Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Church Music Leaders In The Usa: Prioritizing Technical Competence And Inclusion, Heather Maclachlan

Music Faculty Publications

Church music leaders in the United States pursue two priorities: technical accuracy and fluency in the music-making of their church ensembles, and, including as many volunteers as possible in those same ensembles. At times, the prioritization of technical competence and inclusion conflict, because volunteers whose playing or singing is less than competent seek to be included in church music groups. Facing this ethical dilemma, church music leaders operate ethically; that is, they employ strategies and develop policies based on their understanding of their responsibilities to other people (Warren 2014). During interviews, they verbally espouse an ethic of deontology, but in …

The Brief But Shining Life Of Paul Laurence Dunbar, A Poet Who Gave Dignity To The Black Experience, Minnita Daniel-Cox

Music Faculty Publications

Paul Laurence Dunbar was only 33 years old when he died in 1906.

In his short yet prolific life, Dunbar used folk dialect to give voice and dignity to the experiences of Black Americans at the turn of the 20th century. He was one of the first Black Americans to make a living as a writer and was seminal in the start of the New Negro Movement and the Harlem Renaissance.

Revolutionary Songs From Myanmar: Reconsidering Scholarly Perspectives On Protest Music, Heather Maclachlan

Music Faculty Publications

Since the February 1, 2021 military coup in Myanmar, Burmese musicians have been creating and circulating anti- coup songs. This article describes a representative sample of these songs, explaining how the lyrics reference important tropes in Burmese life and history. Further, the article argues that these anti-coup songs, while they can be understood as protest music, do not fit precisely into categories previously delineated for protest songs. Nor do these songs provide a neat answer to the question that scholars so often pose of protest music, to wit: do these songs work to persuade listeners to take an anti-authoritarian position? …

Music And Incitement To Violence: Anti-Muslim Hate Music In Burma/Myanmar, Heather Maclachlan

Music Faculty Publications

his article examines a corpus of Burmese-language anti-Muslim hate songs archived on YouTube. Burma/Myanmar is the site of recent genocidal violence perpetrated against Muslims, and these songs are part of the hate speech campaign that undergirds this violence. Using the definition of incitement articulated by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the article shows that the lyrics of these songs constitute incitement to violence. Further, the comments written by YouTube listeners provide evidence that the songs provoke additional dehumanizing speech. The songs and their creators are therefore complicit in the recent violent persecution of Muslims in Myanmar.

အနှစ်ခ ျုပ်။ ။ …

Burmese Buddhist Monks, The Seventh Precept, And Cognitive Dissonance, Heather Maclachlan

Music Faculty Publications

Burmese Theravada Buddhist monks have varying degrees of involvement with music; this study of 22 monks from across Burma/Myanmar reveals that most of them often listen to recorded music. At the same time the monks acknowledge that Buddhism’s Seventh Precept is (or ought to be) a guide for their behavior, agreeing that to be “attached” to music is to violate their monastic rule. They therefore experience cognitive dissonance, and they respond to this dissonance in predictable ways - that is, in ways documented by researchers working with Western populations. They differ, however, in their phenomenological experiences of attachment.

The Vocal Point: Honoring A Legacy: The Final Conversation With Arthur Woodley, Justin John Moniz, Minnita Daniel-Cox

Music Faculty Publications

AMERICAN BASS ARTHUR WOODLEY APPEARED with prestigious opera companies around the U.S. and abroad, including the Metropolitan Opera, San Francisco Opera, Washington National Opera, Seattle Opera, L'Opera de Montreal, Opera Philadelphia, Dallas Opera, Cincinnati Opera, Pittsburgh, Opera, New Orleans Opera, and Opera Theatre of St. Louis. His many roles included Varlaam in Boris Godunov, Bartolo in Le nozze di Figaro, the Four Villains in Les contes d'Hoffman, Kuno in Der Freischütz, Banquo in Macbeth, Nick Shadow in The Rake's Progress, Sulpice in La fille du régiment, Leporello in Don Giovanni, Rocco in …

Introduction To Special Issue, Music In World Religions: A Response To Isabel Laack, Heather Maclachlan

