Hans Hofmann was a strong exponent of abstract art whose paintings depicted a relationship between powerful and vibrant colours on a clearly defined underlying structure, Hans Hofmann – representative of the Abstract Expressionism movement – was born in Weissenberg in Bavaria on March 21st 1880. A music therapist’s decision making regarding the music used or created in a music therapy session is an idiosyncratic sort of professional decision making, which is distinguished from the decision making of other health-related or music professionals. Decision making has been a burning research topic in many other fields such as politics, industry, medicine, education, and so on; however, research on it has rarely appeared in music therapy despite the importance of clinical decision making in practice. With a focus on clinical music listening, the presenter has developed an analytical model that encapsulates what music therapists listen to in practice and explains how they make judgments or decisions about what they listened to. In order to inquire into a music therapist’s decision making regarding the music used or created in a music therapy session is an idiosyncratic sort of professional decision making, which is distinguished from the decision making of other health-related or music professionals. Decision making has been a burning research topic in many other fields such as politics, industry, medicine, education, and so on; however, research on it has rarely appeared in music therapy despite the importance of clinical decision making in practice. With a focus on clinical music listening, the presenter has developed an analytical model that encapsulates what music therapists listen to in practice and explains how they make judgments or decisions about what they listened to. In order to inquire into music therapists’ perception about their musical decision making and to examine their decision-making strategies, she conducted two studies using the process tracing methods of verbal protocol and the information display board. Her multiple case study using verbal protocol, namely Think Aloud Protocol, investigated the musical decision-making process of seasoned music therapists who have different music therapy backgrounds (e.g., receptive, improvisational, and cognitive behavioral). Right after their music therapy sessions or while watching their videotaped sessions, she interviewed the therapists with the question of why they made such decisions in the situations. The other decision-making research employed a computerized version of the information display board. By choosing from a pre-fabricated list of words, music therapists identified the possible contributors to their musical decision making in clinical situations and listed them in a sequence according to their relative importance. In this way, the music therapists demonstrated their decision-making strategies for the research.
Just as developing conceptions of ancestry provide important background for understanding the monastic programs, the development for the elite of architectural forms that accommodated ritual household devotion and decoration that depicted (actual and ideal) ancestors also enhances our understanding of the setting of the later programs. In early imperial elite houses, the tablinum, typically located on the side of the atrium facing the entrance, was a focal point of the household as the office, reception room, and location of a household shrine. The nexus of atrium and tablinum was where current household business and family history were concentrated: ancestor portraits were kept in this area, where they oversaw family celebrations and rites of passage, and inspired the young to emulate them; and this was where important household documents were kept and where the dominus met his clients during the morning reception, the salutatio. In addition, this area linked the household to the business and governance of the wider civic community; later in the day, for example, the householder and his entourage made their way to the forum from here. Private funeral rites were also performed in this location, from which the household processed to public commemoration, in the forum for those of the highest social stations, a tradition extending from the late Republican period well into late antiquity.H. I. Flower, Ancestor Masks and Aristocratic Power in Roman Culture (Oxford, 1996), 91-126. I. Östenberg, Power Walks: Aristocratic Escorted Movements in Republican Rome,†in The Moving City: Processions, Passages and Promenades in Ancient Rome, ed. I. Östenberg, S. Malmberg, and J. Bjørnebye (London, 2015), 245, goes so far as to say that the funeral procession could be interpreted as the aristocrat’s final salutatio and last deductio procession, now accompanied by lament and a retinue dressed in black.†Here, more than any other location within the house, domestic life was inextricable from public life.K. Bowes, Christianization and the Rural Home,†JEChrSt 15, no. 2 (2007): 144, briefly mentions the example of Ausonius in the transformation of the traditional domestic rituals of (private) morning prayers and the (quite public) salutatio for the Christian aristocratic elite of fourth-century Gaul. D. Frankfurter, The Interpenetration of Ritual Spaces in Late Antique Religions: An Overview,†Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 10 (2008): 199, writes of the importance of religion in domestic space for understanding the complex interpenetration of institutional ideology and domestic sphere,†discussing domestic rituals performed at the household hearth or threshold in Egypt and across the wider world of late antiquity.
