How do we see and deal with music? Are you a musician? Do you identify with it? With what music do you identify?

Why? How?

How do you experience music?

Music developed first as community music. . . most likely as precursor to language.

Evolutionary biologist, Stephen Mithin (2005). The Singing Neanderthals. Posits a protolanguage he calls "hmmm" (holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, and mimetic).

For the next 10,000 years of human development we sang in the streets, mixing dance, celebration, etc. in large social festivals or carnivals. These served as pressure valves in our communities.

Barbara Ehrenreich (2006). Dancing in the Streets.

As we become "civilized" music, like other things, becomes more specialized and linked to class and social status. By the 17th century these "carnivals" are essentially extinct.

Elements of dance, movement, music, feasting, etc. are moved indoors into controlled areas such as schools and churches.

Music is now almost thoroughly relegated to performance or pastime -- professional or audience.

In 1987, Christopher Small wrote a little book that turned this largely objective view of music on its head. "Musicking" deals with music as a verb, an activity, an integral part of human, communal activity.

How many times a week do you participate in music communally? Or play an instrument?

Community Music and Music Therapy are fields that thrive with this view of music as verb.

But, what is going on?

Community Music. .
Music as hospitality.

--Lee Higgins (2012). Community Music in Theory and Practice.

Music Therapy
To promote, maintain and restore physical, emotional, and spiritual health

--Music Therapy Association of Ontario

Famous composer, Benjamin Britten, in a forward to an early music therapy treatise "Therapy for Music in Handicapped Children" (1971) writes of "pathologies of communication" such as autism, dementia, psychosis, brain injury, depression.

Colin Turnbull (1972). The Forest People. Mbuti Pygmies use music and dance to "heal" the forest.