#21 What can music do?

An incomplete list.

We live in a time of great uncertainty and deep global challenges. I find myself questioning whether music is really that important, whether I’m doing the right thing devoting big chunks of my time to it.

I’m listening at the moment to this episode of On Being, which has become now not just my favourite podcast but a mandatory meditative practice that grounds me and inspires me. When I am low, when I am confused, overwhelmed, I reach for On Being. What a resource!

The latest episode is with Christiana Figueres. She’s a Costa Rican diplomat who has made a lifelong commitment to making change happen in response to the global climate crisis, and she was one of the key architects of the Paris agreement.

This conversation is warm and open, acknowledging the despair and overwhelm of the current moment but always gently, firmly, pushing towards hope, or what On Being’s long-time host Krista Tippett calls “muscular hope.”

In Krista’s world, hope is not wishy-washy meaningless optimism but it is a practice, a practice of turning towards each other and towards solutions, with urgency but with resilience, kindness, patience, compassion. Hope is not some flight of fancy, but is deeply viscerally real:

“Hope is distinct, in my mind, from optimism or idealism. It has nothing to do with wishing. It references reality at every turn and reveres truth. It lives open eyed and wholehearted with the darkness that is woven ineluctably into the light of life and sometimes seems to overcome it. Hope, like every virtue, is a choice that becomes a practice that becomes spiritual muscle memory. It’s a renewable resource for moving through life as it is, not as we wish it to be.”

In the On Being episode, Christiana talks about the 2030 deadline for the Paris agreement, and about how in the climate community that date is still being used as an important line in the sand. She speaks passionately and patiently about how what we do in the next seven years will impact what the earth looks like, what the quality of life is for them, what plants and animals and species survive, for the next ten generations.

It’s obviously scary as fuck - you know this, I know, we all know this. Even when being articulated by a warm, charming and funny Costa Rican woman, it’s frightening. Fear is a very natural response to finding out that as a species you are still lurching torwards an extinction level event, and processing that existential fear is a life’s work we all now have in common. So I understand - not for the first time - why I feel the urge to shrivel into a ball, or to run away, or to look away.

In this context, caring about music, making music, championing music, can feel itself like a running-away, like a looking-away.

And as someone whose personal and professional life revolves around music, I can’t help but question if my energy is being spent in the wrong place.

So - perhaps a good day to ask - what can music do?

Do we need music? Is it important? Is it actually necessary, is it vital, or is it peripheral, a luxury, a distraction? In the next seven years, do we need to nurture the infrastructure of music and musicians, embolden artists, privilege their concerns and their health and their practice? Or should “music” be dismantled, or at least heavily deprioritised, so that we can all refocus on more pressing matters? Where do I land, then?

These questions aren’t rhetorical. I actually do not know the answer yet. But I need to think about it deeply, because I need to feel like I’m not wasting my time entirely. In 2030, my kids will be 18, 15 and 13. They’ll be inheriting the world that you and I, and those before us, have boiled.

If I spend the next seven years devoted to music, will I be able to look my kids in the eye and say that it was time well spent? Or will I shrug and say “sorry guys.” “Sorry, this is all I knew how to do.” “Sorry, this is what paid the bills.” “Sorry, I just really really cared about music, so that’s what I focused on.”

Obviously I want them to be proud of me, and I want to be proud of myself. I want to look to a future where I look back and am proud of myself and content that I made a proper positive contribution to people outside of myself. I need to know that I’m making things better not worse. That’s a me thing.

To live the next seven years in music, I have to believe in it. More than ever.

I have to believe that music is a vehicle for empathy, a safe space for emotional rehearsal, and for intellectual growth, a place for personal mythmaking and identity formation (and that these things matter?), I have to believe music can be a facilitator for the gathering of communities and human connection, that music can remind us of our physical realities and embodied-ness, that it can amplify our development and soothe our souls and bodies, that it can provide escape from (and reward for) the grind as we work towards change.

I have to believe this! Or I have to change my life radically, and urgently.

So it starts with this - a meandering and incomplete list of things music can do. Accompanied by a commitment to keep learning, keep reflecting, keep processing (publicly or privately). Maybe somewhere in the spaces between all the big words and the intellectualising, I’ll find some answers and a path or two to move forward, personally, to 2030 and beyond.

One thing I haven’t done - yet - is connect anything in the list explicitly to the work of combating climate change. I imagine it could be interesting and useful to make some more explicit connections between what music can do and how that helps facilitate change. Maybe that will be next.

I hope this helps someone. I hope this helps me. It already did help me, to get it all out of my head, this morning, and I share it with I hope genuine good intentions and as an opening to discussion not a final statement. Would LOVE to hear back anything that this list sparks in you.

