David Hesmondhalgh frames this important book as a response to a crisis in how music is valued. On the one hand, he argues, contemporary neoliberal political discourses have tended to frame human flourishing in economic terms, rather than in ways that acknowledge the importance of expressive practices. On the other, Pierre Bourdieu's work on social distinctionFootnote ¹ has problematized even the act of assessing artistic value, understanding it as a mechanism by which social and economic disparities are perpetuated. Hesmondhalgh's ‘critical defence of music’ thus makes two interventions: arguing that music contributes to human well-being in ways that extend beyond economic benefit, and holding that affirmations of the value of music have a purpose beyond the reproduction of social class.Footnote ² He makes his case in a series of chapters whose scope gradually expands from the personal to the national: music and individuals in Chapter Two, music and intimate relationships in Chapter Three, music and community in Chapter Four, and music and national publics in Chapter Five.

Chapter Two introduces the central pillar in the defence of music: that it promotes ‘flourishing’. On an individual level (the focus in this chapter), it does so by (a) enabling ‘awareness of continuity and development in life’, (b) integrating ‘different aspects of our being, combining reflection and self-awareness with kinetic pleasure’, (c) helping us understand ‘how others might think and feel’, (d) being a practice that has its own internal rewards, and (e) enhancing ‘our sense of sociality and community’ (53–6, emphasis omitted). Hesmondhalgh recognizes that this potential is not always realized; for instance, while music can help us understand others, it is frequently a screen on which we project our preconceptions of them. Here and throughout, the author emphasizes how the agency of music to promote flourishing is circumscribed or constrained.Footnote ³

The focus in Chapter Three is on the potential of music to enhance the flourishing of love, sex, and intimate relationships. It explores how popular music acknowledges and constructs feelings, considers its relationship to institutions such as courtship and marriage, and explores ‘the vast emotional apparatus that we build around desire’ (60). This is not a chapter about the ineffabilities of music and desire, then, but rather the more particular emotional narratives to which popular music gives listeners access. The approach is historical, surveying anglophone popular genres from after the Second World War to the present day. Special attention is paid to differences between early pop and rock, exploring, for example, the contrasting ethics of these genres. (‘In pop, commitment, trust, and sympathy were valued, while rock emphasized freedom, authenticity, and “honest” self-expression’ (62).) Later sections of the chapter explore mediations of love and sex through punk, metal, indie music, and contemporary pop, R&B, and rap. Throughout, Hesmondhalgh both recognizes the contributions these genres make to emotional life and criticizes their failings: the misogyny of rock music, the banality of pop, and the consumerism, ‘empty hedonism’, ‘dubious individualization’, and ‘narcissism’ of a range of genres.

The fourth chapter, the longest and most important in the volume, explores how music and dance contribute to the flourishing of forms of community and togetherness, whether in contexts of social intimacy (e.g., gatherings of friends and family members) or ‘co-present publicness’ (assemblies of non-intimates and strangers). This involves engaging with work by three authors – Christopher Small, Charles Keil, and Thomas Turino – who have made significant contributions to discourse on musical participation and community. While recognizing the importance of their work, Hesmondhalgh finds it lacking in certain respects. First, he suggests, they tend to validate highly participatory musical experiences that may not be accessible to all, and they tend to pursue ‘a type of community that is not feasible in conditions of modernity’ (88). Second, they tend not to give enough consideration to musical practices that are less intensively participatory, but nevertheless widespread, even in the ‘damaged worlds of capitalist modernity’. Third, while they acknowledge the negative potential of collective music-making – both Keil and Turino discuss music's historic associations with fascism – they tend to say less about more ordinary ways in which musical participation can be problematic. Fourth, the authors tend towards a ‘reflectionism’ in which music is seen to mirror ‘the structure and values of the societies and cultures that produce it’ (91), ignoring more complex relationships between music and context, not to mention the agency of musicians (to do something beyond replicating social structure).

