The spiritual in music: a cross-disciplinary conversation

Spirituality has been a shared concern across many fields that study the place of music in human life — including music therapy, ethnomusicology, music education, music philosophy, and theology. Yet genuine interdisciplinary exchange on the topic has remained limited. This special issue, devoted to questions of music, wellbeing, and education, aims to surface ideas, debates, and issues that often stay hidden within disciplinary boundaries. It originated from the 2017 conference “Exploring the Spiritual in Music: Interdisciplinary Dialogues in Music, Wellbeing and Education,” held at the Nordoff Robbins London Centre. Co-organised by the UK music therapy charity Nordoff Robbins and the international network Spirituality and Music Education (SAME), the event was inspired by the ethos of the Nordoff Robbins Plus Research Conference Series, offering a platform for thinking across and beyond music therapy.

The conference drew more than a hundred scholars, researchers, practitioners, and students from a wide range of disciplinary, geographical, and spiritual spaces. It became a meeting point for diverse — and at times contrasting — spiritualities and musics, generating lively debate and creating a “place” alive with multiple meanings. Presentations were grouped into six themes: (i) uncertainties and controversies; (ii) culture, politics, and identity; (iii) learning and teaching; (iv) music, imagery, and reflection; (v) musicians, thinkers, and approaches; and (vi) living and dying.

A commitment to hybridity

Building on the conference ethos, this collection brings together a range of theoretical perspectives, practices, and methodological approaches. As chairs of the conference and editors of the publication, we wanted to move beyond conventional conceptual and methodological frameworks, creating an open space for exploring the spiritual in music. In this context, we deliberately use the term “the spiritual,” reflecting a commitment to what has been described as a hybrid spiritual discourse. Spirituality is treated here as a boundary object — a hybrid construct that allows for the coexistence of unfinished spiritualities alongside multiple, heterogeneous translations.

Rather than imposing a single definition of spirituality, the issue acknowledges its plasticity and how it adapts to local music practices while retaining some broadly recognisable — if fuzzy — patterns across intersecting professional, disciplinary, and cultural contexts. The result is a rich edition that embraces a variety of writing styles, methodological approaches, and points of view. Each contributor was asked to state their position clearly and to argue accordingly.

Contents of the special issue

The issue opens with a paper by Sara Mackian, based on her keynote at the 2017 conference. A human geographer by training, MacKian explores how and where the spiritual might turn up in unexpected places. She calls for openness to the challenges of encountering and articulating spirituality, and she reorients the analytical lens toward the everyday, emphasising the role of mystery in engagements with spirituality, music, and wellbeing. In response, Lars Ole Bonde offers a music therapist’s perspective, focusing on Guided Imagery and Music (GIM). He argues for a dynamic, interpersonal understanding of spiritual and transpersonal experiences with music, moving beyond static-content-oriented approaches.

This interplay between the extraordinary and the ordinary, and the open-ended stance adopted by MacKian and Bonde, runs through the other contributions. Bolette Daniels Beck and Martin Lawes draw on GIM case examples to explore “sacred moments” and spiritual experiences. Kate Binnie investigates the “thin place” between life and death through a case study of a compassion-focused relational music therapy approach with a hospice patient, also outlining a feasibility study protocol.

Some authors — Astrid Notarangelo and Adam Kishtainy, for instance — share personal accounts of integrating spirituality into their own music therapy practice. Others link spirituality to emerging research and themes from various disciplines. Efrat Roginsky and Cochavit Elefant examine spirituality in relation to transformative musical experiences that arose in their research with parents of children with cerebral palsy and multiple disabilities. From a different angle, Owen Coggins reviews the controversies that have marked public, political, and research debates on metal music and health since the 1970s, especially in the US and the UK. Drawing on his ethnographic study within the drone metal scene, Coggins shows how noise and extreme music can function as positive — though often underappreciated — resources for listeners’ health.

