Musical Gleanings From the Pandemic

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This month, a number of online news sources reported on research that indicated that people relied on music in 2020 to cope with psychological challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. These included the websites of PsyPost, the World Economic Forum, and the Hindustan Times.

In fact, the research that prompted this spate of stories consisted of several independently conducted studies. In the journal Psychology of Music, researchers Naomi Ziv and Revital Hollander-Shabtai reported results of their survey study of 200 Israelis who described their listening habits (comparing pandemic to “normal” times) and their emotional reactions to music during lockdown. Another in the journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications reported on a larger survey of over 5,000 people, who reported how they engaged with music to cope with the pandemic. Still another study, which appeared in the online journal Frontiers in Psychology, studied people who had experienced the strict lockdown in Spain from March through June of 2020. It found that young adults and people with musical training reported music being the most helpful in their well-being.

Surely we all learned some important lessons from the pandemic, and many of us really devoted ourselves to finding ways to make lemonade of the pandemic lemons handed us. For my part, I did a major inventory of the content of the university classes I teach and examined what knowledge and skills absolutely require interactivity between teacher and students, versus that what can be effectively taught by one-way communication (e.g., readings, instructor lecture/demonstration). That said, nobody really needed to undergo a pandemic to learn that music is a preferred coping strategy for many people as they face the challenges of life.

The field of music therapy, which throughout the 20th century steadily grew in its sophistication and acceptance by the larger health care profession, has as its primary purpose presenting music as a resource that people can use to adapt and cope when they are “living with profound health problems, disabilities and difficulties, facing daily issues of struggle, loss and pain” (Bunt, 2012, p. 165). Using music as a resource often takes the form of listening. Research has shown many people prefer to listen to music in solitude and among these, personality seems to be a key factor; this type of music listening may work best for those with high trait neuroticism but who are willing to engage with their emotions and who turn to music for relief from situational stressors of life (Miranda et al. 2010; Skånland, 2011).

While the 2020 pandemic provided once-in-a-lifetime conditions to study individuals' use of music listening to cope during a time of isolation, it also yielded some important insights into the nature of music-making (Theorell et al., 2020). A defining element of music for many people is the social, that is, doing it with others. Again, we did not need to experience a global pandemic for this fact to be revealed. Decades ago (if not earlier), researchers in the human sciences had identified the important social functions that music serves for people worldwide (e.g., Merriam, 1964). More specifically, group music-making has been shown as a key means by which people establish a sense of community and provide emotional support for each other, be it through drumming circles, choir membership, or the chants/songs of activists and sports fans.

Indeed, social interaction is a must for many musical people to manage stress or recover from trauma. This truth, experienced by so many during the pandemic, is borne out by psychological research that has established active music-making as an effective means of coping with difficult life circumstances and pursue health and well-being (Hanser, 2010; Hargreaves & Lamont, 2017). Group music has been shown to provide social and emotional support for a variety of people in need, including individuals dealing with poverty, substance abuse, and mental health conditions, (Bailey & Davidson, 2005; Harrison, 2019; Williams et al., 2020). Also, because adolescence can be an especially challenging stage of development, it is not surprising that participating in musical activities has been shown to be especially beneficial to young people, including socio-emotionally (Cheong-Clinch, 2009; Lindblom, 2017).

Because music is such an important element in psychological health, musicians should feel great comfort and pride knowing that in very real ways, they can positively affect the quality of life of many people. By sharing their music with others, musicians actively contribute something that is distinctively human and, by all accounts, practically essential to health and well-being. To declare that music is simply a distraction or “mere entertainment” betrays ignorance of much evidence to the contrary (Woody, 2019, p. 27). In reality, music is a universally human phenomenon. It is beloved and powerful.