Jazz in der Lebenshilfe, Therapie und Prävention
– ein Beitrag zur musikalischen Wirkungsforschung
In this contribution I am complementing my draft of systematic Jazz research as I developed it in the 1st International Scientific Jazz Congress, 1968 in Graz (Jazz as an Object of Interdisciplinary Research, Jazz Research, Volume 1), toward its musically therapeutic and preventive dimension.
First of all, I explained the central meaning of music in general and of Jazz specifically for the development of human personality and lifestyle formation. Out of this grows the relevance of Jazz for the prevention of disease, especially in the psychosomatic area. As an example of the therapeutic effect of Jazz I chose its driving and motivating function in the neurological rehabilitation of heart attack patients: Jazz aids in helping patients to tune up, thereby creating an easier therapeutic climate; secondly, it imparts new movement drives through its character of challenge and pushing power in a kind of vegetative impulse, which at the same time thrusts him motorically, thereby releasing spontaneous body movement. Belonging to the driving structural elements are the motoric, pulsating ground beat of the rhythmic group and the off-beat, as well as determining melodic moments, to name a few. The phenomenon of Swing is especially therapeutic, felt in our body as an overlapping of several pulsating wave processes.