As though the ’80s never happened – recalibrating value through music

How can we renew awareness of the civic value of the arts and humanities? This article responds to this question mainly with reference to music. It notes the rise since the 1990s of extrinsic criteria of value evident in sociological, economic and psychological arguments for the significance of music and the arts, which risk a profound instrumentalisation. In reaction, recent defences of the arts stage a stand-off against sociological perspectives, in particular, returning to older humanistic defences. Recalling the growth of interdisciplinary popular music and cultural studies from the 1980s, which unveiled the multivalent relationships between aesthetic and social dimensions of music, sets this polarisation into relief, productively shifting the debate. Music emerges as a vital medium for living, active in differentiated lives, an environment that may alone proffer meaning, pleasure, hope and a sense of collective imaginative and public life amid intensifying anxiety, desperation and the denial of collectivity. (This article is published in the thematic collection ‘The arts and humanities: rethinking value for today—views from Fellows of the British Academy’, edited by Isobel Armstrong.)