Honorary Doctorate Lecture with Tia DeNora
Professor Tia DeNora will give an open lecture due to her appointment as Honorary Doctor at the University of Bergen. The lecture is titled "Music, for a While: On the Vitality of Health Humanities."
The 17th century poet John Dryden put it this way:
Music for a while
Shall all your cares beguile
Today, the research literatures across a range of disciplines confirm what many people know from personal experience – that music is a powerful medium, that music moves us, that music can help us. Music can help regulate emotion, promote mental health, maintain and support connections with others, scaffold cognitive, physical and physiological function, and offer a means of communication that dispenses with the need for verbal language. Music can help to redress physical and psycho-social pain. In all of these ways, music is revealed as a vital feature of human social being and wellbeing. Looking at music-in-action in these ways also helps us to appreciate the intimate links between mind, body, culture and social situation.
In this lecture Tia DeNora offers a perspective that highlights the humanistic features of how music helps. We will meet four different people – participants in research projects in the UK and in Norway. The projects, which involved long-term participant observation and which in most cases were conducted in collaboration with music therapists, explored: music in everyday life, music in and around a mental health facility, music in a neuro-disability care home, and music at end-of-life in hospices and hospitals. We learn from these people how, individually and in company with others, music is a crucial medium of human existence. Music helps us to make and hold on to meaning, to cope and dream, and, sometimes, to transcend challenges, together in time and place.
Format:
An informal lecture with Honorary Doctor Tia DeNora, including a short session for discussion, questions, and comments.
