Afterword: Coping through crisis with coronamusic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 was accompanied by a mental health epidemic creating an extensive demand for safe, widely accessible, and highly individualized coping strategies. Engaging with music in new and innovative ways became the potentially most frequent and effective solitary and virtually-collective leisure activity for maintaining psychological wellbeing during lockdown. Emerging research findings that interest in corona-themed repertoire—coined "coronamusic"—became the strongest predictor of socio-emotional coping efficacy point towards a potentially adaptive function of thematically tailored musical innovations in human coping behaviour on historical and evolutionary timescales. This afterword starts with an exemplifying overview of the musical and societal responses to the coronavirus in Denmark. Next, based on a review of the emerging research literature on the role of music for pandemic coping, a model is proposed of key structural and contextual features of the coronamusic phenomenon. This may pave the way for including musical measures in collective and individual toolboxes for managing future societal crises.

Creativity in lockdown: Understanding how music and the arts supported mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic by age group

“…An extensive body of research literature has emerged examining the variety of ways engagement in music and other creative arts has supported mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic, in addition to non-creative activities such as increasing the amount of time spent in nature ( Ribeiro et al, 2021 ) or increasing exercise ( Colley et al, 2020 ; Coyle et al, 2021 ; Faulkner et al, 2021 ). A recent special issue of Frontiers in Psychology has captured 44 studies on the topic of “Social convergence in times of spatial distancing: The role of music during the COVID-19 pandemic” ( Hansen et al, 2022 ), and a forthcoming review of this literature has broadly shown that music has supported both eudaimonic and hedonic aspects of wellbeing during the pandemic ( Hansen, forthcoming ). Population-level studies have also been undertaken, with one Spanish study finding that music has helped people to relax, escape, lift their mood, and keep themselves company ( Cabedo-Mas et al, 2021 ), while an Australian study ( Kiernan et al, 2021 ) examined how artistic creative activities (henceforth ACAs, defined as creative activities specifically involving the arts; see Fancourt et al, 2019 ) helped participants regulate emotion during pandemic lockdown, primarily through avoidance-based emotion-regulation strategies.…”