Music, Spirituality and Well-Being

This volume explores how music-making, listening, composing and caring within musicking contexts foster spiritual and emotional well-being in diverse settings.

By engaging with both deeply personal and collective experiences across musical contexts, the chapters showcase innovative forms of autoethnography—individual, duo, trio, and collaborative—that illuminate how music shapes meaning, belonging, transformation, and healing. Rich with narrative, theory, and creative expression, this collection brings forward multiple dimensions of spirituality—metaphysical, intrapersonal, interpersonal, intergaian, and extrapersonal—while offering fresh insights into vulnerability, compassion, and the search for wholeness.

Spanning contexts as diverse as professional performance, education, care centres, grief journeys, and everyday listening, the contributions reveal music’s enduring role in connecting body, spirit, community, and environment.

Liesl van der Merwe is a professor at North-West University, South Africa, in the School of Creative Industries and Performing Arts, and in the research entity Research and Creative Outputs in Visual Arts and Music (ViAMUS).

June Boyce- Tillman, MBE, is Professor Emerita of Applied Music at the University of Winchester and an extraordinary Professor at North-West University, South Africa.

Petra Jerling (PhD, M.Mus. Music Therapy; MA Positive Psychology) is an extraordinary researcher at NWU and a registered music psychotherapist in South Africa.

Laetitia Orlandi, former Assistant Dean (Teaching & Learning) in the Faculty of Arts & Design at TUT, is a collaborative pianist and Integral Coach®.

Debra Joubert is an extraordinary researcher in the research entity Research and Creative Outputs in Visual Arts and Music (ViAMUS), at North-West University.