tool for dealing with her mother’s death destroyed its ability to make her happy. We must be careful how we handle this idea of therapy, lest we take someone’s theoretical hiding place and turn it into a horrific place where someone is constantly confronted with what they were escaping from.