Readers may not find all of these criticisms convincing. For instance, Hesmondhalgh seems to suggest that Keil and Turino do not attend to more ordinary forms of musical participation, but they consistently do just this, exploring ‘possibilities for musical enrichment available in ordinary life in modern societies, and the kinds of participation that untrained and relatively unskilled people can undertake’ (112).Footnote ⁴ Others may wonder whether the critique of reflectionism misses a theme in this scholarly tradition: understanding musical interaction to mediate and constitute the experience of the social, rather than simply reflect abstract structures. Turino, for example, has explored how music is implicated in the (‘rhematic-iconic’) work of imagining new social formations.Footnote ⁵ This said, many readers will be sympathetic to Hesmondhalgh's goals, namely to affirm music's ability to enhance experiences of collectivity while (a) showing that it can do so in ordinary ways, and (b) acknowledging the frequently ambivalent nature of this sociability.

The final chapter examines the role music plays in very large social formations: ‘publics’, whose members are linked by media that eliminate the need for co-presence. It is concerned in part with whether music can make a significant contribution to social flourishing through politics, an idea Hesmondhalgh rejects, arguing that music only rarely has direct political consequences, which tend to get mythologized out of proportion. He holds that music is more likely to enrich social life through contributions to ‘sociable publicness’ than through the ‘deliberative publicness’ established through political discourse: ‘Music is not good . . . at establishing facts, or the truthfulness of one account over another. Books, journalism, and various other kinds of writing are much better suited for this’ (146). The author accepts that music does have a relationship to politics in so far as it (a) forges, fosters, solidifies, and challenges values and attachments, and (b) enables ‘rich forms of sociability’ that allow us to perceive our ‘mutual dependence and obligation’. He also recognizes that deliberative publics sometimes ignore the ‘affective and emotional aspects of politics’. This does not go far enough following the convincing case Elizabeth Povinelli and others have made for the centrality of affect to politics.Footnote ⁶ Hesmondhalgh's main point is an important one, all the same: a relatively small proportion of mass-mediated music explicitly addresses what most performers and listeners understand as political.

Much of the remainder of the chapter explores relationships between music and the nation, drawing on the writings of ethnomusicologists for the most part, and moving beyond the United Kingdom and the United States, which have dominated the book until this point. Acknowledging that the nation has declined in importance in the era of globalization, and that it is in no way unproblematic as a social entity, Hesmondhalgh suggests that it nonetheless offers an important lens through which to explore the relationship between music and ‘collective human flourishing’ (150). He is particularly interested in the roles music plays in establishing commonalities across difference, and in enabling what he calls ‘ethical cosmopolitanism’, namely the idea that all peoples have equal moral standing. In the final sections of the chapter, he explores how an internationally circulating style such as rock has been ‘nationalized’ in various sites; how, in Afghanistan, a ‘national music’ evidences internationalism; how, in Argentina, Cuba, Brazil, and Colombia, the musics of marginalized groups became emblematic of the nation; and how, in Turkey, ‘a number of significant musicians . . . were able to provide some kind of shared space across the class, religious, and political divisions that fractured the country’ (162). In keeping with the critical perspective advanced throughout the book, he finds reasons for both optimism and pessimism regarding the ability of music to connect people across differences of ethnicity, religion, gender, and class.

The book provokes a number of questions, the most significant of which involves the extent to which its ideas about music and flourishing can be generalized. Early on, the volume articulates a commitment to an objectivist and universalizable concept of flourishing that draws on the idea of ‘capabilities’ developed in the work of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum.Footnote ⁷ Yet much of the book is rooted in the particularities of British (and to a lesser extent American) musical life. Is it possible to extend the arguments about music and flourishing to the scale that is frequently invoked: ‘modern societies’ (42), the ‘conditions of modernity’ (88), ‘plain old modern life’ (101)? This depends in part on what ‘modernity’ includes and excludes, something that is not always clear. As noted earlier, the final chapter includes discussions of music in Afghanistan, Turkey, and Colombia, among other places, and this suggests that modernity is understood quite broadly. Yet elsewhere (e.g., 101, fn. 13) modernity appears as something unevenly distributed, which some have and others have yet to attain. If this is the idea, what factors keep a portion of humanity from sharing this state?Footnote ⁸

