ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the wider personal and social benefits of musical engagement across the life course and draws on evidence from various contexts, including mother–infant interactions and childcare, schools, Sistema-inspired projects, further and higher education and a wide range of adult and community musical engagement. Work with refugees, asylum seekers and those in the criminal justice system are considered, as is the limited research in contexts wider than the global west. We argue that musical engagement does not mechanically result in positive outcomes, but rather that music offers affordances for personal and social action, and that careful consideration should be given to both the meaning of music for the participants and the context within which the participants engage with music, in order to understand possible benefits that may accrue due to musical engagement.
