MUSC 140 Music and Healing

This course examines music and healing from an historical, cross-cultural, and applied clinical perspective, exploring current applications of music and healing—inside and outside the professional medical community. The course will address healing rituals and methodologies of non-Western cultures, applications of music to healing through modern Western music therapy, the incorporation of music into contemporary alternative therapies and energy healing, and the field of medical ethnomusicology, which has emerged as a means to understand similarities between these seemingly disparate disciplines. It offers students opportunities to learn about and experience the powerful connections that exist between music and human psychology, physiology, and spirituality (mind, body, and spirit) through experiential class activities like drum circles and music and meditation, course readings, guest lectures, documentary film, audio-visual materials, critical discussion, and community service learning. Through reflective assignments and exams, students will also have the opportunity to make comparisons across different conceptions and applications of music in health and wellness as well as make connections with their own beliefs and uses of music. This course includes a service-learning component that requires students to engage with the local community in connecting and applying their knowledge of music and healing off campus.