ABSTRACT
This chapter works with the findings of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded Care for Music research project (2019–2023 – https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="https://careformusic.org">https://careformusic.org) which made a detailed long-term ethnography of how active music-making facilitated by music therapists relates to the logic, practices and qualities of care within care homes and hospices in the UK and Norway. We present and discuss two parallel aspects of aesthetics that became central to the Care for Music research. Firstly, how music as an aesthetic medium is often used quite by residents, carers, friends and family so that the experience of caring and being cared for merges, shifts and distributes within the interactive and mutual process of making music together. Secondly, whilst the ethnography made conventional fieldnotes and participant observation, we also found ourselves as researchers using various artistic methods (drawings, poems, short stories, collages) as aesthetic means of attending differently, and more precisely, to the musical scenes of care we witnessed and participated in, and to ‘saving’ the qualities and meanings of these experiences. In this chapter, we will present examples of how these artistic methods could contribute to the current debates on ‘aesthetics of care’.
