Music Asylums: Wellbeing Through Music in Everyday Life

Tia DeNora is Professor of Sociology of Music, in Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology at Exeter University, UK. She is the author of Music-in-Action, Music in Everyday Life, After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology and Beethoven and the Construction of Genius. She directs the SocArts Research Group at Exeter.

’This is a beautifully written and important text. I enjoyed reading it immensely and will be recommending it to my students and colleagues. The examples are fascinating and resonate strongly with current health agendas that seek to complement conventional medical interventions with new innovative approaches that challenge existing hegemonies. There is no doubt that music has vast potential to produce significant benefits and this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the relationship between music, health and wellbeing. It offers a wealth of new insights and is both accessible and meticulously thought out. I loved it!’ Raymond MacDonald, University of Edinburgh, UK ’Music and its effect upon health is a vitally important topic in medicine. Music has the power not only to change the way we think about patient care in hospitals but also how we think about health in general. In this pioneering book Tia De Nora shows the importance of avoiding reductionistic thinking in understanding both health and music. Her new interdisciplinary synthesis opens up this field to further thinking and research.’ Trevor Pinch, Cornell University, USA ’... i lettori ideali di Music Asylums non sarebbero solo i professionisti della musicoterapia, ma i ricercatori e intellettuali, di qualsiasi scienza sociale o umanistica, interessati alla musica.’ [’... Music Asylums should ideally be read not only by professional music therapists, but also by any researchers and scholars, in both the social sciences and humanities, that have an interest in music.’] Musica/Realtà ’A great virtue of Music Asylums is the way it manages to take on board important insights from the neuroscience of music and incorporate them into a view of music as a social experience involving agency and culture as well as sound stimulation. ... While it is sympathetic to neuroscience, DeNora’s book is also a healthy antidote to a simplistic view of music as stimulation. As such it i

• Contents: Preface; Introduction; In sickness and in health: defining the ecological perspective; Learning from Erving Goffman, part I: agency and culture; Learning from Erving Goffman part II: reconfiguring the concept of asylum; Music asylums, part I: disconnections, reconnections and removal; Music asylums, part II: making musical space together, furnishing and refurnishing worlds; Musicalizing consciousness: aesthetics and anaesthetics; Where is good music?; Conclusion: what makes us well and when? And how to know if music helps?; References; Index.