Caring for Music : Musical Life, Late Life

Caring for Music presents a groundbreaking ethnographic study of musical engagement in residential care, revealing how music becomes a medium of connection, pleasure, and relationship rather than merely an intervention for symptom management.

Caring for Music describes musical life in Hill House, a residential care home and the site of the AHRC Care for Music research project (https://careformusic.org/) which ran from 2018-2023. The book’s primary aim is to let the people and situations involved show readers, from the inside of musical engagement, what can happen when music is present in scenes of care in late life – when people care for music. Watching what happens when music happens can illuminate how people in situations of residential care, whether they are residents, care staff, friends, loved ones, or researchers, can enjoy good moments together – meaningful, creative, festive, beautiful, mutually supportive. At the same time, the book cautions against the tendency of painting a too-rosy picture of music’s powers to ‘fix’ things. It offers an alternate model of music as a medium of connection. The book suggests that much can be gained by rethinking the dominant model within the literature on music and late life, dementia, health. It proposes a perspective in which music is not for ‘people with disabilities’ but instead a medium – of pleasure, meaning, beauty and relationship – that is enacted jointly.