Music and Human Flourishing

Have you ever attended a concert where children perform the music they have been learning? Both our daughters began to play music using the Suzuki method – for cello and violin, respectively – and some of my most precious memories are of their concerts. Beginners perform pieces like Twinkle, Twinkle, and by the end of the concert, high school students are performing major works for their instruments. The progression one sees is an inspiring encapsulation of how musical skills develop, and beyond that, a window into the process through which we humans acquire emotional intelligence. And listening to them practicing at home is also a precious memory – yes, even in the early days!

Both our daughters continued playing music after childhood. But most people stop playing music as the cares of the world – careers, child rearing, or recreation – displace the time that had previously been reserved for practicing and performing. This is true even for people I know who were quite accomplished as young amateurs.

You might say, “that is a natural part of growing up.” But it isn’t. It’s a phenomenon that has increased in recent decades, which is largely a result of the last century of technological change.

Now, don’t get me wrong; I am no Luddite. Technological change has enabled us to dramatically increase human productivity and elevate living standards beyond what could have been imagined when the Industrial Revolution took root in the early 19^th century. But often there is something lost alongside that demonstrably enormous material progress.

On April 30, 2025, I attended the launch of the first academic research to be released by something called the Global Flourishing Study. The research, published in the prestigious Nature journals, employs a new survey database created by Gallup, in alliance with a network of academic researchers who address particular questions. The survey database is being collected on a longitudinal basis (to allow examination of variation within the same group of people over time) and asks people a wide variety of questions about their own experience of flourishing. The answers to those questions (collected in 22 diverse countries) are being combined with other data to examine how people’s own perceptions of flourishing connect to other information about them.

The patterns that emerged from the first wave of data collection were a confirmation of what had been observed in other recent surveys. The happiest people – based on their own perceptions – on average, are not those living in the richest countries. Also, happiness tends to be higher for married individuals, for older people, and for those who describe themselves as religious. Clearly, “man does not live by bread alone.”

This path breaking new Global Flourishing initiative is very exciting and I am sure it will provide important insights into factors that favor human flourishing. I was, however, a bit surprised and disappointed to learn that survey questions related to the arts are quite scarce in the study. I hope that will change. It’s my hunch that much of the low happiness score of wealthy countries is the result of a diminution of artistic activity, including diminished musical activity.

By using the phrase “artistic activity” I mean to point to a range of activities that differ from each other in their levels of personal engagement with music. Consider four kinds of musical activity: many people only listen to recorded music, some also attend live performances, some experience live music produced by friends and family, and others produce music themselves. Those activities are not the same. The four kinds of musical activity capture a progression from a relatively distant connection to music to a more intimate one.

I conjecture that human progress has made music easy to experience in a distant way, which has crowded out more intimate experiences of it. The result is that far fewer people experience music as something that they physically approach from up close, and even fewer grapple with producing it. Seeing music produced up close produces a unique emotional understanding. Grappling with producing it leads to experimentation and eventually progress and understanding that enriches the soul in ineffable ways.

Only a little more than a century ago, listening to recorded music was not a common pastime. Recording and playback devices had not been invented or widely distributed. But by the end of the 1920s radios had spread throughout even rural areas in the United States. By the time I was born in the late 1950s, Americans shared access to a common experience of sounds from the phonographs they possessed or the radios they listened to. One could hear the greatest musicians of the world playing in one’s living room.

Poor Uncle Ned, however, was a loser from all that progress. He was a mediocre fiddler who used to play for family and friends at home. His group of mediocre players would also play at weddings and church socials in his small town of Aurora, Wisconsin. But he couldn’t compete with the Harry James’s Band or Leopold Stokowski’s Philadelphia Orchestra, and his family and friends often would ask him to practice in his room so that they could better hear what was on the radio. People used to like hearing Ned play a classical piece occasionally at church or at a gathering at his home, but he could not compete with Heifetz. As even one of the great violinists of the time, Fritz Kreisler, remarked of Heifetz’s playing, “We might as well take our fiddles and break them across our knees.” If Fritz felt that way, think how Uncle Ned felt.

In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, when barbershop quartet singing was popular, you could wander around a city in the early evening and hear a group singing on a street corner. But by the 1920s you could just hurry home to listen to your favorite singers on the radio or phonograph.

A woman in her 60s or 70s seated next to me on a flight recently told me that when she was growing up in St. Paul, Minnesota, during the winters, an orchestra played at a skating rink so that people could enjoy music while skating. It’s a precious memory for her, and she smiles when recalling it. St. Paul still has many rinks (at least fourteen). I searched their web sites, and as far as I can tell, there is no regular performance of live music at any of the city’s rinks today, much less an orchestral presence. (If you live in St. Paul and know that I am wrong about that, please let me know.)

Electrification of live music production added to the declining trend of the percentage of the population that had close proximity to physical music creation. At some larger social gatherings, such as weddings, where live music was still required, electrification of music meant that now only a few musicians could provide the large volume of sound that used to require an orchestra. And, of course, hearing amplified music isn’t the same as the connection one feels from sitting in the space where acoustic music is created.

Before the technological changes brought by electrification, recording, radio, and phonograph, many, perhaps most, households contained someone who played music as an adult. Even those who did not play music lived close to someone who did, and experienced live music regularly, from up close. Two-thirds of Americans today learn to play an instrument as children, but a majority of them no longer play even at home, much less perform for others.

I suspect that if we could find a way to encourage more people to listen to live acoustic music, especially classical chamber music, in a wide variety of informal settings, that would help to bring back greater familiarity with the creation of sound, and all the soul-feeding advantages that would attend it. I suggest the Global Flourishing Study consider augmenting its survey questions about the arts in general, and music in particular, to help us figure out the importance of proximity to music creation as a factor in the decline of flourishing, which might also help us figure out how to reverse it.

We at the Pano Hora Ensemble are committed to doing our part to create live performances. Our fall schedule will be announced soon, and we hope you’ll join us if you are around New York City. Imagine the change if each of us attended just one live musical performance each month — that would do a lot to promote human flourishing. We can all make a difference.