2020 was a dark year. As covid, global warming, and social fabric issues stacked up, I often wondered about our changing culture and the role that musicians might play. As 2025 appears, inflection points arise through grueling public affairs, politicized education, distrusted AI tech, and… oh yes, let’s not forget global warming. It’s a perfect storm! Regardless of where you are, there is nowhere to get away. Foreboding affects a culture as it does an individual; it closes you down.
It appears the culture is becoming a patient. Uncertainty and denial informs rising emotional temperatures. Obvious markers point to large scale psychological disorientation. Pharmaceutical pills or medical marijuana aren’t doing it anymore.
Spotlight on music and sound!
When emotions need a balm and life gets really messy, music and sound are a solid antidote. The limbic system provides a direct portal into the nervous system, and rhythm and vibration (the basic building blocks of music and sound) slides right in. The inquiry of how music can be of service to an uptight culture is an appropriate question to ask in 2025.
The Culture Becomes the Patient – Expanding the Role of Music in the Age of Disruption
Perhaps trained therapeutic musicians would be great ambassadors into a new music paradigm. Certified bedside musicians have been educated in taking pulses, reading emotional and physical signatures, and devising appropriate music and sound programs for individuals sick and/or dying.
What would happen if individual treatment guard rails expanded, and we began to see trained music and sound therapists turning to neighborhoods and communities?
Globally, circumstances force us into reconsiderations of how humans live together. Maybe a cultural fever is necessary to open terrains of consciousness.
We know from thousands of years and recent neuroscience that music has a great psychological imprint: harmony triggers unity; melody reminds us of the perfection of beauty; rhythm entrains us together. Historically, music is a palliation. Add the application of social cohesion, and mere music and/or sound becomes a powerful tool of psychological easing of burdens.
We can figure this out together…
Therapeutic musicians, like musicians everywhere, know how to read an audience and create an effect. While there is a great difference between bar and bedside musicians, they both bring good intention and musical surcease. But most of us don’t quite know what to do with a patient as big as a neighborhood, town, or country. So, the human way is to just make it up! Here are some recent examples of music beyond entertainment:
• Homebound Italian musicians spontaneously appeared on Milan balconies during severe 2020 Covid isolation.
• The Black String Triage Ensemble is “…committed to using music as the healing force for the soul in the immediate aftermath of community violence.” They play concerts at the scene of community violence.
• Estonian singers in 1987-1991 took on the Soviet Union in a singing revolution, “…so named because Balts identified songs as the unifying symbol and nonviolent weapon of choice in the struggle for national self-determination.”
• The Pavarotti Music Centre in Bosnia opened in 1997 after a devastating war because they understood the importance of non-professional music directly in homes and neighborhoods.
• In 2022, the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra tours the world to keep attention on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “I don’t have a gun, but I have my cello.”
Dayvin Hallmon, the creator and conductor of The Black String Triage Ensemble, speaks about the use of music and art “…to address pain, foster healing, promote love, call for justice, and guard against hopelessness.”
Expanded Skillsets
What are the skillsets that musicians (therapeutically trained or not) would add, to be effective sonic facilitators to cultures in transition: from fire, war, immigration, loss, racism, etc.? In the parlance of rock musicians, the term woodshedding refers to going away and learning new things. What does it take, as adults, for us to go back to ‘school’ so we can go forward with a new grace and purpose? What do we need to know about technology, psychology, culture, change? You already know about music… Now how apply it to different circumstances? There is a brilliance in being a musician. Now, time to reapply that brilliance in another way.
I suggest that concerned musicians sharpen new skillsets that allow them to bring their music out of the concert hall and hospital room and into the street and community centers. The next blog, Public Music, delves further into this idea.
An important question for my dear fellow musicians, is: What new skillsets do you need to be a sonic activist?
Community Action Organizations (Partial list)
These orgs make a big difference with music.
US-based:
• Songs of Love Foundation 1996
• The Silk Road Project with Yo-Yo Ma 1998
• Playing for Change 2002
• Music In Common 2005
• Jail Guitar Doors 2009
• Hip Hop Caucus 2014
• Black String Triage Ensemble 2018
International:
• El Sistema 1975 (Venezuela)
• The Raging Grannies 1986 (Canada)
• Freemuse 1998 (Denmark)
• Musicians Without Borders 1999 (Netherlands)
• The Complaint Choir 2005 (UK)
• Pussy Riot 2011 (Russia)
• The Landfill Harmonic Orchestra 2015 (Paraguay)
• Climate Choir Movement 2022 (UK)
Study what they do, join them, or create your own unique approach. Remember, expanding your skillsets is a good thing. We’re all making this up as we go…
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