Music for Peace

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  • What kinds of music help you to feel ‘at peace’?
  • How might you represent peace in music? 
  • What would a musical representation of peacebuilding (as opposed to peace itself) sound like?
  • (How) can music promote peace and contribute meaningfully to peacebuilding?

Music is a deeply affective art form. It can paint pictures with soundscapes and tell stories without words. Music and text can combine to support or subvert each other, adding new layers of meaning to already rich storytelling. Silences and musical dynamics can be powerful in themselves; and musical echoes and repeating rhythms can focus attention on the act of listening, crucial in all kinds of dialogue but especially peacebuilding. Music works on parts of our brain not activated by other art forms. Music-making and listening can be embodied experiences. In short, music – in all its forms – is a profoundly powerful form of communication, which lots to teach us about how we think and feel.

Since humans first started making music, it has been used in the service of war: to incite, accompany, glorify, memorialise and mourn. But many musical traditions have also explored and evoked peace in many different ways, and music-making has been influential in shaping ideas about (and in promoting and doing) peacebuilding. 

As part of our wider research into storytelling, the creative arts, artivism and peacebuilding, we have been exploring music’s potential to tell impactful stories about peace, which can enhance our ‘peace literacy’ as individuals and societies. We also wanted to see what different genres of music could teach us about peace-keeping and peace-making, from inner peace to cross-cultural and international endeavours. So we set about collaborating with practicing musicians and composers on some music-making connected to our research questions. We recruited a mix of professionals and students (from the University of St Andrews and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama) who specialise in different genres and styles of music, curious to see how they responded to the challenge and eager to discover what they could teach us about peace itself and music’s power to represent and promote peace in the wider world. As well as producing some wonderful outputs, they helped us wrestle with important questions about the limits of music to contribute to peace work – and when it simply does not feel right.

First up is Robert Southby, a producer, DJ and composer specialising in dance music. In dialogue with members of our team, Robert produced this track called Visualising Peace:

Here is what Robert himself says about the piece:

When approached to write music for a project about understanding and representing peace, my first thought was that the music I make isn’t peaceful at all. I make dance music, designed to be played loud and make people move, and therefore peace is not usually the aim of the music I assumed. However, when hearing the research the Visualising Peace group had done and the way they explained their mission and their thought process around peace and the way we reflect on it as individuals and as a society, I started to realise how much more there was to be explored than the stereotypes of peace I came into the project with had led me to believe. This challenge and reflection to my concept of peace by the group allowed me to explore my own take on peace within music, and has helped me understand peace far better.

I knew I wanted to write dance music as it’s the music I feel most comfortable writing, and in discussion the idea of personal peace and inner peace came up. These two concepts resonated with me as things I’d experienced through music and I wanted to reflect this. I’ve also spent time researching music’s role in society and its importance socially as a way to bring people together through a unified experience, and I wanted to bring these two concepts together. For me, the juxtaposition between the seemingly intimidating world of large crowds, loud sound and bright lights and yet finding oneself at peace and in harmony with everything around you inspired me and is reflected in the music. There aren’t many places in the world where people who don’t know each other come together to experience the same thing both visually in front of them, but also physically as the sound vibrates through their bodies at the same time, and are brought together in music, bringing a sense of unity and peace through that shared experience. My track starts with crowd noise that melts into harmony as I wanted to represent the feeling of melting into a crowd and becoming a part of that collective, then gently builds into the “drop”. This more exciting and percussive section is deliberately quite repetitive and trancelike, with minor developments to keep the movement, in order to help the listener achieve an almost meditative state while listening. This track is designed to be listened to both on headphones as a solo experience where the crowd noise in the tune takes you away, or in a club setting where the beats and the crowd around you give the direction and the shared experience. While there is singing in the track, there are deliberately no lyrics as I wanted the listener to be able to put their own words and meaning onto the track, letting people reflect and find their own idea of peace through the music. While the crowd noise occasionally can be heard building within the tune, it never overtakes it. This came from the discussion around peace as a process more than a fixed state of being as discussed by the group, and suggests that while imperfect, there is still peace to be found amongst these seemingly stressful and overwhelming situations.

