Social Music as a Prescription for Maintaining Wellness

Growing attention highlights the potential of music as a social prescription to enhance wellness. Explicating music’s function in communities can lead to healthy outcomes. During the COVID pandemic, communities tended to isolate, increasingly avoiding in-person interactions. Progress in music-based interventions highlights the potential of live music to improve our sense of community. The need for social prescribing to develop and maintain community brings us together. We propose a model that highlights how music serves as a social modality for maintaining wellness. As a musician and a music therapist, our focus includes analyses of historical contexts through time, and how through humanity’s struggles we’ve relied on music’s integrative elements to unite us, moving toward resilience as a quest to survive. Integrating these trajectories and expanding upon them, we elucidate ways that live engagement in music can strengthen performance and health and wellness. Music’s capacity to treat social aspects of humanity changes the way humanity works within community. This includes our sense of feeling connection and togetherness that feeds social willingness to perceive intimate relationships. In contexts where healthcare systems prioritize symptom management, we must realize that the larger picture includes how we socialize, thus Social Music is supported herein as an inclusive model of care.