Benjamin D. Koen

The Oxford handbook of medical ethnomusicology

Medical Ethnomusicology is a new field of integrative and holistic research and applied practice that approaches music, health, and healing anew, engaging the biological, psychological, emotional, social, and spiritual domains of human life that frame and inform our experiences of health and healing, illness and disease, life and death. The power of music to create health and healing at the individual, community, and societal levels is not only linked to these domains of human life, but is intimately interwoven with the ever present and multifaceted frame of culture, which is often where meaning lies, and is a key factor that creates or inhibits efficacy. The Oxford Handbook of Medical Ethnomusicology appeals to all those interested in music, medicine, and culture, and represents a new stage of collaborative discourse among researchers and practitioners who embrace and incorporate knowledge from a diversity of fields. Importantly, such knowledge, by definition, spans the globe of traditional cultural practices of music, spirituality, and medicine, including biomedical, integrative, complementary, and alternative models; is rooted in new physics, philosophy, psychology, sociology, cognitive science, linguistics, medical anthropology, and of course, music, dance, and all the healing arts. The book is more than the first collected volume to establish the discipline of medical ethnomusicology and express its broad potential; it is also an expression of a wider paradigm shift of innovative thinking and collaboration that fully embraces both the health sciences and the healing arts. The authors encourage the development of this new paradigm through an openness to and engagement of knowledge from diverse research areas and domains of human life conventionally viewed as disparate, yet laden with potential benefits for an improved or vibrant quality of life, prevention of illness and disease, even cure and healing.

Musical Healing in Eastern Tajikistan: Transforming Stress and Depression through Falak Performance

The present article falls within the burgeoning area of medical ethnomusi cology, which has emerged over the last several years as a bona fide specialty within the realm of ethnomusicological studies. The field has increasingly at tracted the attention of researchers, scholars, and practitioners across diverse disciplines in biomedicine, the social and health sciences, physics, ICAM (integrative, complementary, and alternative medicine), medical anthropology, religious studies, and of course, music and the humanities.1 Additionally, this article emerges from a long-term research program within the understudied region of Badakhshan, Tajikistan, where certain genres of music, prayer, and related practices that are central expressions of cultural identity and religious belief function in individual and complementary ways to promote health or facilitate healing. Among the multiple applications of specialized music that fall under the broad, local categories of musiqiye shafâi (healing music) or musiqiye darmâni (music medicine, remedy, healing) is the role of music to assuage one’s pain or even cure a person afflicted with the ills of stress or de pression. A vast body of research across disciplines in the humanities, social, and health sciences shows that stress and depression are pervasive throughout the world, pose major health risks, and can cause the development of numerous conditions and diseases.2 After more than a generation of Soviet control and oppression, a subsequent devastating civil war, and a decade of slow struggle to begin the process of rebuilding, Tajikistan is no exception to the ills of psychological distress and depression. One of the most important musical responses to stress and depression in Badakhshan is the performance of falak.

Medical Ethnomusicology and the Promise of Music, Health and Healing

The potential power of music and the expressive arts to participate in and transform the discourse of health and medicine is greater now than ever before. Most important is how music lives in and transforms our experiences of health, illness, disease and healing. At times, music is supportive, at other times, music is a direct intervention or treatment. Music and sound can likewise create dysfunction and contribute to illness and disease. Yet at all times, music can be healing and contribute to human health and wellbeing. This chapter offers a new paradigm from my research and practice in medical ethnomusicology and presents a holistic model for research and applied practice.