Fostering a Synergy Between the Development of Well-Being and Musicianship: A Kinemusical Perspective

With amateur and professional musicians facing high risks to mental and physical health, it is important to reflect on the nature of instrumental music education and to design novel educational approaches that take the development of well-being into account. In this article, I plead for a “caring” stance towards instrumental music education, conceiving the development of well-being as an integral element of the development of musicianship. First, I define such a caring stance, conceiving of musical development and the development of well-being as the two chains of the DNA of music education, with the PERMA building blocks of well-being as the bases of the ladder that connects the two chains. Next, I discuss how a synergy between the development of musicianship and well-being can be achieved by a constraints-led approach to integrating these building blocks of well-being into the dynamics of a music lesson. Then, I present a novel approach to instrumental music education that seeks to achieve the synergy between developing well-being and musicianship by educating the performing body beyond a mere instrumentalist approach to the body and musical instruments through the incorporation of movement-based learning activities. After elaborating on the guiding principles of this “kinemusical” approach, I exemplify the presented framework by discussing two learning activities in relation to the constraints-led integration of the PERMA building blocks of well-being. This exploratory work is presented as an initial step in a broader research agenda. It invites critical engagement and dialog to refine and advance the proposed kinemusical approach, with implications for both formal music education and the wider field of music research.