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an Attempt to Define a Position
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
If music is to meet the requirements of modern medical practice, it ought ideally to behave like a medicine (Kneutgen 1970): in other words, it ought to be possible to calculate its effects on a patient in advance, in the same way that this is possible with tablets. Yet the history of music therapy, from its beginnings in shamanistic healing songs and ancient Greek ethos doctrine to the present (Möller 1971), shows that music can scarcely be said to generate effects that are calculable in advance in a medical sense; and, consequently, the hackneyed idea of music as a drug has no meaning. The effects of music are complex and diverse, and are not comparable with those of drugs, which have largely been established as specific to individual drugs. Drug dependence is described in terms of concepts like addiction; dependence on music, if indeed it exists at all, ought rather to be described in terms of concepts like predilection or preference.