The Music Health Service

“live music” Ben Heaney, 2019 Thinking out loud, throwing it out there… The following was offered at the “Coping with the Ageing Population” meeting, conducted a few weeks ago at the House of Lords examining the full value of music to UK society (http://musicinsociety.uk/) A Music Health Service funded in a different way e.g. take […]

“live music”

Ben Heaney, 2019

Thinking out loud, throwing it out there…

The following was offered at the “Coping with the Ageing Population” meeting, conducted a few weeks ago at the House of Lords examining the full value of music to UK society (http://musicinsociety.uk/)

A Music Health Service funded in a different way
e.g. take music to businesses first. Train and work with employees of a company who then go into care homes as part of their giving back to the local community targets. And, useful CPD for staff, showing how sharing making music is not something out of their reach.

Why? Maybe because just listening to musIc leads to “X-Factor syndrome”. Purely passive listening is arguably terribly damaging to the sense of our own music skills and abilities.

  • See the Community Song book Preface from 1930s for observation on effect of proliferation of radio and recorded music.
  • Is it too grandiose a sweeping statement to say that there is a connection between the projections of horrific numbers of dementia cases and the period in time that recording and broadcast began to grip our minds?
  • Keeping music as live and interactive is crucial. Musicians are needed and must be paid to do their jobs as best they can.

There is great apathy towards helping musicians and activity coordinators. Seemingly the need is for the job of music provision and leading to be done voluntarily. Is self interest of the entitled actually biting the hand that feeds it?

Technology directs social change – see book “Medieval Technology & Social Change”. X-System at Edinburgh Uni, studying and plotting the subconscious effect of music on the brain. Selling results of their findings to commercial businesses in retails and catering to great success. Analysing music in terms of Arousal (motionless to fully motivated) and Valence (depressed to ecstatic). Although this is something retail/consumer companies have been well aware of for a long time, this particular study is seemingly groundbreaking in its evidence. How much any particular piece of music can stimulate or depress in two key areas of “arousal” and “valence” has seemingly now been determined for over 75,000 pieces of music from a study database of over 4 million…

  • I am troubled to learn that the fruit of an ongoing study into the effect of music on our brains – objective measurable data – rather than being given to the NHS to help the needy is happily being sold to keen and eager retailers who are using it to manipulate customers into buying their products.
  • What happens when the public become wise to the fact that music has been manipulating their choices?
  • We can’t ignore that music is something quite different and special.
  • We know it’s more than a job, musicians don’t tend to retire. Like everyone we die, but musicians are still at their job to the end. It’s something about our faculties and preservation?
  • “Sustained by Music”, Sir Thomas Armstrong (1993)


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