Education in Music-Thanatology: An Overview
Lane Community College Music-Thanatology Training Program
Professional Paper
Justine Flynn
September 28, 2011
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Acknowledgements
Gratitude to Therese Schroeder-Sheker, Cynthia Wood, Margaret Pasquesi, Tony Pederson, the
Music-Thanatology Association International, Carol Sack, Lane Community College, my family,
and friends.
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Introduction
I. Roots of Music-Thanatology
• Monastic Medicine
• Sacred and Secular
II. Modern Training
• Chalice of Repose Project
• Lyrica Precaria
• Lane Community College
III. Adult Learning
• Vocation
• Adult Learning
IV. Conclusion
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Introduction
Providing pain relief, comfort, and ease of symptoms, music-thanatology engages musical and
contemplative elements in attending to the dying person in a unique way. The clinical practice of
music-thanatology entails balancing information and process. At the center is the fundamental
mystery of death, humbly acknowledged and supported by the contemplative core of the work.
This is a radical proposition for any field, and especially so for a training program, in our culture
of industrialized nations that value commoditization and ownership above all.
In this paper I will briefly describe the history and tradition of music-thanatology, the presence
of both sacred and secular elements in the field, and approaches to adult learning. I will seek to
clarify what can be articulated in the education of forming music-thanatologists, while
acknowledging the greatest mystery we work with: death.
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I. Roots of Music-Thanatology
Music-thanatology is a relatively new field, pioneered by Therese Schroeder-Sheker in the early
1970s with the aim to serve people at the end of life. Combining musical, medical, and spiritual
care elements in a clinical environment, this work helps bring reverence and beauty to the
bedside of the dying. Ms. Schroeder-Sheker had her first experience of the spiritual process of
dying at a nursing home when she sang to a man as he died in her arms. This powerful
experience drew her on to seek and ask questions about the dying process and its many
dimensions.
The alleviation of physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual pain is part of music-thanatology,
and is rooted in monastic medicine. Monastic practices at Cluny during the medieval era are
cited as origins of the field. Serving people at the end of life for music-thanatologists, as it was
for the monks at Cluny, means supporting the integrity of each individual death. Central to
Cluniac spirituality was the understanding of the human need for beauty, and a commitment to
music in maintaining and cultivating this beauty. The monastic infirmary at Cluny left detailed
accounts of the musical ways in which the dying were tended.
Current principles of spiritual care relate to the rituals performed at Cluny in many ways. One
parallel is the concern with the whole person that we see in hospice and palliative care, which
resembles the “twofold domain of monastic medicine”: care of the body and the cure of the soul,
through rational medicine and religious or interior practices (Schroeder-Sheker, 1993). Today we
recognize that it is not just a physical event when someone dies, just as they recognized during
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medieval times. Our challenge may be that we may over-emphasize the physical aspect, since
we have created so many solutions to our bodies’ physical problems. Care of the body can be
“comfort care”, providing pain relief through medication as well as other modalities, and cure of
the soul can be addressed in many and varied ways, in addition to the traditional religious
practices which a patient may or may not utilize. Music-thanatologists respond to the need for
both the sacred and secular in adapting musical elements for each patient. While the roots of the
material are Christian, the musical elements are utilized in each vigil in such a way as to be
appropriate to the beliefs of each patient.
Death is seen by the monastic tradition as a rite of passage composed of three stages: separation,
liminality, and reincorporation (Meyerhoff et al). The liminal state is one “betwixt and between”
states, and undefined. The monastic practices recognized that both patient and attendant become
liminal agents, and that both should be placed “in a working environment that is conducive to
process (transformation and transitus)”. This threshold condition is of primary importance to the
Cluniac customary, and persons going through this can experience pain (emotional, physical,
spiritual), fear, and great insecurity. According to custom, it is during this part of the dying
process that music is most helpful.
In the modern world, everyone, even within a single culture (even as this is a defining
characteristic of “culture”), does not share a common viewpoint on death and dying. This makes
it difficult to have shared, meaningful rituals. What we still have in common with the Cluniac
monks is the belief that each human death is unique, just as every human birth, and as such
deserves our most attentive presence. As music-thanatologists, we seek to support the beauty,
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reverence, dignity and intimacy of that experience. According to Therese Schroeder-Sheker,
“The sole focus is to help the person move toward completion and to unbind from anything that
prevents, impedes, or clouds a tranquil passage.”
