Music Therapy

It is said that it was the Swiss-French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, at the beginning of the 18th century, who discovered what later became music therapy. At almost the same time, the French musician André Modeste Grétry observed that the speed of his pulse varied with the faster or slower tempo of the songs he composed, that speed changing with the musical tempo, in step with his pulse. Experiments on sound stimuli developed in the late 19th century and have multiplied ever since, giving rise to different schools of thought, which fall into two main groups: studies of physiological processes and studies of verbal accounts.

Music Therapy has existed in France for more than thirty years, practically since it was created by Benenzonk in Argentina. It has two approaches: the so-called receptive, or passive, one, which consists of listening to the patient, and the so-called active one, almost non-verbal, which puts the patient into sound action. Sound, then, because it uses every possible sound: the involuntary sounds of our body (tummy sounds, etc…), the sounds we make voluntarily with our body (clapping, etc…), the sounds around us (in the room, in the street, in nature, in the building, on the train, etc…). Sound, then, because you do not need to know how to play music or sing in tune to enjoy the benefits of sound! Because we can enjoy the music and the songs we make without being musicians.

The French pioneers, from the late 1960s, are Jost, Edith Lecourt (who created a music therapy course, with a doctorate, at the Sorbonne) and Gérard Ducourneau (with whom Joelle Ghazarian studied).

The principles of Ducourneau's method 1) (and not only his!) are, in short, the following:

• Establishing a non-intrusive relationship is the necessary first step for music therapy to take hold. Music therapy, which is part of an interdisciplinary approach, sets out to help, but without doing harm;

• To create, renew, rebalance, bring to light the desire to live;

• To open the channels of communication: to share, listen, communicate, express emotions, become unblocked, relate to others;

• To join in, not to suffer, not to strain: to find the inner élan, the vital engine;

• To have pleasures;

• The goal, not always attainable, is: one day to manage to express ourselves verbally, precisely and in a way that brings relief.

1) Argentine psychiatrist, composer and music therapist considered one of the creators of music therapy in the 1970s. Gérard Ducourneau, one of the three great French representatives of music therapy, was the first to translate Benenzon's work into French and welcomed him in Bordeaux at his institute, the Atelier de Musicothérapie, A.M.Bx (where Joelle Ghazarian studied).