Art beside Science: Clinical Music Therapy and the Limits of Measurement

As a Music Therapist working with Oncological, Palliative and hospice patients, one of my aims is to observe how music makes them feel. In this reflective Essay, I provide a practice-informed philosophical inquiry showing that clinical music therapy at life’s end is a distinctive, non-reductive way of knowing that is complementary to science, through which meaning, connection, and understanding can unfold. In the Introduction of the Essay, I outline the importance of Clinical Music therapy at life's End by reflecting on music's philosophical, psychological, and spiritual-aesthetic components, which at first seemingly self-explanatory observations give rise to some rather abstract artistic thoughts and ideas. Yet, ideas which never rest on final answers and fixed certainties but actively seek and engage with experience to provide necessary conditions for the unfolding of understanding. In the second part, I expand these ideas by incorporating the differences of epistemological considerations between Art in general and Science. From my standpoint, many ambiguities, paradoxes, and speculations, especially in artistic clinical research, arise because the aesthetic epistēmē phenomenon is lost from the outset when it is adapted to scientific procedures and subjected to their rules. Linking artistic processes to epistemic abilities whose standards are set by the sciences, rather than defining independent standards for artistic research, merely subsumes the arts under the legitimising dispositif of science and reduces the idea of artistic “research” to a mere servant of technical and scientific standards and their specifications. If we agree that the effects of Music propensity as a human emotional experience are indisputable, then by following the Scientific guideline, setting up an experiment by establishing a condition, which means establishing a law and controlling the frame of reference, cannot be solely captured in numerical acquisitions. In my clinical practice, the power of music shows what a harmonious life could still feel in a limited life. It speaks in meanings that numbers alone cannot convey.