Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2025 AMS-SMT Joint Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
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Daily Overview |
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Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and the Music of Troubled Minds Location: Lake Minnetonka Session Chair: Erin Michelle Brooks, State University of New York at Potsdam | |
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Arvo Pärt’s Tintinnabulation as Intervention in Grief Studies Boston University The tintinnabuli music by Arvo Pärt is extraordinary in its universal appeal. This essay advocates for its use to enhance the therapeutic experience, helping individuals navigate their grief journey by offering a nurturing environment for healing. Taking a mixed methods approach (including methodologies from phenomenology and musopathy), this paper seeks to demystify how this distinctive music works to more accurately promote it as an intervention. Assisted by studies that endorse the use of music as an antidote to the issues of complex grief (Kelly et al. (2022), and Sekeles (2007)), it explores the unique medicinal benefits of tintinnabulation. Empirical data is supplied by analyzing not only the phenomena of the music itself, but also the vast number of comments on social media where people post deeply personal responses to Pärt’s music. Devised in the mid-1970s, the musical attributes of tintinnabulation are exactly those that are known to have calming effects on the mind and body, such as slow tempi, single keys, and minimal aural distractions. In Pärt’s music, the result is more than the sum of its parts and it is uniquely able to transcend cultural and ideological difference. It is a serene and meditative music, a panacea which opens fresh space that can help individuals access and express their emotions, providing a safe space for grief to unfold. Used as intervention, patients can either immerse themselves in this space unaided or utilize a systematic customized guide to process various aspects of grief (as described, for example, by Hollinger (2022)). It concludes that the richness of this emerging field can successfully incorporate music to encourage positive health outcomes because of the “awareness that nuances of the bereavement experience must be captured in order to explain medical outcomes,” and that ultimately, “the study of grief in psychosomatic medicine has a bright and growing future.” (O’Connor, 2019). Finally, it prescribes a playlist of works which have proven results that broadly match what patients and therapists might need for personal processing of grief and trauma, presenting an opportunity to utilize music that provides sonic space for reflection, consolation, memorialization, and healing. | |