This document discusses how music may help foster empathy and intercultural understanding. It describes an experience where the author composed a musical piece intended to promote unity between different ethnic groups in South Africa. The piece was successfully performed once but failed to unite the groups in a later performance. This paradox led the author to question assumptions about music's power and investigate how music may cultivate empathy. The document also examines theories of how musical activities could potentially strengthen empathic responses through imagination and social engagement, but notes many contextual factors are also involved.
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Music Empathy And Intercultural Understanding Felicity Laurence
1. Music, Empathy and Intercultural Understanding
Felicity Laurence, October 2009
Introduction
Dan Baron has suggested that empathy is ‘one of the qualities cultivated by effective
arts education’ and has commented upon the need to ‘redefine arts as our essential
human languages of understanding, communication and social transformation’,
while the 2006 WAAE statement underlines the importance of ‘research into
pedagogies for personal and social transformation’. In what follows, I will tell a
story ‘from the field’ and then try to share some of my attempts to understand the
nature of using the arts, in this case music, in helping and educating children to
learn how to ‘see’ and comprehend, and respect, the ‘other’, in an imaginative way.
Indeed, without the imaginative act itself, and a corresponding effort to reach out
and take in the other’s perspective, feelings, and even way of being, empathic
understanding may be impossible properly to achieve. Since the events and field
work described below were carried out, I have been able to apply and develop these
findings and ideas to a number of projects within schools, and have found similar
‘musicking‐empathising’ patterns, sometimes even down to the specific words
spoken by participating children. They speak often of the importance of their voice
and their work as artists (in this case, co‐composers of songs) being taken seriously,
and of learning better to empathise in an often non‐ or anti‐ empathic world, and
strikingly, there have been direct and explicit suggestions from a number of children
in different parts of this country, over a period of years, that the Prime Minister
himself (they were referring to Tony Blair)should take heed of the ideas explored in
this work, and learn about peace from these!
This article has been developed from doctoral work, a subsequent paper given at the
International Symposium of CIMA (the Centre for Intercultural Music and Arts
Conference) in Granada 2006, and my chapter Music and Empathy in the volume
Music and Conflict Transformation (ed Olivier Urbain, 2008). It describes my
exploration over recent years into the mechanisms by which music and human
activities involved in its practice may engender empathic responses and behaviour,
leading to empathic relationships between people. Looking closely at theories both
of music and of empathy, I have found aspects within both areas which may offer an
understanding of the potential connections between them. A specific focus upon
Christopher Small’s concept of musicking has informed the evolving of a theoretical
framework, which has been further developed by insights arising from experimental
field work with primary school children. While refuting any a priori assumption of
the power of music – any music – to produce harmonious relationships between
people, I do suggest that the human activity of musicking does carry a potential
unique both to the particular sonic and rhythmic quality of music itself, and to the
particular and essentially social character of this activity, for catalyzing and
strengthening empathic processes and responses. The realization of this potential
3. been so many precedents, in a number of countries, of the ‘appropriate’ responses
being evoked in earlier performances, that I had no reason to question my basic
premise –that which I have termed the ‘music‐makes‐friends’ discourse. This has it,
quite simply, that the ‘right’ music carrying recognized and appropriate emotional
cues will evoke the intended responses, and consequently pave the way to peaceful
understanding. It carries also an implicit trust in the notion of music as a ‘universal
language’.
How was it, then, that my music, so apparently compelling in the first performance,
and on so many other occasions, failed so miserably to move people in that second
one?
There seems a paradox here; there is on the one hand the assumption of music’s
universally felt emotional effects but on the other, clear evidence that the same
piece of music can and does produce different emotions. Both positions seem to
inform everyday decisions about using music; music in film surely relies for its
effect upon the same emotion being aroused, while the aversive use of classical
music on railway stations to clear them of foul‐intentioned loiterers conspicuously
exploits the reality of profoundly different emotional response to the same music.
