Music

As countries went into lockdown in 2020, people turned to music for comfort and solidarity. Neighbours sang to each other from their balconies; people participated in online music sessions that created an experience of socially distanced togetherness.

Nicholas Cook argues that the value of music goes far beyond simple enjoyment. Music can enhance well-being, interpersonal relationships, cultural tolerance, and civil cohesion. At the same time, music can be a tool of persuasion or ideology. Thinking about music helps bring into focus the values that are mobilised in today’s culture wars. Making music together builds relationships of interdependence and trust: rather than escapism, it offers a blueprint for a community of mutual obligation and interdependence.

Music: Why It Matters is for anyone who loves playing, listening to, or thinking about music, as well as those pursuing it as a career.

Acknowledgements

or maybe it doesn’t?

music for good or ill

ideology in disguise

music, race, colonialism

after BLM

music and asocial individualism

music, nostalgia, delusion

music and administered society

musical togetherness

music, covid, ethics

pandemic intimacy

Notes

Further Reading "A witty, concise, and far-reaching book about music in a global context."
Suddhaseel Sen, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay

"A ringing riposte to the assumption that music has little to say about the critical issues of our time. Cook shows us just a few of the countless ways in which music is an indelible aspect of what it means to be human – most crucially, because music teaches us nothing less than how to live."
George E. Lewis FBA, Columbia University Nicholas Cook is Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge.