Eheyttävät musiikkimuistot osana elämäntarinaa

Abstrakti

When we explore the meanings of music education we often refer to the intrinsic value of music as part of civilization and culture. At the same time, music also has strong instrumental value as it offers us harmonization of cultural experiences through memories and mental images, which, throughout our lives, remind us of experiences, interaction relationships, and people important to us. The meaningful musical experiences create a personal "soundtrack", which contains meaningful music and musical experiences, tightly connected to our most important memories.

These experiences are tightly bound to our identity. Important musical experiences follow us from early childhood to old age. For example, childen’s songs can reach forgotten memories of the elderly with memory disorders, and improve their quality of life and strengthen their feeling of coherence. Our narrative study is based on 198 stories (227 pages) of respondents’ most meaningful life experiences and music connected to them. The participants were students of higher education in educational sciences, sociology, nursing, music education and music therapy. The core themes of the lifestories were analysed through a narrative method. The stories told about many changes in human growth, characterized by a variation of smooth and traumatic periods. The results reveal that music has helped most of the participants in solving their problems and in working through their difficult and traumatic life situations.