Tight or Loose? Reframing Musical Relationships Between Client and Therapist in Music Therapy

Improvisation has long been a central approach in music therapy practice. Though improvisation is used to date in various settings of music therapy, there is still a lack of a comprehensive theory that connects all the essential components at play when improvisation is applied: i.e., the context, the client, the music therapist, the music, the relationship, the therapeutic process and the therapy’s goals and objectives. In this paper, we wish to propose a novel outlook, by introducing the Tight-Loose (T-L) framework, a prominent theory in the social sciences originally intended to discern cultural differences between societies that rigidly observe social norms, and those that are more flexible about them. By integrating the T-L framework with music therapy improvisational theories and psychoanalytic perspectives, we suggest a developmental theory consisting of four T-L stages, each one characterized by different improvisational techniques, diverse levels of clients’ engagement, and distinct levels of music therapists’ musical differentiation, therefore attending to disparate therapy goals and yielding different music therapist-client relationships. Applications and recommendations for music music therapists are discussed.