ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 was accompanied by a mental health epidemic creating an extensive demand for safe, widely accessible, and highly individualised coping strategies. Engaging with music in new and innovative ways became the potentially most frequent and effective solitary and virtually-collective leisure activity for maintaining psychological wellbeing during lockdown. Emerging research findings that interest in corona-themed repertoire – coined coronamusic – became the strongest predictor of socio-emotional coping efficacy point towards a potentially adaptive function of thematically tailored musical innovations in human coping behaviour on historical and evolutionary timescales. This afterword starts with an exemplifying overview of the musical and societal responses to the coronavirus in Denmark. Next, based on a review of the emerging research literature on the role of music for pandemic coping, a model is proposed of key structural and contextual features of the coronamusic phenomenon. This may pave the way for including musical measures in collective and individual toolboxes for managing future societal crises.
