The lecture is an introduction to music therapy for upper secondary school students. It starts from the connection of music with intense emotions and with the unconscious, prompted by listening to Brahms’s Third Symphony. The historical part presents the views of Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle on the effect of music on the psyche, the opposition of Apollo and Dionysus, Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, who is regarded as the father of modern music therapy, and the first applications in the United States after the First World War, for the psychological support of the wounded, which led in 1950 to the founding of the first music therapy organisation. There follow the definition of music therapy as a form of creative psychotherapy through art, its means (listening to music and improvisation on simple instruments that require no musical knowledge), the skills of the music therapist, whom it is addressed to and where music therapists work, as well as music therapy as science, interpersonal relationship and art. The lecture closes with the use of music therapy in developmental disorders, through videos of sessions with children, on which the students are invited to consider what the goals and the means could be.
Presentation. The lecture was given on 13 November 2012 in Preveza, at an educational meeting with upper secondary school students in the framework of a research project (Music School of Preveza).