Music Faculty Publications

This article serves to introduce a special issue of Religions, titled Music in World Religions. A 2015 article by religion scholar Isabel Laack claimed that the study of music and religion has been neglected by Laack’s peers in the field of religions. Responding to Laack, I argue that scholars of music have been making important contributions to the study of music and religion and, indeed, have been addressing the twelve specific topics she highlights for decades. After summarizing academic works which respond to Laack’s twelve categories of inquiry, I introduce each of the articles in this special issue, showing that …

"Jesus Is Not A Foreign God":Christian Music-Making In Burma/Myanmar, Heather Maclachlan

Music Faculty Publications

Christians in the Southeast Asian country of Burma, also known as Myanmar, make up approximately five percent of the national population. The Christian community of Burma includes both Catholics and Protestants, and the Protestants are divided into many denominations. Baptist Christians are predominant among this group, and they provided most of the ethnographic information upon which this article is based. In the article I argue that twenty-first century Baptists in Burma fulfill both aspects of a “twofold legacy” bequeathed to them by Adoniram Judson, the first Baptist missionary to Burma, and that their fulfillment of this legacy is manifest in …

Safeguarding Curricular Self-Experiences In Undergraduate Music Therapy Education And Training, James Hiller, Courtney Belt, Susan Gardstrom, Joy Willenbrink-Conte

Music Faculty Publications

The purpose of this paper is to put forth a model to support the psychological safety of undergraduate students as they engage in a form of experiential learning called self-experiences. Self-experiences pair active engagement in learning episodes with learner self-inquiry. The need to safeguard curricular self-experiences is grounded in the American Music Therapy Association’s Professional Competencies and Code of Ethics and the Certification Board for Music Therapists’ Board Certification Domains. We first explicate several types and benefits of self-experiences and identify potential risks and contraindications that may compromise learners’ psychological safety and even cause harm. Next, we describe …

The Impact Of Singing Engagement On Food Intake Of Individuals With Alzheimer’S Disease And Related Dementias: A Multi-Site, Repeated Measures Study, James Hiller

Music Faculty Publications

Malnutrition among older adults with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) is a serious and long-recognized health concern. Identifying nonpharmacological means for enhancing the volume of nutrition intake is an urgent need. Researchers have explored the use of music and music therapy as nonpharmacological avenues in this regard, but most music-based studies related to food intake focus on receptive interventions wherein participants are exposed to recorded music during meal times. The purpose of the present research is to investigate whether residents with ADRD would significantly increase their volume of food intake during the midday meal immediately following 30 minutes of …

Warning: Music Therapy Comes With Risks, James Hiller, Susan Gardstrom

Music Faculty Publications

Bob Marley sings, “One good thing about music—when it hits you, you feel no pain.” Although this may be the case for some people and in some circumstances, we dispute this statement as a global truth. After all, couldn’t any phenomenon commanding enough to alleviate human pain (ostensibly instantaneously) also harbor the potential to catalyze undesirable, even injurious, effects? And couldn’t this influence then logically extend to music employed within the context of a therapeutic process? As music therapist and Concordia University Associate Professor Dr. Laurel Young writes, “the ‘miraculous’ effects of music as featured in popular media along with …

Women’S Perceptions Of The Usefulness Of Group Music Therapy In Addictions Recovery, Susan Gardstrom, Abigail Klemm, Kathleen M. Murphy

Music Faculty Publications

This study represents our attempt to uncover aspects of group music therapy that women with addictions perceive as useful toward recovery – factors that have yet to be clearly identified in existing literature. Women in residential treatment for addictions to heroin and other substances were surveyed following group music therapy sessions involving vocal and instrumental re-creation, listening, and improvisation. Qualitative content analysis of data revealed four major findings. We learned that treatment is, in fact, seen as useful by these particular women and that Yalom’s theory provides a meaningful framework for identifying, understanding, and fostering mechanisms within the group music …

Resistances In Group Music Therapy With Women And Men With Substance Use Disorders, Susan Gardstrom, James Hiller

Music Faculty Publications

In this paper, we explore client resistances in group music therapy with women and men in residential treatment for substance use disorders (SUDs). We describe how we have encountered resident resistances on women's and men's units within a gender-specific treatment facility and offer suggestions for pre-empting and addressing such resistances, offering both nonmusical and musical strategies and techniques. We emphasize a person-centered approach and an experience orientation, in which we view our primary responsibility as providing opportunities for the men and women to engage meaningfully with music, self, therapists, and other residents in order to identify problems and explore alternatives …