Sending, as always, with minimal editing and second-guessing so .. feeling vulnerable. That’s usually a good sign.

It’s a bit of a stream of thought thing .. see below.

“The Italian pianist Ludovico Einaudi, renowned for his career composing scores for television and movies, gives a haunting performance among the icebergs of the Arctic in conjunction with Greenpeace in an attempt to draw attention to the plight of the region.” (The Guardian) That was in 2016, which is seven years ago. In seven years, it will be 2030.

WHAT CAN MUSIC DO?

• Music as a space of emotional rehearsal. Feels like a clunky phrase, but I’m talking about the idea that music can allow a listener to rehearse the experience of their emotions in a space and time that is separate and/or adjacent to their daily lives.
  
  Stress and anxieties of the day build, loss and love, and joy and sadness, can lay dormant or repressed inside us, or we may be feeling feelings that we have not yet learned to express or name or articulate. Our own emotions can be unlocked when listening to music that reflects those emotions or contains the performance of them, if we are open we can use the music as a vessel to get to a feeling that we know we have inside and rehearse feeling and exploring that emotion in a safe space, a private space, and/or on our own terms.
  
  As an example, I often speak to artists who write songs about grief and loss, and we often end up talking about the idea that documenting your process of grief in a song or a set of songs is valuable because it might open space for someone in a similar place to rehearse the grieving process or find their own way through it. You create the space for someone else to rehearse, explore, or even discover, an emotion.
  

• Music as a vessel for perspective. The lyrics in a song, the story told in a song, perhaps more broadly even the ways in which songs evoke moods, all give us examples of how to live, how to think, how to feel, that we may not be seeing in our daily lives. We live in our bubbles and in our own worlds, music can be vessels for different perspectives, different worldviews, different ideas.
  
  Beyond the music itself, the way an artist talks, presents themselves, the way they are visible and visibly acting and living, can communicate different perspectives and in doing so remind us of the richness of human experience and the vital importance of respecting and nurturing diversity. Tolerance and empathy.
  
  Tie this with the previous item and you get to the idea that music - embedded with a diversity of emotion and perspective - can contain a toolkit for living and how to live, consciously or otherwise. This is all also resonant with the idea of music as a vehicle for increasing empathy across humanity. That feels important.
  

• Music as facilitator of identity. Music is just one way in which people can flesh out their identity by becoming “the kind of person who listens to this kind of music.” This can be malleable and changeable over time, or it can harden and become rigid. Identifying with certain sounds and signifiers, may evolve into a deeper literacy regarding genre & stylistic conventions (and the policing of them, often with negative outcomes), can lead to identifying through fashion, fandom, online behaviors, language codes and memes. A music identity an become adjacent to or intertwined with a political worldview.
  
  Or, more simply and perhaps more common, the idea that being “the kind of person who loves music” can be an identity marker that provides clarity or fulfilment on a personal level and also acts as a signal to others. Compare with the rare non-music person who will say “I just don’t get music” as some odd point of pride. Where you identify on the sliding scale of being “into music” provides a connection node to other people at similar points on the scale.
  

• Music as a gathering space. Music, again, is just one human activity which can, if desired, be something around which people gather and be together. Being present with each other is vitally important to the majority of human animals.
  
  Gathering around music might be formal, in the sense of a subculture or scene, where there is some mutual reinforcement of identity and worldview in safe spaces. Gathering around music might be much more informal, in the sense of a music festival where thousands of strangers gather and feel connected to each other because of their shared experience despite not being connected at a personal level, this can be a reassuring experience.
  
  Gathering around music can also be disembodied, and not just talking about online spaces, but also just the “feeling” that you are not alone because you know there are others in the world who love the music you love.
  

• Music as a time/space enhancer. Putting music on in an environment can elevate the surroundings and the experience of that place or of that moment.
  
  Music can shift the mood of a room, change the colour of the air, provide space (extra dimensions in a room) to discover resonances and insights, make connections and leaps of logic (and not-logic) that weren’t there before. Music can also crowd or overwhelm a space, is not always welcome. Sometimes music is welcome when it fills or masks empty or awkward gaps with sound.
  

• Music as a physical regulator. Music can be used to regulate your heart rate and physical functions - quiet music can calm, upbeat music can thrill, not just emotionally or intellectually but physiologically. Using specifically paced music for fitness and workouts, running playlists, keeping pace. Rhythms can facilitate physical movement, help us to move, dance, sweat and stay active, which is related to …
  

• Music as a visceral experience. Music can remind us that we are physical beings, that we have bodies. Involuntary reactions to rhythm, compulsions to dance, can act as a reminder that we are more than our minds.
  
