Routledge Companion to Music, Mind, and Well-being

In recent decades, the relationship between music, emotions, health and well-being has become a hot topic. Scientific research and new neuro-imaging technologies have provided extraordinary new insights into how music affects our brains and bodies, and researchers in fields ranging from psychology and music therapy to history and sociology have turned their attention to the question of how music relates to mind, body, feelings and health, generating a wealth of insights as well as new challenges. Yet this work is often divided by discipline and methodology, resulting in parallel, yet separate discourses.

In this context, The Routledge Companion to Music, Mind and Well-being seeks to foster truly interdisciplinary approaches to key questions about the nature of musical experience and to demonstrate the importance of the conceptual and ideological frameworks underlying research in this field. Incorporating perspectives from musicology, history, psychology, neuroscience, music education, philosophy, sociology, linguistics and music therapy, this volume opens the way for a generative dialogue across both scientific and humanistic scholarship.

The Companion is divided into two sections. The chapters in the first, historical section consider the varied ways in which music, the emotions, well-being and their interactions have been understood in the past, from Antiquity to the twentieth century, shedding light on the intellectual origins of debates that continue today. The chapters in the second, contemporary section offer a variety of current scientific perspectives on these topics and engage wider philosophical problems. The Companion ends with chapters that explore the practical application of music in healthcare, education and welfare, drawing on work on music as a social and ecological phenomenon.

Contextualising contemporary scientific research on music within the history of ideas, this volume provides a unique overview of what it means to study music in relation to the mind and well-being.

Penelope Gouk is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, UK, where she lectured until her retirement. Throughout her career the dominant theme of her research has been the intellectual history of music in early modern science and medicine. Most recently she has been investigating changing explanations for music's emotional effects, especially in Britain. Her publications include Music, Science and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England (1999) and edited volumes Musical Healing in Cultural Contexts (2000) and, with Helen Hills Representing Emotions: New Connections in the Histories of Art, Music and Medicine (2005).

James Kennaway is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Roehampton in London, UK. He has written extensively on the history of medicine and music, notably in his 2012 monograph Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea of Music as a Cause of Disease.

Jacomien Prins is Assistant Professor/Researcher at the Ca’Foscari University of Venice, Italy. She has worked extensively on the interaction between music theory and philosophy in the Renaissance. Her work includes Echoes of an Invisible World: Marsilio Ficino and Francesco Patrizi on Cosmic Order and Music Theory (2014), Sing Aloud Harmonious Spheres: Renaissance Conceptions of Cosmic Harmony (2017), and an edition and translation of Marsilio Ficino’s commentary on Plato’s Timaeus (Harvard University Press, the I Tatti Renaissance Library series (ITRL)).

Wiebke Thormählen is Area Leader in History at the Royal College of Music in London, UK. Her research focuses on the formulation of music as a language of emotions and its particular role in educational theories and policies since the eighteenth century. Recently awarded a three-year collaborative research grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (Music, Home and Heritage: Sounding the Domestic in Georgian Britain) she explores the interaction of the domestic with the public in musical arrangements, in devotional music and in the relationship between music as domestic social activity and amateur choral societies in Britain.