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Music can lift mood, foster community and even rewire brains – but does it need to have a purpose?

The therapeutic role music can play is the focus of a string of new books and even an entire BBC radio station. But why can’t we just listen to music for music’s sake?

My father practising classical and jazz guitar was the aural wallpaper to my childhood, and at my rural state school I took lessons on the recorder, the violin, the cello, the trombone, the piano. When I tune in, I find myself being encouraged to consider “the grandness of the natural world” by an authoritative baritone against strains of undulating woodwind, majestic strings, sonorous horns. For some it’s been political: German playwright Bertolt Brecht complained that Wagnerian Romanticism stupefied listeners, dulling their critical faculties and their revolutionary fervour.

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