II. Modern Training
Chalice of Repose Project
The Chalice of Repose Project (CORP) is the music-thanatology training founded and run by
Therese Schroeder-Sheker. CORP is an umbrella for multiple tasks for developing the field of
music-thanatology (Hollis, 2010). CORP also trains and certifies music-thanatologists, and
includes comprehensive training and education in the philosophy, history, and practice of music-
thanatology. Continuing to build with care, the program has participants apply their first year of
study to the development of a contemplative approach, a kind of one-year chaplaincy focus,
before they go on to the study of music-thanatology. This approach recognizes the profoundly
sacred role of the music-thanatologist, and seeks to support this through preparation of the
candidate.
The training program integrates music history, monastic medicine, phenomenology, psychology,
and thanatology, utilizing scholars and experts in each of these core disciplines. Due to the
faculty expertise, students are given a thorough introduction to each topic. CORP is currently
based in Mt. Angel, Oregon, and Schroeder-Sheker is working to create a training program with
Catholic University in Washington, D.C.
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Lyrica Precaria
Developed by music-thanatologist Carol Sack, Lyrica Precaria teaches students “how to minister
to the terminally ill through the use of voice and harp.” (JELA website, 2011) This two-year
training, based in Tokyo, Japan, is now in its third cohort and is a pastoral care adaptation of
music-thanatology, utilizing courses in harp, voice, and theological reflection to prepare students
for service. While supported within a Lutheran context, this training is open to people from all
backgrounds.
Lane Community College
Several students of the Chalice of Repose Project have come together to create another training
program for music-thanatology. Their program seeks to teach to each of the six competencies
required for certification by the Music-Thanatology Association International (MTAI), preparing
their graduates to certify with the MTAI once the program is completed. The program at Lane
Community College (LCC) in Eugene, Oregon provides a framework within which a candidate
may pursue the fulfillment of the competencies required for certification. While this program
recognizes the importance of the sacred, their emphasis is more focused on meeting the
competencies as outlined by the MTAI. There is an acknowledgement of the sacred while
leaving each student to pursue this individually.
Summary
Ideally, education in music-thanatology balances both the spiritual and clinical. This presents a
challenge when dealing with the diversity of spiritual backgrounds (or lack of) in students. Do
you teach from a specific tradition, as does Lyrica Precaria, offering the grounding of the
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Lutheran tradition from which to go deeper into a pastoral application of music-thanatology? Do
you utilize a non-specific “spirituality” in the educational process, as does the Lane Community
College program? How much spiritual support does a student need? How can that student know
this, when the student does not know what is to come? What level of guidance does a training
program in music-thanatology provide the student, as well as the teacher? And from a larger
developmental perspective, how do we learn from our mistakes?
III. Adult Learning
Vocation is the word most frequently used in reference to music-thanatology. Vocation comes
from the Latin vocatio, which means “summons”. Vocatio comes from the word vocare, “to
call”, from the Latin vox, “voice”. Frederick Buechner offers an image of vocation as “the place
where your deep gladness and the world’s hunger meet.” (Palmer, 1998; Buechner: Wishful
Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC, 1993))
Therese Schroeder-Sheker states that those who seek training in music-thanatology arrive with “a
deep inner call, seeking to understand their longing as a desire for contemplative musicianship,
and the blending of music, medicine, and spirituality in the service profession of music-
thanatology.” In almost every case, music-thanatologists have to make complex changes in their
lives in order to train, even leaving secure and successful careers, while simultaneously
acknowledging that they might never find a job in their new field (Hollis). Without the guarantee
of external rewards, music-thanatologists instead experience an inner satisfaction and fulfillment
great enough to mitigate the professional and personal risks and carry them into the next part of
their lives.
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Adults have developmental tasks, as do people at every age. Not only do tasks shift, but learning
styles also evolve throughout life (Kolb & Wolfe, 1981; Knox, 1986). From adolescence many
shift from acquisition of basic concepts to specialization to integration. Through the twenties
and early thirties, starting a family and occupation are primary. With the onset of middle age,
adults often revise career plans, redefine family relationships, and look for ways to make major
civic contributions, support social change, and later to prepare for retirement. Beyond retirement,
adults have tasks associated with adjusting to retirement, declining health, loss of loved ones,
and changing living arrangements.
The accumulated life experience can both help and hinder educational activity. For instance, for
adults in middle age, the call to music-thanatology may combine many needs: making a
contribution, supporting social change, and revising career plans. For others it might be the work
they will do after retirement from their primary occupation. Obviously, there are as many ways
of working as there are music-thanatologists. How does a training program approach this
diversity of learners, learning styles, and tasks?
While existing models of adult education are helpful, there is also a difference with the field of
music-thanatology. Many forms of “continuing education” build on competencies students
already possess. Because of the diversity of backgrounds students of music-thanatology come
from, there may not always be a shared level of competency in any one area among students.
