Abstract
This paper describes how music fulfills two of its broadly recognized functions—“mood regulation” and “social cohesion”—in times of pandemics and social isolation. Through a trans-historical comparison of the musical activities of the Milanese during an outbreak of plague in 1576 with the musical activities observed during the COVID lockdowns in 2020 (such as balcony-singing and playlist-making), this paper suggests a framework for understanding the role of music in the care of the biological body and the social body in times of medical disaster.
Highlights
Writing for Critical Inquiry’s blog at the beginning of the near-global COVID lockdown in April 2020, Lorraine Daston observed that we have been “temporarily thrown back into a state of ground-zero empiricism,” a state of great scientific and epistemological uncertainty where “chance observations, apparent correlations, and anecdotes that would ordinarily barely merit mention, much less publication in peer-reviewed journals, have the internet buzzing with speculations among physicians, virologists, epidemiologists, microbiologists, and the interested lay public” (Daston, 2020)
We have rediscovered that some Americans were wearing their masks improperly during the flu pandemic (Burch, 2020); Daniel Defoe lamented that the poor appeared far more vulnerable to plague (Jordison, 2020); Samuel Pepys wore his new periwig only after quarantining it for a good while, as some of us had done with our deliveries (Bowyer, 2020); and Boccaccio told us that the medieval well-to-do, like ours, happily fled to their country homes (McKinley, 2020)
We can find in past epidemics some antecedents and analogs for the musical activities, such as therapeutic music making and balcony flash mobs, that emerged during the COVID-19 lockdowns
Summary
Department of Fine Arts, Loyola University Maryland, Baltimore, MD, United States Reviewed by: Katelijne Schiltz, University of Regensburg, Germany Andrea Schiavio, University of Graz, Austria Specialty section: This article was submitted to Cultural Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology Received: 12 October 2020 Accepted: 26 November 2020 Published: 17 December 2020 This paper describes how music fulfills two of its broadly recognized functions—“mood regulation” and “social cohesion”—in times of pandemics and social isolation. Through a trans-historical comparison of the musical activities of the Milanese during an outbreak of plague in 1576 with the musical activities observed during the COVID lockdowns in 2020 (such as balcony-singing and playlist-making), this paper suggests a framework for understanding the role of music in the care of the biological body and the social body in times of medical disaster. Keywords: plague, COVID-19, emotions, ritual, social cohesion, music, quarantine
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