Ru
EnE. Tarasevich
Music therapy: history and modernity
Since Аntiquity, the art of music has played an important role in human life. It not only performs a number of social functions – aesthetic, ethical, didactic, but is also actively used by doctors and clinical psychologists as the main or additional means of treating mental and psy-chophysical diseases. The author of the article makes an attempt to consistently, relying on the few surviving literary sources and available data on ethnographic expeditions, to trace the ways of dissemination, development and transformation of the idea of the healing effects of musical art on the human body. The purpose of the study, therefore, is to study the historical path of de-velopment of music therapy in relation to its current state.
As a result of the analysis of scientific articles, books and monographs by researchers in various fields of scientific knowledge, it was possible to conclude that the initial ideas about “musical healing”, as a means of healing the soul and purifying morals, belong to the time of the appearance of early treatises of Western European and Arab thinkers Аntiquity and the Middle Ages. By the 1800–1840s refers to the testing of musical instruments by medical professionals in psychiatric hospitals, mainly in the Russia, France and a number of other European countries, which was a natural development of the ideas set out in the first scientific works of the same period. Since the 1890s the axiomatic nature of the therapeutic effects of music is confirmed by evidence-based scientific research by the Russian scientists, physiologists I. Dogel, I. Tarkhanov, I. Sechenov and others. Only by the middle of the last century, listening to music and elementary musical improvisation became part of a number of methods successfully used in related fields – correctional pedagogy, habilitation, psychology, balneology and others, thereby expanding the scope of their practical application.
Key words
healing properties of music, ancient theories of “musical healing”, habilitation of children, modern methods of music therapy
For citation
Tarasevich E. Music therapy: history and modernity. In: South-Russian Musical Anthology. 2024. No. 3. Pp. 37–46.
