Just A Song Sunday: Reaching the End of Sears' Processes in Music Therapy

The time has come. I can feel it. Today is the day I finish this chapter of my foundational readings and leave it for some time. Today is the day!

Here's what I have left:

• Music provides opportunities for acceptance of responsibility to self and others
• Music enhances verbal and nonverbal social interaction and communication
• Music provides for experiencing cooperation and competition in socially acceptable forms
• Music provides entertainment and recreation necessary to the general therapeutic environment
• Music provides for learning realistic social skills and personal behavior patterns acceptable in institutional and community peer groups.

That's it. That is all that is left.

Here we go.

Music provides opportunities for acceptance of responsibility to self and others. 
Have you ever noticed the self-esteem boost that someone gets when he or she has earned a special part in the recital or musical? I think this is some of what Sears was thinking when he wrote these paragraphs. The first portion of the category is "music provides for developing self-directed behavior." Sears goes on to frame this concept through the idea of a person making a decision about what he or she wants to do with music and then making the commitment to get to that goal. Many times, clients have shown the interest and ability to accomplish a musical goal where they have not made the same type of commitment to the same type of task in an academic area. Symbol matching is symbol matching, but there is something a bit more interesting in matching musical symbols than letters. The same client who refuses to match letters in an academic classroom will often match letters when playing a musical instrument.

The second part of this category is "music provides for developing other-directed behavior." The music therapy client works within a group by playing with the others rather than playing over, in contrary to, and/or instead of others. This doesn't always happen with my current clients, but I can often observe changes in interaction and music play that indicate greater awareness of others in the environment.

Music enhances verbal and nonverbal social interaction and communication. 
Sears points out that music plays a role in most social occasions and the research of the time pointed to the ideas that music in the background could increase the amount of talking that someone would do in situations. I think about my high school. Most of the time, the social groups that happened had some sort of common music that helped to unite the individuals within the groups. We could bond with each other when a preferred song came on the radio. A common musical interest led us into interactions with people who we may not have met otherwise.

Music provides for experiencing cooperation and competition in socially acceptable forms.
You must cooperate with your fellow musicians to complete a musical piece. You also have the opportunity to compete with those same musicians for more responsibility to the group and to the music. Ah, chair auditions.

Music provides entertainment and recreation necessary to the general therapeutic environment.
Based on the institutional nature of music therapy at the time of writing, this paragraph focuses on the fact that music offered opportunities for persons who were segregated from the "normal" population based on the fact that they were institutionalized. Music is something that many people engage with in some way for recreational and entertainment purposes - persons with exceptionalities are no different.

Music provides for learning realistic social skills and personal behavior patterns acceptable in institutional and community peer groups.
Of all the paragraphs in this sub-section, I think this is the one that resonates the most with me in my role as a therapist for my clients. This is what I do at my facility. I work on social skill and personal responses with my clients. Everything is based on learning new ways to interact with others - that is my therapeutic mandate, so this is what I feel is most important to me in this section of the outline.

The last paragraph of this chapter is something that I like, so I am going to quote it verbatim from page 44. Here it is.

"A theoretical foundation such as this may suffer one of several fates: It may pass into history having received little consideration. It may be examined and found wanting, but because of the study it required, result in a different, more adequate formulation of theory. Finally, it may prove of enough interest and worth to be put to the test in practice and research - to be modified, improved, and expanded. Hopefully, the latter fate will come to pass. In any case, processes in music therapy take place by uniquely involving the individual in experience within structure, experience in self-organization, and experience in relating to others."

As I finish my most recent reading of this chapter, I wonder how many of us out there know about these ideas. I wonder how many of us agree with what Sears wrote. I wonder which of the fates Sears would think his ideas reached when he looked at us as a community at this point.

I am someone who is interested in the history of our profession, while still looking forward to the future. I think we cannot leave our history behind us, but we can and should learn about it in order to inform the decisions we make now. For the moment, I will leave this book and go into my own future, thinking about what Gaston and Sears thought almost 50 years ago, and thinking about what their thoughts mean to me, a current music therapist working in a new world for music therapy and for clients.




Sears, W. W. (1968). Processes in music therapy. In E. T. Gaston (Ed.) Music in therapy (30-44). New York: MacMillan.