(Mis)Representation Of Burmese Metal Music In The Western Media, Heather Maclachlan

Music Faculty Publications

Heavy metal music is performed in Burma (also known as Myanmar) by two distinct groups of musicians: generalists, who are part of the mainstream music industry, and underground bands, who differentiate themselves from the mainstream industry in a number of ways. Importantly, the underground performers insist on presenting nothing but their own original songs. Western-educated journalists have recently published a number of articles about these underground bands, equating their original creations with resistance against the military junta that controlled Burma for the past half-century. The author argues that the metanarrative revealed in such media reports does not accord with the …

Aesthetic Foundations Of Music Therapy: Music And Emotion, James Hiller

Music Faculty Publications

The subject of aesthetic experience as it relates to music embodies a vast and fascinating territory of philosophical thought. Ancient philosophers to modern musicologists have engaged in scholarly debate over the topic from many perspectives (Davies, 2010; Kivy, 1989). Not surprisingly, a similar intrigue surrounds questions regarding the clinical value of aesthetic aspects of music and of music making for health, healing, and human development (Aigen, 1995, 2007).

Numerous links between aesthetic experience and therapeutic processes are found in the music therapy literature. In fact, volumes could be filled with theories and philosophical arguments for and against the meaning and/or …

A Review Of 'Spaces Of Solidarity: Karen Identity In The Thai-Burma Borderlands' By Rachel Sharples, Heather Maclachlan

Music Faculty Publications

In 1949, civil war broke out in the newly independent country then known as Burma, and now known as Myanmar. The war, which continues to this day, pits the central government (made up mostly of Burmans) against dozens of ethnic minority insurgent groups. One of the largest and most militarily successful of these ethnic insurgent groups is the Karen National Liberation Army, which contests the state army in southeastern Burma/Myanmar in areas of Karen State abutting the border with Thailand. The conflict has created tremendous hardship for civilians in the area, who speak mutually unintelligible Karennic languages and who variously …

Women With Addictions: Music Therapy Clinical Postures And Interventions, Susan Gardstrom, Maria Carlini, Jessica Josefczyk, Amy Love

Music Faculty Publications

Like men, women have been using alcohol and drugs since ancient times; yet we are just beginning to uncover important information about women's unique trajectory to and through addiction. Straussner and Brown (2002) write, “There is little or no denial left today: Women can be and are addicts at alarming rates” (p. 34). Close to 15% of the members of the American Music Therapy Association (AMTA) report working with clients who have addictions (AMTA, 2011). It is likely that some of these members work with women who struggle with addictions, and it seems feasible that some would work predominantly or …

The Impact Of Group Music Therapy On Negative Affect Of People With Co-Occurring Substance Use Disorders And Mental Illnesses, Susan Gardstrom, Jacklyn Bartkowski, Joy Willenbrink, Wiebke S. Diestelkamp

Music Faculty Publications

The purpose of this study was to explore the impact of group music therapy on levels of self-reported negative affect (NA) among men and women on a residential unit of an integrated dual diagnosis treatment program.

More specifically, we sought to determine if and to what degree engagement in composition, receptive (listening), re-creation (performing), and improvisation experiences would result in a shift—namely, a decrease—in the intensity of self-reported NA.

Participants were adults in residential treatment who had been diagnosed with co-occurring substance use disorders (SUDs) and mental illnesses (MIs), predominantly mood and anxiety disorders. Twenty group-music-therapy sessions were held on …

Adjudicated Adolescents, Susan Gardstrom

Music Faculty Publications

This chapter highlights music therapy practice with adjudicated adolescents, also referred to as juvenile offenders or delinquents.

In 2008 alone (the most recent year for which statistics are available), juvenile courts in the U.S. took action on more than 1.6 million petitions of delinquency. Some of these cases were dismissed; some were waived to adult, or criminal, court; still others resulted in adjudication (a determination of guilt) with subsequent dispositions of community service, restitution, fines, probation, and/or mandatory placement in treatment programs of varying levels of security (National Center for Juvenile Justice, 2009).