There is another paradox. Music’s assumed direct ability to unite people across
personal, social and cultural divides underpinned my own compositional efforts and
informs a plethora of statements of intent from the fields of education,
reconciliation and peace studies. In these contexts, this assumption relies upon an
underpinning belief in music’s positive and humanizing power. However, we can
surely see, if we look more closely, that music by no means simply makes us more
humane. We have only to look at the innumerable instances of music’s use in
creating alienation, for example in war music arousing men to slaughter others in
battle, or in Hitler’s musically‐boosted manipulation of his crowds. Indeed, music
has been used by every society at every point in human history for many kinds of
purposes. Most of these probably serve the ongoing ends of power relationships in
one way or another, with the exception of the benign use of music in healing,
documented across the globe and throughout human time. The direct pursuit of
peace, in terms of effecting reconciliation between groups in conflict and of
inculcating peaceful values and non‐violent behaviour, is perhaps the rarest of these
uses.
Notwithstanding, the ‘music/singing makes friends’ discourse is powerful, holding
sway in educational contexts, and well beyond. It is arguably so taken for granted
that, perhaps, the quest for its possible mechanisms has been largely neglected.
Educational ‘music‐for‐understanding’ programmes proliferate nonetheless, and
may indeed succeed in reducing barriers between people, as documented in the case
of the Norwegian music and peace education researcher Professor Kjell Skyllstad’s
ground–breaking longitudinal ‘Resonant Community’ study (Skyllstad 1993) with
children from differing cultural backgrounds. Skyllstad found, among other things,
that certain ways of doing music within primary school contexts appeared to be
5. Through musical interaction, two people create forms that are greater than
the sums of their parts, and make for themselves experiences of empathy
that would be unlikely to occur in ordinary social intercourse. (Blacking,
1987:26)
Charles Keil (1984) indicates a similar idea in his description of the ‘urge to merge’
and ‘moments of oneness’ brought about in musical events. Both were looking to the
human activity of ‘doing’ music, in their examinations of its functions in establishing
and maintaining community feeling, feelings of being ‘at one’, and feelings of mutual
understanding – those feelings we seek to engender in peace building between
communities in conflict.
It seemed to me that this way of looking beyond the music ‘object’ itself, and to the
human relationships and activities associated with actually ‘doing’ the music, might
provide a fruitful way of approaching any potential connection with empathy and
the human activity of empathising. In other words, rather than look for some
inherent empathy somehow encoded ‘within’ the music’s sonic musical patterns and
tonal qualities, we might look to what people are doing when they empathise, and
when they ‘music’. But for many people, music can and does exist outside the sphere
of human action, brought within it by composers and performers, but existing
somehow in its own, other‐worldly plane.
Christopher Small has challenged this view, and his argument robustly directs an
unprecedented attention towards the human activity of ‘musicking’, this term being
the neologism he has articulated and explored in his volume Musicking (Small,
1998). Small takes not only ‘musical’ activities into this concept, but, stressing
participation, allows (undoubtedly controversially) any activity occurring in the
context of a musical performance. This is what he suggests:
To music is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by
performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for
performance (what is called composing), or by dancing. (Small 1998: 9)
Furthermore, Small suggests that the meaning of ‘musicking’ is revealed in the
relationships brought about in its course, contending that during a musical
performance, ideal relationships, as thus conceived by all those taking part (my
italics), are produced:
The act of musicking establishes in the place where it is happening a set of
relationships, and it is in those relationships that the meaning of the act lies. They
are to be found not only between those organized sounds which are conventionally
thought of as being the stuff of musical meaning but also between the people who
are taking part, in whatever capacity, in the performance; and they model, or stand
as metaphor for, ideal relationships as the participants in the performance imagine
them to be: relationships between person and person, between individual and
society, between humanity and the natural world and even perhaps the
supernatural world. (Small 1998: 13)
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Practical Application. Unpublished PhD, University of Birmingham.
Skyllstad, K. (1993). The Resonant Community: Fostering Interracial Understanding
through Music. Oslo: Rikskonsertene.
Small, C. (1998). Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Hanover,
NH: Wesleyan University Press.
Stein, E. (1917/1989). On the Problem of Empathy. Washington, D.C.: ICS
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Stein, E. (1922/2000). ed. Sawicki, M. Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities.
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