Paper short abstract:

Based on sessions wherein 'music' is intersubjectively improvised, Western Music Therapy organises the participants' senses and emotions, embodying ideas of transformation which involve the body and the self. By doing so, MT politicises sensitivity with respect to the dominant therapeutic system.

Paper long abstract:

Western Music Therapy (MT) engages forms of sensoriality and expression in force of which the therapist's and patient's bodies work as vehicles of mutual communicative dynamics. In MT "therapeutic" settings, connections between perception, emotion and bodily symptoms and states are established on a performative ground.

Drawing evidence from a set of MT improvisational sessions in Italy, England and Finland, this paper discusses how communicative-musical and bodily-sensorial interactions can convey specific politics of senses, emotions and bodily expressions. A sensorial pedagogy or bodily education stands out as the condition by which the "therapeutic relationship" is provided with proper modes of being performed. Original treatment techniques are employed, which often borrow elements from remote healing traditions, thus connecting local and global, nearby-grounded and cosmopolitan knowledge. Furthermore, the musical interactions I observed, and participated in, embody complex sets of ideas and beliefs. MT methods of touching and hearing, proposing and interacting speak to a distinctive ideology of healing with its own categorizations of illness and well-being, of the person (body-Self) and the patient, of knowledge and (sensed and felt) experience. By peculiarly structuring senses, emotions and the body, medical efficacy stricto sensu is no longer the core-goal of therapeutic performance, leaving place to other conceptions of "transformation", "quality of life", "symbolicalness" and "collaboration".

In the conclusion, I argue the relevance of addressing MT from an anthropological perspective. Actually, an ethnography of MT performance puts into question the classical "five senses" schema, and calls for multimodal approaches to senses and to emotional perception as spheres of mental activity that can never be totally separated. In this perspective, senses and emotions, though classically thought of as autonomous, practically stand on the very same ontological, cognitive-behavioural, and phenomenological level.