Abstract
The study aims to understand the participants’ experiences of Anthroposophical Music Therapy (AnMT) within the South Korean anthroposophical community. By exploring the participants’ experiences of a new music therapy approach in the specific cultural community, this study aims to contribute to the development of a music therapy practice with cultural sensitivity. Moreover, this thesis aims to introduce AnMT to South Korean music therapy practice where AnMT is relatively new, although there are high demands of it in Korean anthroposophical communities.
The study, thus, examines what participants experience through AnMT; how cultural context influences the participants’ anthroposophical musical healing experience; and lastly, how participants perceive the application of AnMT in South Korea. During the fieldwork period from Jun to Oct 2018, data was collected through applied ethnography within the broad qualitative research framework. The researcher provided six AnMT workshops and twelve AnMT trial sessions as the applied work. Ten events for participant-observation and about 150 interviews were also conducted. The collected data was interpreted through thick description with the field notes. With the thematic analysis, the data was synthesised and analysed.
As a result, the study reveals that participants in the Korean anthroposophical communities experience AnMT with three distinct ways: healing, chinmilgam 친밀감 (intimacy) in music, and future application. Specifically, the theme of healing was expressed with their notions, which were gyunhyeong 균형 (balance), soom 숨 (breathing), ja-ah 자아 (ego), and yeongseong영성 (spirituality). The three themes that emerged developed key discussions: medical pluralism in music therapy; wifi model; and Koreanisation of AnMT, which could provide deeper and nuanced understandings in music therapy academia and practices.
Therefore, this thesis is an original contribution to the music therapy discipline through presenting interdisciplinary research located at the intersection of music therapy, medical anthropology, and medical ethnomusicology. This thesis reports a unique study of the collaboration of these three disciplines as a new way of exploring and further developing music therapy theory and practice. Furthermore, the thesis acknowledges the cultural sensitivity in music therapy practices in this global, multicultural society.