Dorion School of Music Therapy

Reprinted from News for Members, the newsletter of the Anthroposophical Society in America, Winter, 2007

THE DORION SCHOOL OF MUSIC THERAPY

Catherine Read

Washington Crossing, Pennsylvania

We hear of Dorion in the Orphic Songs which have come down to us from Ancient Greece.  Orpheus was the god who brought music, and creation out of music, to human beings on earth.  Dorion was the being to whom Apollo gave Spring, to tune the “renewal of life”.  The Dorion School of Music Therapy, located in Camphill Beaver Run in Pennsylvania, is the only English-language training in music therapy out of Anthroposophy in the world.  The training takes place over four years with three meetings per year held at Beaver Run.  The first set of students graduated in the summer of 2005.  Many of these graduates are working as music therapists, some are working with the methods and approaches that are unique to a set of four training sites – Dorion in the US, and two German-language centers and one in Dutch in Europe.  The therapy taught in these schools is based, of course, on the four-fold human being as described by Rudolf Steiner, but, in addition, the training focuses on the etheric level of the human being.  This focus distinguishes the approach from other trainings, in Anthroposophy or in the mainstream, which tend to focus on palliative care of the soul.  In contrast to the soul or astral level, the etheric is the source of healing; and, as it is the life body, it is characterized by movement, growth, and processes, and also, habit and memory.

 The spiritual and intellectual heritage of the Dorion School goes back to Anny von Lange, a German Anthroposophist studying music with Goethean methods of phenomenological observation.  Based on Rudolf Steiner’s indications regarding the qualities of the planets and the zodiac (see four lectures in 1922/23 in The Inner Nature of Music and the Experience of Tone), she developed a method of listening to tone and intervals over the course of 50 years of work in music.  Von Lange described “Planetary Scales” each beginning on a tone corresponding to one of the seven main planets (with Sun and Moon considered as planets). (See her book Man, Music, and Cosmos.)  She studied body, soul, and spirit aspects of the scales which proceed up from their beginning tones to their octaves.  The ascending scales have some relation to the ancient Greek modes in that they only use the natural tones (the white keys on the piano), and each has its own pattern of whole and half steps, or intervals.  The Planetary scales are transformed modes, however, because the descending scale keeps the same pattern of intervals as the ascent, not the same tones.   The descending scale mirrors the ascending sequence of intervals.  Herein lies the significance of these scales for the ether body.  The ether body in general has the quality of mirroring or countering physical movements, thus bringing about a balanced whole between the dead mineral of the purely physical body and the living movements of the etheric.  When one reaches upward, for instance, an etheric countermovement takes place precisely downward.  The mirrored scales are the basis of the music that can “meet” the ether body.

 Dr. Hermann Pfrogner, an Anthroposophic musicologist, and Dr. Hans-Heinrich Engel, a medical doctor, working together with a group of curative musicians in the 1960’s elaborated the tonal structure of Lange’s mirrored scales to specify the relation of certain intervals or sequences to particular aspects of ether body motions.  In fact, the ether body is quite differentiated – as Rudolf Steiner described in several ways.  Always in sevens (the form of life progressions) these aspects encompass life stages, processes, and movements.  Over many years the group around Pfrogner and Engel, which included Dr. Karl Konig, Christof-Andreas Lindenberg, Johanna Spalinger, and Maria Schuppel, researched the tone sequences that bring balance and strength to particular aspects of the differentiated ether body.  For example the interval of the fifth corresponds to the life process of breathing: the openness of the fifth opens the breath, and the fact that the fifth is the outer boundary of the human being corresponds to the inner boundary between blood and air, the meeting of inner and outer in physiology.

 This realm of working on the detailed correspondences of music and the etheric body is the realm of the interval of the second, the smallest interval, i.e., between adjacent tones in a scale.  Here one is working where Rudolf Steiner’s insights based on intervals and tones “…opens the possibility…of experiencing it (music) with the whole being, including the body, i.e., through the formative forces body.  Forces and elements are not then experienced as merely soul-subjective, but as spiritual-objective, as world forces.  The experience of music here, in which it is discovered as a world of cosmic formative forces in the life-building forces of the soul, is the second-experience.” (E. Lauer, The Evolution of Music, in J. Godwin (ed.), Cosmic Music)  Out of  this experience of the second, which is the interval that leads to the etheric, Anthroposophic therapists are bringing the specific musical sequences which can be given prescriptively to heal a range of imbalances from physical illnesses to soul illnesses.  Training in the Dorion school consists of a schooling in listening to the spiritual aspects of tones and intervals, of acquiring skills in playing and singing melodies, rhythms, and harmonies, as well as diving into occult physiology and medicine in order to bring music as prescriptive medicine to those in need.

 The Dorion course concentrates on the use of musical instruments, traditional folk and orchestral instruments, as well as the new instruments arising out of Anthroposophy.  These new instruments strive for tone qualities that surround the listeners/players rather than point-focused tones that project from the instrument.  The primary instrument for developing our own inner listening and tuning, and for bringing healing music to clients, is the lyre – a new stringed instrument played with two hands in a breathing back and forth between the front strings (corresponding to the white keys on the piano) and the back strings (the black keys).  This surrounding quality of the tone allows a hearing into the etheric that is not possible with the traditional instruments.  The beauty and living quality of the lyre tones must be heard and experienced – words are not enough.

 Other new instruments include the gemshorn, a wind instrument made from cow horn, the chrotta, a cello-like instrument for which the bow rests in the hand instead of being held from above, and a new psaltery, another bowed instrument with high tones that are especially effective for the head and the nerve-sense system.

 The Faculty of the school is made up of Christof-Andreas Lindenberg, composer and music therapist, Norma Lindenberg, curative educator and Camphill Seminar faculty, Grace Ann Payson, eurythmist and artist, and Catherine Read, developmental psychologist and board member of the Lyre Association of North America.  The many visiting faculty, from Europe and the US, include Anthroposophic physicians and nurses, and practicing music therapists.

 The Orphic Hymn to Apollo is quite specific regarding the qualities of tone given to Dorion.  The Hymn says of Apollo:

 T’is thine all Nature’s music to inspire,

With various-sounding, harmonizing lyre;

Now the last string thou tun’st to sweet accord,

Divinely warbling now the highest chord:

The immortal golden lyre now touched by thee,

Responsive yields a Dorion melody.

All nature’s tribes to thee their diff’rence owe

And changing seasons from them music flow:

Hence, mixed by thee in equal parts, advance

Summer and Winter in alternate dance;

This claims the highest, that the lowest string,

The Dorion measure tunes the lovely spring

 Dorion is the musician of Spring and Fall – the two seasons that weave between the height and heat of summer and the depth and cold of winter.  This is the realm of the etheric which modulates and moves between the astral and the physical, in the human microcosm and in the macrocosm of the earth.  Dorion is fitting inspiration for music and music therapy that lives and works at the level of the etheric.