Giorgio Scalici’s ethnomusicological study of the Wana people in Morowali, Central Sulawesi, analyses how music links the human world with the hidden world of spirits and emotion. Music, in this context, serves as a ritual marker: it shifts ordinary time into mythical time and allows emotional catharsis, healing both the patient and the community. Finally, Faith Halverson-Ramos offers an opinion piece linking music to gerotranscendence. Focusing on the US social context, she discusses how music can anchor a culturally responsive approach to ageing and transpersonal growth.

The articles are followed by three book reviews, by Tia DeNora, Marilyn Clark, and Leslie Bunt, covering Mysticism, Ritual and Religion in Drone Metal (Coggins, 2018) and Spirituality and Music Education: Perspectives from Three Continents (Boyce-Tillman, 2017) — both launched at the 2017 conference. The issue concludes with a reflective conference report by Karin Hendricks and Tawnya Smith, supported by photographic material; for readers who did not attend, it serves as an introduction to the special edition.

Filoxenia: an ethic of hospitality

This project could not have been realised without the careful labour of the editorial board, who also served as the 2017 conference’s scientific committee: Lars Ole Bonde, June Boyce-Tillman, Owen Coggins, John Habron, Frank Heuser, Koji Matsunobu, Simon Procter, Neta Spiro, and Liesl van der Merwe. They fostered a dialogic and reflexive peer-review space where scientific rigour went hand in hand with genuine curiosity about spiritual dimensions that may lie at the edges of existing theory — dimensions that can be slippery for the scientific eye. Rather than succumbing to polarisation or mutual suspicion, which sometimes marks relationships across different professional fields in music, wellbeing, and education, the reviewers paid heed to the multiplicity of the spiritual in music. They welcomed diverse voices to enter the professional discourse and meet. That convergence is a key contribution of this edition, since many of these papers would otherwise have stayed within the comfortable conceptual and methodological borders of their own disciplines.

The editorial team nurtured an epistemological culture of filoxenia — from Greek filo (love) and xenos (stranger) — meaning an atmosphere of openness, trust, and generosity between authors and reviewers. Rather than being treated as uninvited or misunderstood guests in one another’s disciplinary discourses, the participants became partners, equal co-creators of this interdisciplinary environment. Naturally, this appealing picture was worked out through negotiations and controversies, and through the uncertainties and vulnerabilities that accompany professional and disciplinary growth.

Mercédès Pavlicevic — who was taken seriously a few months after the 2017 conference — gave an essential voice to some of these negotiations around music, health, and healing. In an article with Cripps, she proposed “messy hybridity” as a concept for describing the sociocultural and cosmological fusions that contemporary music therapy demands:

Spanning what we call the South and the Global North, we suggest that Western (often bio-medical) healing and health practices might think about reclaiming and drawing from their own — and from other — traditional and indigenous healing cosmologies. Against the background of segmentations created by Western scholarship and economics, we argue that “the ancestors” and “the aspirin” need to embrace one another rather than regard each other with suspicion. Each might be enriched, and perhaps also discomforted, by the silenced coincidences of each side’s efforts to know and feel our shared humanity through music.

With this special issue, we pay tribute to Mercédès — a close colleague and dear friend to both of us. She was instrumental in setting up the Nordoff Robbins Plus conference series and contributed to the 2017 scientific committee. Although she was too ill to take part on the editorial board, her passion for exploring music and spirituality in context and in action informed our editorial work.

Looking forward

We hope that this issue widens horizons, generating new questions and routes for studying the spiritual in music. We want it to encourage further development in practice, theory, and research that push past established methodological assumptions. This publication also marks the tenth anniversary of Approaches, capturing the journal’s ongoing mission to foster interdisciplinary dialogue that bridges local and global aspects of music, health, and wellbeing.

As this editorial closes, we leave a door open — and we invite readers to engage critically with the creative uncertainties that characterise an evolving, interdisciplinary landscape of the spiritual in music.