Just as importantly, consideration of music outside of secular contexts in the United Kingdom and the United States is largely absent from the first four chapters. How might the discussions in those chapters – of how music allows individuals, intimacies, and communities to flourish – have been complicated by considering other modernities? For instance, how might the chapters have been enriched by looking at discourses or groups in which music, dance, or both are regularly regarded with suspicion? Reflection along these lines would not necessarily have threatened the central argument – namely that music can contribute to human flourishing – but it would have underscored how music contributes to human well-being in different ways and to different degrees in different contexts. Such issues are significant, given Hesmondhalgh's hope of working towards a pluralist view of music and human flourishing.

A second set of questions concerns music, community, and social integration. Hesmondhalgh is sceptical about the potential of participatory music-making to effect deep forms of social integration in contexts where sociality has been transformed by industrialization and urbanization (100), and regards the aspirations expressed along these lines in work by Small, Keil, and Turino as ‘admirable but inflated’ (112). He suggests that, if we are to look for ways in which music can benefit social life on a large scale, we should be willing to attend to more demotic and mundane kinds of musical participation (and not have hopes of them that are too utopian). His insistence on the importance of low-stakes forms of musical participation is an important intervention; such practices merit more study than they have received. At the same time, and as noted earlier, it is not always evident in Hesmondhalgh's account that Keil and Turino are among those who have most consistently drawn scholarly attention to these forms of music-making. It could also be more evident that highly integrative musical practices continue to thrive as part of everyday life in many parts of the world, including industrialized metropolises – as scholarly literature on children's songs and games, or devotional and liturgical music, shows.Footnote ⁹ In this respect, it seems curious that there is relatively little reflection in the book on the role of music in religious observance, surely an important context for modern musical experience.

Perhaps the most important contribution of Why Music Matters is its insistence that, while music has the potential to contribute to human flourishing, this power is constrained. Music is deeply ambivalent, as Hesmondhalgh's account of football songs suggests:

Here music produces laughter and joy while simultaneously reproducing offensive stereotypes and conveying abuse. And throughout Why Music Matters, rare is the musical practice or performance that is characterized as entirely laudable or entirely problematic. Rock and roll's part in the emergence of an understanding of the emancipatory possibilities of sex is acknowledged, but so too is its problematic sexual politics (65). The ability of African-American musics ‘to diminish suffering and enhance flourishing across time and place’ (167) is addressed, but this is followed by a discussion of Paul Gilroy's concern that neo-liberalism has ‘eroded the life-enhancing potential of black music’ (169). Conversely, while Hesmondhalgh identifies tendencies in popular musics towards narcissism, hedonism, and problematic forms of individualism, he also lauds their potential to express complex forms of contemporary subjectivity, and he shows pop, dance music, power ballads, and gangsta rap to contribute to flourishing in perhaps unexpected ways.

This ambivalent view of music might perhaps be seen as a way around the agonistic dynamics of vernacular (and some scholarly) discourse on popular music, in which the exaltation or derogation of any genre seems inevitably to invite a contrary response. But it accomplishes something much more important by questioning the romantic tendencies in the literature on participation without abandoning some of its most significant insights, including how musical interaction mediates experiences of social collectivity. The value of this approach is nowhere more evident than in Hesmondhalgh's compelling interpretations of ethnographic material: his reflections on interviews with music listeners, a night of music at the pub, and football songs, for example, show how music enables connections even as it creates boundaries.

Why Music Matters seeks to advance a widely applicable theory of how music can foster well-being. Just how widely applicable it is remains to be seen. As remarked earlier, the discussion of music and national publics in the final chapter addresses modernities outside the global North, but more could be said about how music matters when it comes to experiences of selfhood, intimacy, and community outside secular contexts of music-making in the United Kingdom and the United States. This said, it is a thoughtful and provocative book, and an essential contribution to dialogue on participatory music-making. I urge others to read it, argue with it, and draw inspiration from it.