The Healing Power of Aesthetics in Music and Art

In this article, the author follows diverse aesthetic, therapeutic and educational facets of musical reception and production. From the levels of meaning of the aesthetic in art, music and music therapy, she draws a bridge to the analogy between the love of music and friendship. In music, art and friendship we can never say everything about them, there is always more to say that can be expressed in words. Because of their individual meaning for us they transcend the boundaries of our knowledge. The love of beauty and friendship opens up listening and musical activity as a physical performance in the devotion to music, in which reflection, experience and action are united. This bodily-aesthetic potential of music can support healing and identity finding in music therapy. Therapeutic work with the medium of music offers sound spaces and resonating spaces that can be experienced by the compulsion of the body and enables one to find one's own aesthetic meaning patterns. It is a matter of finding oneself in music and art with all our senses and to enter into a dialogue through resonance to our own world that we finally can answer the question: Who am I? How do I want to live? How do I want to be?