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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.
List of contents
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
About the author
Nicholas Cook is Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge.
Report
'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
