The Uncontrollable (in music therapy)

Hartmut Rosa. The Uncontrollability of the World. polity, 2020.

There is an element of unpredictability in music therapy encounters with clients. We cannot fully control the outcome of an improvisation, how a musical interaction will unfold, or whether the music we have selected for listening will evoke a response in the client. Music therapists have developed a range of methods, techniques, and procedures intended to ensure, as far as possible, that we can create favorable conditions for musical communication, musical experiences, and transformative interpersonal encounters. There are numerous improvisational techniques designed to foster synchrony and dialogic moments. And we have clear procedures connected to music listening and receptive music therapy.

Despite all techniques and planned rituals, we know that we do not always succeed. Improvisations do not always lead to ‘good moments,’ and musical experiences in GIM sessions may fail to appear. In other words – there is something uncontrollable in music therapy practice. We cannot decide or impose particular musical experiences on our clients.

A sociological perspective on the uncontrollable

This uncontrollable dimension lies at the heart of the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa’s philosophy of resonance. As I read his newly translated Norwegian edition of The Uncontrollable, it struck me how many parallels exist between his understanding of “resonance moments” and what music therapists are striving for in their work.

This summer, Rosa’s short book The Uncontrollable (Unverfügbarkeit in German) appeared in Norwegian, offering a clearer understanding of what this somewhat peculiar German term entails. In a broader sociological perspective, the concept concerns life in late modernity and our desire to control the world, driven by an aggressive “must-have / will-have” attitude. Our freedom to act has become a compulsion to act. We seek to control by making things visible, physically accessible, manageable, and useful. Modernity has developed a vast apparatus of control through science, technology, economics, and politics. Rosa describes this attempt at control as an assault on the world – an aggressive stance that rebounds upon ourselves. He provides many everyday examples of how we strive to increase our capacity to create the conditions for resonant experiences. Yet these experiences often slip away; they are not quite as powerful as we hoped, and so we continue chasing the next possibility.

Music therapy parallels

However, there is another stance besides the drive to control our surroundings. Rosa also offers a concise description of how the world can instead appear as a resonance partner. I have previously outlined Rosa’s resonance theory in these pages, so I will not repeat this here. It is in this resonance theory that I find several points of contact with music therapy, particularly when Rosa writes about affect, emotion, transformation, and the uncontrollable.

We are well aware that we can never fully control how individuals react to or experience music in therapy. When we improvise, we deliberately create a situation in which the outcome is uncertain. We can never know exactly how others will interpret or respond to our musical expressions. Yet because we know how to respond through our improvisational techniques, cultural awareness, and musical sensitivity, we can recover if the response fails to occur and thus attempt anew. In this way, we can create a musical interaction that takes the uncontrollable as its starting point—as a possibility for generating a meaningful musical dialogue. We create what Daniel Stern calls “present moments,” which may sometimes dissipate and at other times become “moments of meeting.” These meaningful moments signal relational connection. They bear witness to a form of resonance, perhaps what Rosa calls a “second-order” resonance, recalling deeper or earlier resonant experiences.

The search for peak moments

Many music therapists seek peak experiences, what Maslow called “peak experiences.” Such transformative moments also belong to Rosa’s model of resonant experiences. As music therapists, however, we know that such moments cannot be ordered or forced. At best, we can create favorable conditions, prepare the ground, and hope that greater or smaller transformative moments will occur.

This applies, for example, to the GIM journey. One may have powerful musical experiences while lying relaxed, in an expanded or altered state of consciousness. In some cases, these experiences are truly impactful—physically and mentally transformative. I had many such journeys with my mentors during my BMGIM training; a few of them remain particularly vivid and memorable.

Such experiences—whether arising from improvisation, interaction, or music listening—come to us by grace, to borrow a religious expression I once found in philosopher Martin Buber’s writings on music. Music therapists have also compared such powerful resonant moments to I–Thou encounters. At a seminar with Daniel Stern that we once held with doctoral students in Denmark, I asked Stern about the relationship between his “moments of meeting” and Buber’s I–Thou encounters or Maslow’s peak experiences. As I recall, Stern would not equate his moments with the most intense experiences—yet he acknowledged that they may still be transformative.

Affect and affect attunement – the moment of being touched

Rosa emphasizes that resonance presupposes openness and receptivity—the capacity to be moved. We must allow ourselves to be affected. “To enter into resonance with a person, but also with a landscape, a melody, or an idea, means to be touched or moved inwardly by him, her, or it,” Rosa writes. He describes this as a kind of calling. The challenge for music therapists is to cultivate a musical setting in which clients can become receptive to musical impressions.

This recalls Daniel Stern’s concepts of intersubjectivity and affect attunement. Intersubjectivity refers to a mutually created and shared world of meaning. It arises through immediate and shared synchronization with another’s mind, through intentional exchange of affects and shared attention, forming a dialogic frame for development, as Gro Trondalen (2016) writes. This contact is procedural (implicit) and nonverbal. Body, experience, and affect are central.

Self-effecacy – the moment of answer

According to Rosa, resonance only occurs when this being-touched is followed by an active response. We speak of getting goosebumps, of feeling a shiver. Rosa highlights the etymology of “emotion” (e-movere) – a movement outward – located in the response. Resonance occurs when we experience ourselves as agentive and vitally connected to the world. Rosa calls this self-efficacy, drawing on Bandura. The simplest example lies in exchanging glances or participating in a conversation where both parties listen and respond. “Eyes are resonance windows,” Rosa writes; we may add that ears are as well.

Music therapists’ concept of communicative musicality refers precisely to such moments in which musical elements foster interaction between child and caregiver. To define musicality in this way is to show how musicking inherently preserves relational qualities in our being-in-the-world. With improvisation as a tool, music therapists seek to invite and elicit responses from clients—whether children with developmental disabilities or adults with personality disorders. There are countless improvisational techniques for evoking intentionality, eliciting response, and synchronizing interaction. And yet, it is precisely the uncontrollable in musical improvisation that has led to these techniques for influencing the conditions of control.

Within relational psychology, imitation and moment-to-moment synchronization play a central role. This contact is cross-modal and unfolds across different sensory modalities. These microprocesses form an intersubjective field in which partners influence one another through negotiation, including breakdowns and repairs of communication.

Transformation – the moment of incorporation

The third element Rosa highlights is transformation: resonant encounters change us, though to varying degrees. Resonance experiences transform us, and this is where the sense of being alive resides. If we cease to be open to being called, or lose the capacity to respond, we become inwardly dead—we lack resonance capacity. Rosa refers here to depression as a state in which all axes of resonance have fallen silent.

Transformation, dependent on resonance experience, is unpredictable and uncontrollable. Even in a structured BMGIM session—with relaxation, a carefully selected music program, imagery, and skilled therapeutic guidance—there is no guarantee that transformation will occur. I have experienced this myself through many hours as both participant and therapist. Yet there have been singular sessions that remain embedded in my body and memory, from which important insights and transformative experiences have emerged.

The uncontrollability moment

The final element of resonance is that relational blockages cannot be changed by sheer will, and resonance cannot be instrumentally produced. This is what is described as the uncontrollable. There is no method that can guarantee resonance in encounters with others or with music. Even in musical improvisation or in GIM, where we carefully shape subjective, social, spatial, temporal, and atmospheric conditions in the hope of resonance, it may still not occur. “A distinctive feature of resonance is that we can neither command it to appear nor to stay away,” writes Rosa (p. 85).

Reference:

Trondalen, Gro (2016). Relational Music Therapy. Barcelona Publishers.