Lasting Music: An Essay on Music Therapy at End of Life reimagines the case study as an essay film: a reflective and interpretive form that moves between documentation, imagination, and philosophical reflection. Based on a composite of real music therapy cases, it explores how a song can hold together the past and present of a person’s life, mediating between memory, identity, and care at the end of life.
(Last)ing Music. An essay on music therapy at the end of life Feb2025.mov
Lasting Music redefines both the case study and the essay as forms of inquiry. The essay is understood not as a written argument but as an open, exploratory mode of thinking in which reflection unfolds through moving image, music, and language. The film draws on the essay tradition’s concern with interpretation and speculation, extending it into an audiovisual practice that invites a sensory as well as intellectual engagement with knowledge.
The case study, commonly used to describe and analyse professional practice, is reimagined as a poetic and ethical reconstruction of lived experience. Grounded in a real composite case from palliative music therapy, the film abstracts and reconfigures its elements into a hybrid form that combines aesthetic, ethical, and phenomenological perspectives. The patient’s identity is concealed; the encounter is represented indirectly. This approach exemplifies an ethics of aesthetic restraint, where representation functions as an act of care. By avoiding direct depiction, the film foregrounds the ethical responsibility of witnessing—how to acknowledge suffering and meaning-making without appropriation or spectacle.
Through this reframing, Lasting Music questions what constitutes a “case” within health and artistic research. It shifts emphasis from demonstration to interpretation, showing how creative work can operate as a legitimate mode of inquiry capable of articulating temporal, relational, and affective dimensions of experience that elude conventional empirical or textual forms. The film thus positions the audiovisual essay as a methodologically robust framework for interdisciplinary reflection—one that integrates attentiveness, interpretive depth, and embodied understanding.
Drawing on Cicely Saunders’ concept of total pain, the film approaches end-of-life experience as an indivisible constellation of physical, psychological, social, and existential suffering. Within this framework, music is not employed as a therapeutic intervention but as a relational mode of attending to the complexity of pain as a whole phenomenon.
The recurring song, The Boy from Ipanema, functions as an anchor connecting distinct temporalities of a life. First encountered as a childhood memory and later reappearing during the final phase of illness, the song embodies both continuity and transformation. Each re-voicing—slowed, softened, or reshaped to accommodate frailty—demonstrates how music can adapt to changing bodily states while preserving coherence and agency. In this way, the film traces how musical memory sustains identity and relation - offering a means of expression where verbal communication may fail.
By transforming a composite case into an audiovisual essay, Lasting Music examines how knowledge in music therapy and palliative care can be conveyed through experiential and reflexive rather than purely discursive means. The film does not document therapeutic procedure or outcomes; it investigates the conditions of experience that shape encounters at the end of life.
This approach contributes to current debates in the humanities and health research concerning multimodal and practice-based methodologies. It proposes that artistic forms can extend research language by making perceptible the relational and existential dimensions of care. Through its integration of music, image, and reflection, Lasting Music demonstrates how music can operate simultaneously as a method, a subject, and a metaphor for understanding the persistence of meaning, connection, and identity within the processes of dying and remembering.