Rosemarie Tüpker


Rosemarie Tüpker is a German music therapist and musicologist.

Biography

Born in Korschenbroich, Tüpker first studied piano and percussion at the Musikhochschule Köln and then psychology, philosophy and musicology with direct graduation to doctorate at the University of Cologne. While still a student, she took part in the first training course for music therapists from 1978 to 1980 and then worked in in-patient psychotherapeutic care.
She was a student of and Jobst Fricke and co-founder of the Institute for Music Therapy and Morphology together with Eckhard Weymann, Tilmann Weber and Frank Grootaers, which emerged from the research group "Music Therapy and Morphology" and initiated seminars and morphological further education. Morphological music therapy is an in depth psychological and art analogous view of music therapy processes without claiming to be a treatment method in its own right. The research group developed concepts for the analysis of music therapeutic improvisations and treatment processes.
From 1990 to 2017, Tüpker headed the diploma course in music therapy and the master's course Klinische Musiktherapie at the University of Münster. In 2005 she habilitated with her work Musik in Rehabilitation und Therapie. She has been retired since autumn 2017. She continues to supervise the doctoral course in music therapy at the University of Münster.
Her research focuses on music in fairy tales, qualitative research methods of artistic therapies as well as topics of music therapy and music psychology from a morphological and psychoanalytical perspective.
In the work Musik im Märchen, published in 2011, Tüpker presented the results of more than ten years of research on the occurrence and significance of music in European folk tales. Cultural-historical, musicological and psychological questions were examined by comparing over three hundred fairy tales. In addition to statements on the musical instruments used, the perception of music as a profession, different fairy tale traditions, typical playing situations and the gender question, an interpretation pattern/typification of the motives was presented, while content analysis was developed from the text material of the fairy tale. The types found are named as: Music as outwardly and inwardly moving, creation of a mental space, music as the connecting link between two worlds, music as the foreign, music as desired, music and healing, music transforms, music as witness, music and identity. At the same time, references to today's understanding of music will be established. A more detailed indepth psychology analysis is devoted to the Brothers Grimms' fairy tales: Das Eselein and two fairy tales of Sinti and Romani people: The Creation of the Violin and Der Sohn kämpft gegen den Vater. The investigations show the diversity of the concept of music in fairy tales and the clear traces of cultural and historical changes. To date, the final register of the 329 fairy tales studied represents the most comprehensive collection of European fairy tales in which music appears.
The theoretical background of the investigation was formed by Wilhelm Salber's morphological psychology and the psychoanalysis according to Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung, the newer psychoanalytic concepts of developmental psychology, self psychology and culture theory.

Publications