SYMPOSIUM: MUSIC, THERAPY, MEDITATION, SPIRITUALITY 2025

Music, Therapy and Spirituality (Symposium within Prague Shakuhachi Festival 2025)

The symposium focuses on multidisciplinary exploration of music as a tool for therapy, spirituality, and healing. The conference reflects the fact that music has been associated with magic, prayer, shamanic practices, and spirit invocations since the prehistory of mankind, while its perception as purely artistic product represents a relatively young phenomenon of Euro-American culture from recent centuries. The symposium maps rich traditions of therapeutic music use across world cultures – from ancient Greece through African-American cults to healing trance rituals of Zár in Ethiopia or Gnawa in Morocco. Attention is devoted to contemporary development of music therapy, which has achieved considerable progress in recent decades both at institutional level and in the form of individual sessions with new methods utilizing various musical instruments and vocal techniques. A significant part of the symposium consists of examining the evolution of sacred music in the context of globalization, where traditional forms are transferred to new settings and change their structure and effect. Examples include Western adaptation of overtone singing from Central Asia or globalized singing of Indian mantras with guitar accompaniment. The conference emphasizes a scientific approach to the subject matter, addressing neuroscientific theories of music's therapeutic influence, the role of music in spiritual traditions, and new musical-spiritual phenomena of our time. The symposium poses questions about mechanisms of music's therapeutic effects and the significance of choosing specific instruments or vocal techniques.