The Routledge Companion to Music, Mind, and Well-being

Penelope Gouk, James Kennaway, Jacomien Prins, Wiebke Thormahlen, Penelope Gouk, James Kennaway, Jacomien Prins, Wiebke Thormahlen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351674980
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Musik

In recent decades, the relationship between music, emotions, health and well-being has become a hot topic. Scientific research and new neuro-imaging technologies have provided extraordinary new insights into how music affects our brains and bodies, and researchers in fields ranging from psychology and music therapy to history and sociology have turned their attention to the question of how music relates to mind, body, feelings and health, generating a wealth of insights as well as new challenges. Yet this work is often divided by discipline and methodology, resulting in parallel, yet separate discourses.

In this context, The Routledge Companion to Music, Mind and Well-being seeks to foster truly interdisciplinary approaches to key questions about the nature of musical experience and to demonstrate the importance of the conceptual and ideological frameworks underlying research in this field. Incorporating perspectives from musicology, history, psychology, neuroscience, music education, philosophy, sociology, linguistics and music therapy, this volume opens the way for a generative dialogue across both scientific and humanistic scholarship.

The Companion is divided into two sections. The chapters in the first, historical section consider the varied ways in which music, the emotions, well-being and their interactions have been understood in the past, from Antiquity to the twentieth century, shedding light on the intellectual origins of debates that continue today. The chapters in the second, contemporary section offer a variety of current scientific perspectives on these topics and engage wider philosophical problems. The Companion ends with chapters that explore the practical application of music in healthcare, education and welfare, drawing on work on music as a social and ecological phenomenon.

Contextualising contemporary scientific research on music within the history of ideas, this volume provides a unique overview of what it means to study music in relation to the mind and well-being.

1
INTRODUCTION

Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Music, Mind and Well-being

Penelope Gouk, James Kennaway, Jacomien Prins and Wiebke Thormählen

The last 30 years have seen a resurgence of interest in the connections between music, mind and well-being. This is hardly surprising as life has become inundated with music facilitated by its ever-increasing dissemination through digital technology. We no longer need to find a radio or CD player, let alone a live band. Each of us has a vast choice of music readily available through our preferred electronic medium and our choices are determined as often by loose emotional concepts such as music that is “sad,” “happy,” “relaxing” or “romantic” as they are by artist or genre. Social media abound with testimony to the use of music in daily life: to calm us, to inspire us, to distract us, to help us remember, to help us forget; to express ourselves or to avoid finding our own words; to bond with others or to shut ourselves off from the world; to intensify or overcome a particular feeling (Bull, 2007; Skånland, 2013). At the heart of all this lies the general assumption that music is somehow a “language of the emotions” with an almost magical link to our state of mind. Musical emotions are perceived to have an impact on the subjective sense of well-being and thus on psychological and physical health. In our everyday lives, the music-emotions-health nexus constitutes “common sense” on the subject, but doubts about its universal validity and questions around how it might function remain, at a time when research into the application of music’s “powers” is mushrooming across a variety of fields.

A key reason for the boom in recent scientific interest in music, emotions and well-being relates to the remarkable advances in imaging technology in the neurosciences over the past few decades, which have led to the formation of a highly productive sub-discipline that has brought exciting insights into how the brain reacts to music. The neuroscience of music has also inspired scholarship in other fields such as cognitive psychology, psychotherapy and psychoneuroimmunology, as well as in applied studies such as rehabilitation and non-pharmacological pain management and is the basis of work on neurologic music therapy. At the same time, it has also created significant and intriguing intellectual challenges for future approaches to the subject. What is the relationship between the lived experience of music and the measurable biological markers that are the stock-in-trade of neuroscience? What are the limits of what brain science can tell us about music and emotion? What is the relationship between reward circuits in the brain and the social and historical construction of musical concepts and cultures? And for that matter, is music really all about emotion at all?

The idea itself that psychological processes can be mapped directly onto biological processes, with the apparent implication that mental states and emotions can be read from biological markers, has come under fierce attack. Some critics have accused the neuro-disciplines of ignoring the political and social context, and have argued that the field - in a way that is almost neo-phrenological - makes the mistake of thinking that locating brain activity using brain scans is the same as explaining the meaning of its function (Conway & Rehding, 2013; Legrenzi & Umilta, 2011; Tallis, 2014; Uttal, 2001). While scientific popularisers and the media have sometimes clearly been guilty of a hubristic approach to what brain research can tell us about music, serious researchers in the field have stoutly defended the epistemological basis of their work and acknowledged its limits (see Eerola; Taruffi & Koelsch in this Companion). In order to create empirically based models of how music affects the brain, neuroscientific approaches necessarily have to reduce complex human behaviour, but that is not a barrier to producing important and informative results.