How do you train a group without shared competencies? With what other fields does music-
thanatology share patient care goals?
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Education in music-thanatology is an emerging field within an emerging field. In order to pursue
the many unresolved issues and questions, we need to be comfortable with discomfort. As the
poet Rilke wrote to a younger poet, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try
to love the questions themselves…Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you
because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the
questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day
into the answer.” (Rilke; Palmer)
There are many questions for education in this field. How do we educate people who expect the
“top down” model of education, which is the passing on of objective facts? Music-thanatology,
while embodying elements of medical and clinical practice, has an essential core of mystery
(death) and the processes around it reflect this. By what do we evaluate our education in music-
thanatology, and how do we structure and support that training?
Parker Palmer, in The Courage to Teach, describes two models: objectivist and the community
of truth. The objectivist model is the dominant model, and has the “object” at the top, followed
by the “expert” who then trains the “amateurs” at the bottom of the pile, and there are “baffles”
in place on every level, keeping information from flowing back up the hierarchy. Palmer
describes this model as “hierarchical, linear, and compulsive-hygienic, as if truth came down an
antiseptic conveyer belt to be deposited as pure product at the end”. He goes on to describe the
two main problems with this approach: it is a false picture of how we know things, and it has
deformed the way we educate. While many classrooms engage this model, there is “no field –
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from astronomy to literature to political science to theology – where the continuing quest to
know truth even vaguely resembles this mythical objectivism.”
The “community of truth” described by Palmer represents a circle of “knowers” with the subject
at the center, looking “less like a bureaucracy and more like bedlam”, inviting this community to
form a hub around the subject. The power of the living subject, which we exist in relationship to,
forms the connective core of all our relationships. Going beyond relativism and absolutism, the
community of truth includes a transcendent dimension described by Robert Frost as quoted by
Palmer: “We dance round in a ring and suppose/But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.”
IV. Conclusion
We are educating in a field requiring spiritual, emotional, intellectual, and personal growth, and
because of this we have a responsibility to seek guidance from experienced and compassionate
educators in each of our competency areas, as we develop training programs. The training
programs as they currently exist are a combination of models, evolving into a working pathway
as they integrate clinical and spiritual elements, each in a different way.
The “pathway” approach may be a constructive viewpoint, in the sense of a kind of trust walk.
We take one step at a time, and the next step appears on the path as we continue to discern our
core values as a field and as individual practitioners. Much like the music-thanatology vigil
itself, we make adjustments moment to moment in our educational processes and do not know
the outcome ahead of time.
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Education in our field will grow according to the exchange of experience, stories, research,
clinical data, and personal integrity each music-thanatologist brings to the field. The
competencies we certify in each represent a pathway of development interrelated with one
another, and other disciplines. Our field will unfold and develop according to the integrity of
each practitioner, and our ability to receive nutrients from those deep resources. This willingness
to grow is essential to our professional practice, and to our education of those to come.
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Bibliography
Aries, Philippe. The Hour of Our Death. Trans. Helen Weaver. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1981. Print.
Hollis, Jennifer L. Music at the End of Life: Easing the Pain and Preparing the Passage. Santa
Barbara: Praeger, 2010. Print.
Japanese Evangelical Lutheran Association Foundation (JELA) website, September 2011. Web.
Knox, Alan B. Helping Adults Learn. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Inc., 1986. Print.
Kolb, David A. and Donald M. Wolfe. Lifelong Learning and Adult Development Project. Case –
Western Reserve University, School of Management, Cleveland Ohio, 1981. Electronic resource.
Meyerhoff, Barbara G., Linda A. Camino, and Edith Turner. Rites of Passage…An Overview.
Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade, Volume 12, pages 380-387. Chicago: Macmillan,
1987. Print.
Palmer, Parker J. The Courage to Teach. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Inc., 1998. Print.
Schroeder-Sheker, Therese. Transitus: A Blessed Death in the Modern World. 2001. Print.
Schroeder-Sheker, Therese. Music for the Dying: A Personal Account of the New Field of Music
Thanatology – History, Theories, and Clinical Narratives. ADVANCES, The Journal of Mind-
Body Health, Vol. 9, No. 1 Winter 1993. Print.
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Appendix
Chalice of Repose Project
Therese Schroeder-Sheker, CM-Th
info@chaliceofrepose.org
Lane Community College Music-thanatology Training Program
Jane Franz, CM-Th
FranzJ@lanecc.edu
http://www.lanecc.edu/ce/careertraining/musicthanatology.html
Lyrica Precaria
Carol Sack, CM-Th
csack@jela.or.jp
http://www.jela-foundation.org/servicemusic.htm
Music-Thanatology Association International
www.mtai.org
