ABSTRACT
In this opinion piece, I write as an experienced musician who has played at the highest level of performance. I also write as someone who has employed music as therapy and who has studied both neuro-biological and cultural aspects of the impact of music upon the body, mind and spirit. After years grappling with the intangible and ineffable aspects of music I am as cautious about reducing its impact to either measured outcomes or neural firings as I am of considering even the most subtle musical analysis an explication of the musical experience. While each of these approaches has an important role and must be considered seriously, as a musician I am keenly aware of the difficulty, even the impossibility, of quantifying aesthetic human experience. Yet, as a devotee of the scientific method, I recognize the need for rigorous, replicable and meaningful analysis of music used therapeutically. So why do we feel the need to justify or explain beauty in order to be able to experience or value it? Accepting the notion that both the rational and subjective aspects of musical experience are necessary to its fuller appreciation, this chapter seeks to explore this tension between quantitative measures and qualitative experience in evaluating the impact of music on health, taking the interplay between the objective and subjective as an important way to talk about the medical humanities in general.