Much excellent work has been presented in the related fields of music and health and music and emotions, most recently Music, Health and Wellbeing by Raymond MacDonald, Gunter Kreutz and Laura Mitchell (2012), the Handbook of Music and Emotions (2010) and its predecessor, Music and Emotion: Theory and research (2001) by Patrik Juslin and John Sloboda, which together demonstrate the rapid development in the field of the affective sciences over the first 10 years of the twenty-first century, as well as Tom Cochrane, Bernardino Fantini and Klaus Scherer’s The Emotional Power of Music (2013) and, on a rather different note, there is also Oliver Sacks’s Musicophilia (2007), which gives a literary-clinical description of neurological cases related to music.

Our Companion differs in two respects from these books. Firstly, it explicitly problematises the relationship between past and current scientific thinking on music, emotions and well-being, using historical perspectives to illuminate the ideological and cultural roots of contemporary musical and scientific concepts. It places contemporary understandings into a continuum of approaches instead of setting out a vision of a teleological march of progress, revealing the role of culturally determined concepts. It goes beyond traditional narratives of music and emotion, with many chapters using ideas of the embodied mind, and includes contributions that deal with scepticism not simply about music’s “emotional power,” but with the ideology itself that music has an inherent special relationship to the mind. As such, the Companion identifies a variety of theories on music’s affective relationship to man, presenting a variety of conceptions of the temporal and dynamic nature of both music and the mind as an encapsulation of the self, that have been discussed and reinvented to suit changing socio-cultural contexts since Antiquity. Indeed, a Pythagorean-Platonic model of the soul (mind) in which music was considered to have an inherent relationship to the human self, forms the underlying assumption in many of the chapters presented here, while others point to the Aristotelian model that denied an a priori relationship between the soul and music. Finally, the book seeks to create a dialogue between theoretical and experimental approaches, with the hope of inspiring new research questions and methodological approaches that can further the investigation into the nature of music’s impact on body and mind. We hope to inspire research that involves integration at the level of formulating research questions, research that is fully aware of its own ideological premises with respect to key concepts such as music, mind, emotions, human nature and well-being, and that is fully aware of the ideological pillars that hold its own disciplinary stakes and methods.

This Companion brings together case studies and state of research summaries from a wide variety of perspectives – neurology, psychology, sociology, education studies, history and musicology – to probe not only how music relates to the mind and emotions and how it has been or could be used in the process of maintaining or gaining well-being but also to push beyond this to the question whether the subject-object relational model traditionally used to investigate the “power of music” – in which music as a “thing” or even a “practice” acts on the individual who possesses mind, emotions and a sense of well-being — is a useful model in the investigation of a more inclusive conception of well-being that is based around individuals’ accounts and perceptions. By placing case studies and theoretical studies side by side, the book raises issues of voice, individuality and community as aspects of music that could be considered alongside biological markers. In other words, this Companion seeks to encourage a greater awareness of agency and the social dimension of music through self-reflexive research approaches, as well as of the role of historical and cultural contexts.

In this light, a central issue addressed in the book is the problem of the obvious lack of dialogue between the various disciplines involved and their lack of agreement on the conceptual framework used to explain the impact of music on the mind, emotions and well-being. The conceptual and philosophical challenges posed by the different disciplinary approaches to the impact of music give us the opportunity for further fruitful research based on an exchange of ideas between disciplines to create a multidisciplinary picture of the music, mind, well-being nexus. Our Companion therefore aims to demonstrate the value of and need for musicologists, historians, neuroscientists, psychologists and others to examine these theoretical issues together in order to move towards an understanding of musical experience that incorporates a sense of both the cultural and historical construction and the scientific materialist basis of musical experience.

The chapters in this book thus critically consider the basis of thinking on the topic, while also investigating the different models of the interaction of body, mind and emotions, revealing ideologies that have a significant impact on the questions that scientific and psychological research asks today. The historical chapters allow an evaluation of the social and cultural contexts within which these models were conceived as true, universal and scientific, drawing on the so-called method of reflexivity (common in ethnographic studies and in medical humanities) in which the subject of study is investigated alongside its practical and ideological contexts and frameworks which include the investigator and the common assumptions of the “normal” setting for the investigation (Bleakley, 2014; Viney, Callard & Wood, 2015; Whitehead, Woods, Atkinson, Macnaughton & Richards, 2016). Stepping beyond these boundaries will be essential in order to formulate approaches that help us to develop our understanding of the musical experience as a vital human phenomenon that manifests itself both as subjective experience in everyday life and as a scientific object of study.