We loved working with Robert, who got us thinking about music as a safe, often healing space, as well as an embodied and social experience. In our discussions we talked about brain frequencies, rhythm and beat, trance-like states, and transcendence as we explored music’s power to bring inner peace; and we also explored the participatory element and sense of belonging that it can generate. Robert’s composition takes us through various forms and stages of peace, from solo states to collective experience, and from quiet and calm to tension, noise and chaos. Through repetition and starting over again, it also captures the iterative nature of peace-building.

Next up is Ross Donaldson’s composition, also called Visualising Peace, which you can listen to below:

You can read Ross’ score for the piece below:

Visualising-Peace-ScoreDownload

Ross wrote the following about his experience of composing a ‘peace’ piece:

When I first considered the idea of writing music inspired by peace, my mind instantly jumped to the music of Dmitri Shostakovich. Perhaps, a strange thought initially, as anyone familiar with his music would agree, as the heavy, brutalist nature of most of his work creates a chaotic war like scene rather than evoking thoughts of peace. However, I have always felt it important to consider the situations that Shostakovich found himself writing in. As a composer who suffered through the brutal siege of his city from the axis powers in the Second World War, frequent denunciation from his own government, and crippling struggles with mental health, his music often acts as his own criticism for oppression and breaches of peace from foreign, domestic and internal sources.

A main reason for the timelessness and success of Shostakovich’s music is its universality. It was written as a historic commentary of the events of his own life, yet it projects the composer’s very personal and unique struggles onto the audience and allows us to unite in a common search for both internal and external peace. This was something I was keen to try and do with my own composition.

My process began by composing a short theme, which is initially heard in the low strings before building to the rest of the orchestra. I debated for a while what kind of ensemble to set this music to, initially toying with the idea of setting a poem to music. However, keeping in mind my initial goal of universality, I eventually decided that keeping it strictly instrumental would allow the music to be as accessible and relatable as possible. I eventually concluded that the rich tapestry of timbres available from an orchestra would allow me to best explore the concept of peace.

The next challenge was developing the theme which slowly progresses to the rest of the orchestra until the music bursts into a chaotic fugue, almost like an individual trying to make sense of cascading thoughts. This develops into a dissonant string chorale over which various solo instruments are heard until they fuse into a homogenous sound almost like individual voices uniting in a collective struggle. The tonally ambiguous ending of the piece aims to remind us that many conflicts both internal and external are not black and white and attempts to come to terms with the fact that fairy-tail like endings to not always exist.

This brief provided a wonderful opportunity to explore programmatic music and methods of interacting and communicating with an audience. Until now, my compositions have all been extremely personal, as if I have always been composing for myself. Talking with other students as well as my own research has invited me to consider not just music but all art as an important means of tying together individual expression of our personal struggles with our species’ collective goal of peace, on an international, domestic and personal scale.

As you explore to Ross’ fantastic composition, listen out for solo lines (to denote potentially ‘disruptive’ but also inspirational or leading voices) that merge into sections of polyphony and unison – an expression of the combination of ‘I/we’ and individuality/togetherness that is needed in all peacebuilding efforts. With changes of pace, poly-rhythms and cross-rhythms, Ross wanted to convey the idea that peacebuilding does not move forward in a simply linear fashion but can be a more uneven, roundabout journey. As he explains above, he ended his piece/peace with a few deliberately out-of-place notes, to complicate our sense of completion with a reminder that the work of peacebuilding is never fully done and that peace itself is not some ‘perfect’ state. Just as importantly, both Ross and Robert reminded us of the crucial work that both listening and dialogue play in peacebuilding; both composers wrote with their listeners very much in mind, building bridges and interpersonal relationships through music.

While music can be a valuable creative tool for exploring and building peace, our collaborators also helped us to explore where the limits of music might lie – and when music-making does not feel right in the context of ongoing conflict. Two students from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama shared their experiences, as Jewish creatives, of trying to collaborate on some Israeli-Palestinian fusion music to reflect on the ongoing war in Gaza. One of them – Isadora Pulman-Jones – has collated her reflections in this blog on why that project did not work and what they learnt in the process about the challenges of producing music that resonates across divides and does not risk becoming ‘tone deaf’ to those most impacted by a conflict.

We learnt so much from working with Robert, Ross and students from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, about how others understand peace and peacebuilding and also about the challenges and opportunities of visualising it through music. We hope that their compositions and reflections have the same impact on you!

As follow up, you might enjoy these museum entries by members of the Visualising Peace project, which explore representations of peace and peacebuilding in music:

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