Music can lift mood, foster community and even rewire brains – but does it need to have a purpose?

The Guardian

14-04-2025

Growing up, I never questioned the intrinsic value of classical music. My father practising classical and jazz guitar was the aural wallpaper to my childhood, and at my rural state school I took lessons on the recorder, the violin, the cello, the trombone, the piano. The after-school clubs on offer included, somewhat implausibly, an ocarina ensemble. Music was art, and wasn't art the point of it all, when you got right down to it? The reason to live, after we cater for all our basic needs? It was certainly what led me to become first a classical musician, and then a music historian.
But when my dad died unexpectedly in 2019, it threw my relationship with music into sharp relief. All of a sudden, I couldn't bear listening to it. It was too painful, or it grated on my nerves and made me angry. I started to question how and why music mattered to me. And, as I learned to care about it again, I started to wonder about the ways in which music might care for me in return.
I'm not the only one to have been thinking about this lately. The capacity of music to influence wellbeing and healing is having a cultural moment. Amid a flurry of new books – Hark: How Women Listen by Alice Vincent, Daniel Levitin's Music as Medicine: How We Can Harness Its Therapeutic Power; soprano Renée Fleming's Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness – the issues have been focused by the debate around the BBC's new station, Radio 3 Unwind, which aims to mobilise (mostly) classical music to 'enhance wellbeing'. The music it plays is designed to relax us; the station is promoted using wellness-inspired language, promising to 'help you escape the pressures of modern life'.
Programming on Unwind is light on chat, but heavy on second (ie slow) movements and, er, birdsong. The schedule consists mostly of playlist-type shows with names such as Mindful Mix and Classical Wind Down and features plenty of recognisable choral, piano and instrumental classics from big hitters such as Chopin, Purcell and Mozart, alongside an emphasis on new music and composers from diverse backgrounds.
Unwind's presenters often have psychology or mindfulness credentials – and above all soothing voices. When I tune in, I find myself being encouraged to consider 'the grandness of the natural world' by an authoritative baritone against strains of undulating woodwind, majestic strings, sonorous horns. 'You breathe, as nature would have you breathe. You are alive.' Hmmm. A Shostakovich symphony this is not. I can't quite shake the feeling that I'm settling in for a spa treatment.
Mind you, I have a lot of time for mindfulness or also for spas. And I have the most time of all for any initiative that might get people who don't already listen to a particular type of music to give it a try. Gateway drugs are important – especially for classical music, because in the UK it's managed to get an unwarrantedly fusty reputation.
And hey, listening to Unwind is nice. Doing breathing exercises is nice. It is relaxing.
But lots of things are relaxing. Baths, for instance. Aromatherapy candles. Isn't music different? The anxiety is that Unwind devalues music, so that we start thinking that it is only of value insofar as it's useful for something else. Mightn't Unwind encourage listeners to think classical music is little more than bland background muzak, with nothing to say? Criticism has come from all directions: the BBC has been accused of selling out, of dumbing down, of anaesthetising listeners and of relegating classical music to the awful category of 'ambient'. There's been a rallying cry for the intrinsic value of music, music for music's sake.
This debate is nothing new. People have long castigated the soporific properties of certain music. For some it's been political: German playwright Bertolt Brecht complained that Wagnerian Romanticism stupefied listeners, dulling their critical faculties and their revolutionary fervour. And there's a noble history of people advocating for the intrinsic value of music. Enter bespectacled misanthrope Theodor Adorno, for instance, the critical theorist who took the discussion to extremes in the mid-20th century, arguing that popular music was irredeemably compromised by being, well, popular. True music for Adorno, a knotty composer himself, turned its back on the market.
The problem was that Adorno's 'true music' – the eye-watering dissonances of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern – wasn't always especially easy to listen to.
I'm inclined to agree with Adorno on at least some of this. I am allergic to the suggestion that music needs to be attached to claims about something else to be worthwhile – be that its ability to make money, or aid focus (and productivity), or to optimise health. Can't it just be for its own sake?
But then what do we do with the fact that listening to and playing music does seem to be good for your health? Take musician and broadcaster Clemency Burton-Hill's moving BBC documentary My Brain: After the Rupture, which explores her recovery from a catastrophic bleed on one side of her brain in early 2020, completely knocking out her speech centres. Neurologists believe musical training increases the chance of having language distributed over both sides of the brain, and that this probably accelerated her ability to recover speech.
That may be a dramatic example, but Daniel Levitin argues compellingly in Music as Medicine for the therapeutic benefits of music: among other things, for Parkinson's disease, dementia and pain perception. He notes the role of music in shamanic healing rituals; these properties of music have long been recognised by human cultures. We all already self-medicate with music. 'Most people know what music to reach for when they want to maintain or alter their mood state.'
For Levitin, however, music isn't separate to us, a thing that can be used to optimise health. It is demonstrably deeply entangled throughout the brain, and embedded in our most fundamental human processes, across all forms of attention. 'Music lives inside each of us who listen,' he writes.
Alice Vincent, a former pop music journalist, whose book tells the story of her return to music after the critical illness of her infant son, believes music's potency comes from how it makes people feel seen and understood. 'Ultimately, that's the most basic form of therapy you could ask for,' she tells me. After spending her 20s fitting herself into the male-dominated coolness hierarchies of music journalism, Vincent's return to music came through reimagining it as something much bigger: resonance, reverberation, communality.
'I now get a lot of joy from singing nursery rhymes with a bunch of women and their small children in a community library. From a classic pop patriarchal standpoint, that is not a cool way of making music, but there's still a community and a resonance. There's an identity with it that feels really powerful.'
When I came back to music after my father's death, I found the joy was in creative play. Messing around, exploring, bashing something out on the piano, the satisfaction of small improvements. I was lucky that my gateway drug to classical music was music lessons in school; for others, it might be thinking: 'I'm stressed … help!'
Where the art-for-art's-sakers and the music-for-healing camps find common ground is in the idea that as a society we've lost sight of how important music is. Over the past decade, there's been a sharp decline in UK sixth-formers studying the arts, following the government's 'strategic priority' emphasising Stem subjects. But music is not the icing on the cake of an existence dominated by science, technology and economics; it's (to push a metaphor too far) the rich butter whipped right through the mix. We are aural creatures, reverberating together.
Emily MacGregor is the author of While the Music Lasts: A Memoir of Music, Grief and Joy.