  Loud music at gigs or pumped directly into your ears can be thrilling or shocking, sound waves can be physically overwhelming in a pleasing and not-pleasing way, all reminders that we exist physically.
  
  Even being aware of music as a directional experience (where is it coming from?), as a stereo experience (most of us have two ears, no more, no less) and as an experience of volume (understanding the difference between quiet and loud, the space between, and the layering of both, as a physical thing). All helps to remind us we exist in a physical sense, in a place, in a physical world.
  

• Music as a mood regulator. Adjacent to the idea that music can act as a regulator of physical qualities of our bodies. Music helps regulate mood, and can provide people with agency to shift their moods. Put upbeat music on to feel “better.” Put low key music on to feel “calmer.” Put sad music on to lean into an experience of sorrow, safely or otherwise.
  
  Learning to use music as a personal device to regulate mood can help you understand that you have some level of control over your own feelings, that you are not necessarily a slave to your emotions or to your nervous system. This is maybe overlapping with the idea of “music as emotional rehearsal” though emotional rehearsal is more like “I think I’m in love but I’m not sure how that feels but bam this song just expressed that exact thing I was trying to figure out, or something adjacent to it, so now my (unspeakable) emotional language is richer and I armed with more tools in the bag when I go back out into my life.”
  
  ”Music as mood regulator” is perhaps more about the ability to change moods, change gears, and the agency that can give you and then the additional insights that can come knowing you have that agency available. How powerful to discover that you can take some control over your mood and mindset.
  

• Music as developmental amplifier. Clunky term haha. The idea that learning about music, whether in a formal way as a student of music or a more informal way as a fan or person who cares about music deeply, can stimulate all sorts of other positive benefits developmentally and educational settings.
  
  There is much research into how learning about music as a child and young adult can stimulate healthy intellectual and emotional development. No reason why this can’t also apply to adults.
  

• Music as accumulation of knowledge. The “music expert” feeling, tied perhaps to the idea of “music as identity”. Becoming knowledgeable in any field brings with it its own reward, opens up potential for pride in yourself for devoting enough time and energy to a practice that you feel confident in its nuances and are able to appreciate its richness. There is a danger here of sliding all the way up your own asshole and just generally being annoying. But it feels good to know stuff about stuff, and music can be a vessel for that.
  

• Music as escape / reward. The idea that “entertainment activities” more broadly (Netflix, TikTok, tennis, knitting, Fortnite) provide much-needed relief from the grindy stress and anxieties of modern work / life routines. I’ve worked hard today, now I get to come home and listen to whatever music I want in the safe comfortable space of my choosing. Or: life sucks, but I can put this pop song on right now and forget about it for four minutes.
  
  There is something here also about the ability to take control, in a world where you often feel subservient to the pressures of outside forces. There is also the idea that in a moment of overwhelm, despair, sadness, I can access with this piece of music and come out the other side rejuvenated, refreshed, or somehow with new perspective or new energy that can fuel the next day, or help address the next challenge. This is a more noble reading than just music as pure escapism from reality, head in the sand.
  

• Music as a reminder of the present moment. With perhaps rare exceptions - music is only music when it is happening over time. Different to a still image. Different to a chair or a table. Different, often, to our minds which can race and be disjointed and often seem to operate outside of time. Different to a book that you put down and then pick up later, consume over longer periods (though I guess technically you can pause a song or album and come back to return later - but especially a live show or a performance of music, happens in real time and cannot be paused).
  
  To love music or simply to experience it is to be reminded of the inevitability of the passage of time - one second ticks to the next as one bar leads to the next, to listen to music is to engage directly with the passage of time. Every active experience of music listening is therefore an opportunity to rehearse being present in the moment.
  
  Music can also be a place to rehearse the practice of making time malleable (slowing time down by leaning into music and making the time around it expand, i.e the feeling of when “time stops” … or speeding up time that you want to avoid or skip past, by putting on music you like to “pass the time” quicker, when bored or upset). Music helps us be aware of time (it is easy, weirdly, to forget that time is “a thing”) and helps us reach for a more complex understanding of our own experience of time.
  

• Music as a gym for practicing critical thinking. Perhaps this is an edge case that mainly applies to deeper music fans and stans. But thinking deeply about music, unpacking songs, lyrics, unpacking artist careers, debating them with friends, kicking them around and looking for threads between them, championing things you think are great and trying to explain why they are (or aren’t) - all that can be filed under the more meta experience of music - can allow the listener to access/practice different kinds of critical thinking that can also be applied outside of music, and that might not be regularly part of their day to day work or personal lives. Again, it’s a place to rehearse - explore, discover & tweak critical thought processes so that you expand your toolkit and your ability to process things in other areas of work and life.