Music for Good or Ill

Humans are always ready to divide things into opposed categories, which is a problem because in general the world doesn't work like that. So we have 'Western' vs 'non-Western' music (what Stuart Hall called the 'West and the rest' model), we have 'art' vs 'popular' music and so on. There's also a division that arose out of the aesthetics of autonomy: between 'aesthetic' or 'autonomous' music on the one hand (traditionally referred to simply as 'music') and 'applied' music on the other - music the point of which is to do things like make your unborn baby smarter or improve milk yields (I'm speaking of cows). People don't talk much about this distinction, but it is built into everyday life. On the one hand there's concert and recorded music played by professionals, where aesthetic quality is all-important. On the other there's the music without which no royal (or other) wedding or funeral would be complete, or the canned music played in failing restaurants to make them seem less empty, or the music that drives aerobics classes, or that used or created by therapists to help people work through their mental or behavioural problems - all areas in which aesthetic quality is just part of a broader concern for music's contribution to quality of life.

Today's musical pluralism reflects a history of migration and globalisation, coupled to the massive diversification of modes of musical production and consumption resulting from digital sound technology. Many of the old categories and divisions are no longer useful or meaningful. And other social changes have added to this. For example, during most of the twentieth century, music therapy was a specialist practice primarily located in hospitals, but by the end of the century - as with other aspects of care - it had been largely relocated to community settings. There it has become closely linked with the developing practices of community music, as part of a new, emerging area called 'music, health, and wellbeing'. You might see this as demonstrating the increased importance within today's society of 'applied' music, but we don't need to think of it as an either/or. There is rather a continuum of highly diversified musical activity. I maintain that the personal and social dimensions of music are there in the concert hall, and the values of expressive sound in the community music centre or therapy room. The balance may vary, but all music is both 'aesthetic' and 'applied'.

Changing personal and social uses of music have - or should have - a knock-on effect on the study of music, and in this book I touch on that too. Just to set the scene, musicology (a term which in America has the narrower meaning of music history) came into being in the nineteenth century as part of the broader cultural and political phenomenon of nationalism: the very idea of nationhood implied the existence of national cultures that could be traced as far back as possible into the past. Historical traditions of music that originally had nothing to do with one another were amalgamated into national cultures and consolidated in multi-volume editions with titles such as Denkmäler deutscher Tonkunst (Monuments of German musical art, published between 1892 and 1931).

Other approaches to the study of music developed around this. Music theorists formulated models of how music worked, whether in terms of national styles, specific composers' styles, or individual compositions. What was called comparative musicology focused on the relationship between Western and - recalling that health warning - non-Western musics, often demonstrating the supposedly exceptional nature of Western music as compared to other traditions seen as inferior. This tied in with the broader historical and cultural ideologies of colonialism and imperialism. Following the partial collapse of European colonialism in the wake of the 1939-45 war, comparative musicology gave way to a new discipline: ethnomusicology, which aims to understand the musics of other cultures on their own terms - an approach sometimes linked with ongoing processes of decolonisation. Popular music studies developed later in the century, initially within literary and cultural studies, but - as the elitist edge of traditional musicology softened - increasingly as a core element of music studies (an umbrella term that I like because it avoids making unproductive distinctions between its constituent disciplines).

Music, health, and wellbeing has not as yet consolidated into an academic field, and people studying it are as likely to be found in departments or divisions of sociology, psychology, or medicine as of music. People who work in this area tend to be well informed about musicology - many of them have music degrees - but not many musicologists know much about music, health, and wellbeing. I think it would be better if they did, and that to get a balanced sense of why music matters you need to think across the whole spectrum of music making. To begin to redress the balance, then, I offer a brief overview of music oriented towards the achievement of broadly social goals.

I turn on the radio at random and hear how the regular beat found in musics across the world helps people with Parkinson's disease to walk, makes it easier for people to articulate feelings they cannot express in words, creates a sense of unity within groups, and even predisposes people to like one another. The social significance and benefits of music have been recognised by multiple governmental and other public groups. The UK Department of Education's 2011 policy paper The Importance of Music spoke of its effects on 'self reliance, confidence, self-esteem, sense of achievement and ability to relate to others',1 and there is an extensive research literature to back this up. Yet in 2020 an article by Colin Harris reported that over the previous five years music teaching in state schools had declined by 21 per cent, and that 'a fifth of all schools in the state sector had no music provision at all'; private schools, by contrast, had increased their music provision by 7 per cent.2

That tells us two things. First, music - and culture more generally - is increasingly undervalued by comparison with literacy, numeracy, and subjects seen as directly enhancing employability and economic growth. (British governments have never fully recognised the scale of the employment and overseas earnings generated by music.) And second, music - especially classical music - is increasingly becoming an enclave of the socially privileged. Outside the government-funded education sector, however, the picture is less bleak. A wide range of not-for-profit initiatives focus on music's potential for both personal and social development in contexts that range from institutions (for example prisons) to the wider community. The British Lung Foundation, for example, advocates the health benefits of choral singing, while any number of local programmes target specific communities. London's Wigmore Hall runs 'Music for Life' and 'Singing with Friends' programmes for people with dementia. And it is said that there are more community choirs in the UK than there are fish-and-chip shops.

Music therapy is one of the most longstanding and solidly researched areas of music for health and wellbeing. Its move out of hospitals and into the community was part of a larger move away from medicalised approaches to health - approaches that effectively treated people as bundles of symptoms - and towards a more socialised approach based on a broader conception of care. The 'music, health and wellbeing' label reflects a concern for wellness, for living well, for flourishing; health becomes a positive concept rather than just meaning absence of illness. Music therapy offers what social psychologist of music Tia DeNora calls 'asylum',3 referring not to a physical space but rather to a safe, protected environment that facilitates both personal and social rehabilitation. Therapists and clients interact musically, and this fosters communication and empathy, the capacity to see yourself through others' eyes and hear yourself through others' ears (Figure 2). There is a substantial psychological literature that demonstrates the link between music and empathy; a study in which DeNora collaborated with musicologists/psychologists Eric Clarke and Jonna Vuoskoski provided what the authors called 'narrow but hard-nosed evidence' that hearing music from another culture increases people's empathy for that culture - even when they are just listening to a recording.4 And the belief that 'music creates empathy, builds connection and gives hope' underlies the work of Musicians without Borders, an international organisation that uses music for peace-building and social change in vulnerable communities from El Salvador to Rwanda, and from Northern Ireland to Palestine.

Figure 2. Client and therapist at the Cornwall Music Service Trust, Truro. Credit: Cornwall Music Service Trust

Perhaps the highest-profile musical contribution to peace-building is the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra (WEDO), founded in 1999 by...