“Found Performance”: Towards a Musical Methodology for Exploring the Aesthetics of Care

Abstract

Concepts of performance in fine art reflect key processes in music therapy. Music therapy enables practitioners to reframe patients as performers, producing new meanings around the clinical knowledge attached to medical histories and constructs. In this paper, music therapy practices are considered in the wider context of art history, with reference to allied theories from social research. Tracing a century in art that has revised the performativity of found objects (starting with Duchamp’s “Fountain”), and of found sound (crystallised by Cage’s 4′ 33) this paper proposes that music therapy might be a pioneer methodology of “found performance”. Examples from music therapy and contemporary socially engaged art practices are brought as potential links between artistic methodologies and medical humanities research, with specific reference to notions of Aesthetics of Care.

The music matrix: A qualitative participatory action research project to develop documentation for care home music therapy services

“…As a team, we had found it difficult to capture and report the range of impact our work had on the individual client, their physical functioning and their social lives within their wider community. This belief in the breadth of music therapy impact is underpinned by recent reports from the broader Arts and Health movement (All Party Parliamentary Group on Arts, Health and Wellbeing, 2017; Clift et al, 2016), from the medical humanities (Wood, 2017) and the music therapy literature (Hsu et al, 2015; McDermott et al, 2015; Pavlicevic et al, 2015). As a group of colleagues and a participatory action research group, we speculated that our experience was not unique.…”

Beyond Messiaen’s birds: the post-verbal world of dementia

“…12. Stuart Wood (2017), “Found Performance: Towards a Musical Methodology for Exploring the Aesthetics of Care.”…”