The Basic Concepts: Music, Mind and Well-being

The concept of music itself as it surfaces throughout the chapters in this book requires some consideration. Interestingly, many a-historical studies appear to reveal a reliance on what musicologists have long since defined as a strong work concept. The underlying assumptions prevalent here follow a subject-object model in which music as an entity in itself impacts on the human mind and the aim is to quantify this impact. Yet, this very notion of music as possessing an objective character – and one that can be described both technically and aesthetically independent of an individual’s reception and perception – has come under considerable scrutiny over the past 30 years, as musicology has tried to free itself from an ideological construct that determined its rise as a discipline in the first place (Bergeron & Bohlman, 1992; Clarke & Cook, 2004; Cook & Everist, 1999; Kerman, 1985; Kramer, 1990; see also Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina & von Savigny, 2001). The long-held idea that music operates as a series of fixed art works was critiqued comprehensively in the 1990s (Goehr, 1992) and the construct has come to be seen as a restrictive cultural premise, albeit one with continuing influence among composers, performers, theorists and educators. Ideas of music as practice (“musicking”) as something one does rather than a collection of works has become increasingly influential in musicology (Small, 1998), but some other fields seem more beholden to older conceptions of music as an object.

This older concept of a musical “work” itself developed from the re-definition of music as an art in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries or even as early as the Italian Renaissance (Kristeller, 1990) and from the subsequent desire to define and control music’s powerful physical and mental stimulation (Barker-Benfield, 1992; Goehr, 1992; Marsh, 2013). One Baroque source that strongly contributed towards this view of music as discrete works created by composers with a view to move the passions was Athanasius Kircher’s highly influential treatise Musurgia Universalis (Rome 1650) (Universal Music-making). As well as classifying music and musical instruments Kircher’s encyclopaedic work also contained a section on anatomy that included illustrations designed to show how the ear actually hears and responds to music (See front cover, also Gouk, 2001). For Enlightenment music theorists such as Johann Georg Sulzer, music’s non-conceptual nature and its perceived physical and mental effects made it difficult to define it as a true art. Art’s role was the moral education of man, a tall task for an un-texted piece of music, the meaning of which appeared potentially different to each listener. Two features of music became significant in defining music’s inherent powers and its usefulness in the process of education: the manner of experiencing music – i.e. music as a practice – and a contemplation of music as abstract form. While both were part of the formulation of music’s powers during the eighteenth century, the latter rose to prominence towards century’s end, with a Kantian separation of experience and perception from the object per se (Bowie, 2007; Dahlhaus, 1981; Michaelis, 1806). Around 1800 an Idealist conception of music came to dominate, suggesting that music as practice and its physiological impact were mere tools towards the true aim of music — metaphysical truth communicated through musical form (Evan Bonds, 2009). Aesthetic judgement, therefore, was divorced from musical practice and the idea of music as aesthetic objects or works came to be tied to educational ideals in which art could further man’s moral sense and be part of a moral education through its truth and beauty (Gramit, 2002; Riley, 2004; Semi, 2012); the physical effect of music was in part marginalised as a medical problem (Kennaway, 2012).

With this Idealist shift, abstract form not physical impact became the manifestation of music’s vital powers. As a result, both music’s formal parameters and its constituent parts – sound and vibration – took centre stage in treatises that were no longer instructive (as eighteenth-century composition treatises had been) but analytical. They displayed the desire to put understandings of music’s impact onto a proper scientific basis. The novelist Stendhal reflected on this scene when he wrote in his 1824 Life of Rossini that, “Music is still awaiting the coming of its Lavoisier, the genius who will eventually submit the whole system of the aural nerves and indeed the human heart itself, to a series of accurate scientific tests and experiments.” This person would need a “remarkably sensitive nervous system” to understand the kinds of “emotional reaction” provoked by music, leading in the end to “the establishment of a scientific theory of music based upon the observed data of emotional psychology (European sub-species) and upon an analysis of the habitual reactions of the aural nerves” (Stendhal, 1824, pp. 124, 125).

On the other hand, a generation later the music critic Eduard Hanslick postulated a view of music that was entirely divorced from such emotional psychology. In Vom musikalisch Schönen (1854) he denied music any expression beyond the expression of itself. As such, he distanced music from the expression of emotion to conclude that music’s effects stemmed from the fact that its dynamism mimicked the shape of emotion rather than any act of expression. Hanslick claimed that form itself and the beauty arising from form was the only true essence of art. Here, aesthetic judgment was strictly separated from emotion, effect, perception and stimulation. At the same time, Hermann Helmholtz would attempt to provide a scientific rationale for music’s effects on human physiology (1863). His definition of science and physiology necessarily required him to explain music’s effects as entirely independent of any subjective perception. The development of his theory, however, was driven by his own strong emotional reactions – caused in turn by moral beliefs and national sentiment – against the virtuosic musical display which became increasingly popular during the nineteenth century (Hui, 2013; Steege, 2012).

Both Helmholtz and Hanslick would prove hugely influential on an understanding of music that isolated objects from practice. For both, musical practice and any effect arising from the application or experience of music were pale shadows of music’s true nature. One result of this was the prioritisation of the act of serious listening over any other ways of engaging with music (Hui, 2013; Rehding, 2003; Steinberg, 2006). Echoing Greek thought, Sulzer had already suggested that the ear and the eye were the primary senses with which man gained knowledge and honed his inner sense of the beautiful and the good and he also conceded that while “in these two noble sens...