Music Therapy

Note: If you are a current AMTA member, and can’t log in successfully the first time, please do not create a new account as your membership is tied to the email address we currently have on file. The texts of the songs are highly emotional and deal with a broad range of themes, from political protest to calls for a loud and lively dance party; accompaniments are provided by guitars , keyboards, and percussion instruments and are electronically amplified Music educators were attracted by the intrinsic structural values of this music, especially its distinctive rhythmic and modal characteristics, its texts, and the qualitative levels that may be distinguished.

Drawing on both the music of earlier protest movements and newly composed repertory, performers such as Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Pete Seeger, Cisco Huston, Josh White, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGee, and Lee Hays performed at union rallies, hootenannies, and for a variety of social causes throughout the 1940s.

Although there have been a huge number of women composers in classical music, from the Medieval period to the present day, women composers are significantly underrepresented in the commonly performed classical music repertoire , music history textbooks and music encyclopedias; for example, in the Concise Oxford History of Music, Clara Schumann is one of the only female composers who is mentioned.

Two or more listeners may derive very different meanings” from the same piece of music, and, since written and spoken language cannot render these musical meanings,” whatever they may be, in consistent and commonly recognizable terms, verbal explication often seems to raise more questions than it settles.

There has been a strong tendency in the aesthetics of music to emphasize the paramount importance of compositional structure; however, other issues concerning the aesthetics of music include lyricism , harmony , hypnotism , emotiveness , temporal dynamics , resonance , playfulness, and color (see also musical development ).