The Effect Of Pre-­Meal, Vocal Re-Creative Music Therapy On Nutritional Intake Of Residents With Alzheimer’S Disease And Related Dementias: A Pilot Study, Larisa Mchugh, Susan Gardstrom, James Hiller, Megan Brewer, Wiebke S. Diestelkamp

Music Faculty Publications

Singing has long been credited with a wide variety of physical, mental, and social health benefits (Hunter, 1999). Recent scientific inquiry points to the efficacy of singing toward enhanced cardiovascular and pulmonary performance (Bonilha, Onofre, Vieira, Prado, & Martinex, 2009), verbal communication (Wan, Ruber, Hohmann, & Schlaug, 2010), and immune functioning and attendant affective states (Kreutz, Bongard, Rohrmann, Hodapp, & Grebe, 2004; Kuhn, 2002; Unwin, Kenny, & Davis, 2002).

Among older adults, singing has been linked with improved mood, better quality of life, greater happiness, stress reduction, and emotional well-being (Clift et al., 2010).

In our own work, we have …

Music Therapy Within The Context Of Psychotherapeutic Models, Mary Scovel, Susan Gardstrom

Music Faculty Publications

Music therapy clinical practice occurs at various levels. Wheeler (1983) has classified the treatment of adults with mental disorders into three types: music therapy as an activity therapy; insight music therapy with re-educative goals; and insight music therapy with reconstructive goals.

Activity-based therapy is aimed at helping the client reach observable, measurable goals through various forms of music experiences. In contrast, the two remaining levels focus on facilitation of change through personal insight gained via musical experiences and verbalization about those experiences. Insight-based music therapy processes are ordinarily more intense and prolonged, in that deep emotions are evoked, and in …

Undergraduate Music Therapy Students’ Experiences As Clients In Short-Term Group Music Therapy, Nancy A. Jackson, Susan Gardstrom

Music Faculty Publications

This report highlights a collaborative, phenomenological study undertaken by two faculty researchers from different undergraduate music therapy training programs in the Midwest. A total of nine junior and senior music therapy students from both programs (five from one, four from the other) were involved in short-term group music therapy, participating in three two-hour sessions during the course of an academic semester. Sessions were facilitated by the researchers, both of whom were board-certified music therapists.

To ensure ethical treatment, each researcher led sessions with the students from the other university, with whom they had no dual relationships. Student participants were involved …

Personal Therapy For Undergraduate Music Therapy Students: A Survey Of Amta Program Coordinators, Susan Gardstrom, Nancy A. Jackson

Music Faculty Publications

The primary purpose of this study was to gather information in order to understand if and how various modalities of personal therapy are employed with undergraduate music therapy students in the United States, AMTA degree program coordinators were asked about 3 therapy modalities, in particular: verbal therapy, music therapy, and expressive arts therapy (excluding music therapy).

It was predicted that less than a quarter of the respondents would indicate that personal therapy of any modality was required in their undergraduate curricula, but that a larger percentage would indicate that it was encouraged. Both hypotheses were supported, with just over 14% …

Music Therapy Improvisation For Groups: Essential Leadership Competencies, Susan Gardstrom

Music Faculty Publications

This book contains 80 exercises designed to reinforce a variety of competencies. Exercises represent three types of learning that have emerged as invariable aspects of the introductory course:

• Didactic learning
• Experiential learning
• Independent skill development

Didactic learning relates to philosophical, theoretical, and/or practical information that is communicated via lecture, discussion, and modeling.

Experiential learning refers to the students' firsthand experiences in the learning/therapy group process that accompanies didactic instruction. In this form of learning, students have opportunities to observe, participate in, co-lead, lead, and verbally process improvisation experiences.

In independent skill development, students engage in skill-building experiences independently and with …

The Don Dance: An Expression Of Karen Nationalism, Heather Maclachlan

Music Faculty Publications

How do Karen people define themselves as Karen? This question has particular import for one community in New York State—the Karen of Utica. The two hundred members of this group affirm their distinctiveness in part by celebrating a day that is special to Karen people worldwide. Since their arrival in Utica in 1999, every January they dance the don dance, a dance created and practiced only by Karen people. This article will discuss the performance of the don dance in another context: in a refugee camp in Southeast Asia, the dance functions to create and reinforce a particular ideal of …