The Role Of Music Therapy And Ritual Drama In Transformation During Imminent Death

This case study will explore the ritual drama that organically emerged in a music therapy session with an actively dying patient and her loved ones. Death is a natural transition that awaits every individual and impacts parallel transitions for patients receiving hospice care and their caregivers. Hospice patients are challenged to transition peacefully into their postlife construct, and caregivers are similarly challenged to move toward a new understanding of the Self in relation to their loved one's passing. Ritual dramas can provide a cultural and spiritual structure for participants to experience these transitions and embody their subsequent transformations in meaningful ways. Ritual dramas are performed in the therapeutic space by all in attendance, including the music therapist, and each performer infuses the performance with their individual, cultural, spiritual, and historical backgrounds. This ensures that each performance is unique from all others, and malleable to the needs of the immediate setting. Music therapy is uniquely equipped to assist in the facilitation of ritual dramas, given music's inherent transitional and malleable qualities and the recent repositioning of the music therapy process as syntonic with meaning-based performance. How these elements of music therapy were integrated into the performance of the ritual drama will be explored. Additionally, the emergent themes from this performance will be analyzed alongside the cultural, spiritual, and historical contexts that informed them.