Thin, N. (2011). No-one is unmusical: Elizabeth, everyday cheermongery, and active musical citizenship. 

International Journal of Wellbeing, 1 (2), 291-306. doi:10.5502/ijw.v1i2.10 

 

Neil Thin 

University of Edinburgh 

n.thin@ed.ac.uk  

Copyright belongs to the author(s) 

www.internationaljournalofwellbeing.org 

291 

ARTICLE  

 

No-one is unmusical: Elizabeth, everyday 

cheermongery, and active musical citizenship 
 

Neil Thin 

 

 
Abstract: Everyday cheermongers spread positive emotion through social contagion. This 

capability is illustrated here through a portrait of Elizabeth, a ‘Suzuki method’ violin teacher in 

Edinburgh. Through this example, we can learn about the important ways in which children and 

parents alike rely on skilled and dedicated felicitators to help them through the difficult balance 

between enjoyable and sociable music-making on the one hand, and the pursuit of musical 

excellence on the other. After presenting the philosophical and practical aspects of Shinichi 

Suzuki's ‘everyone-is-talented’ approach to instrumental music instruction, this paper argues for 

recognition of the key roles of music in facilitating happiness, and explores cultural variety in 

the promotion of musicality. While also recognizing that music education needs a democratic 

‘no child left behind’ approach, the argument is that the full benefits of music are better realised 

through active musical engagement and social music-making. When not treated simply as an 

optional leisure activity or as a means to other ends, music can be a pathway to self-transcendent 

‘peak experiences’ that can be achieved not only via the extraordinary performances of elite 

musicians, but also by savouring the very imperfect musical sounds produced by children. 

 

Keywords: music, happiness, parenting, children, education, perfectionism, self-transcendence 

 

 

1. Introduction 

This paper argues for stronger recognition of music facilitators and music itself as sources of 

happiness. Focusing particularly on the joys of collective amateur music and on the tricky 

business of helping children and parents through the tribulations and delayed gratifications of 

early-stage instrument-learning, I present Elizabeth, a violin teacher, as an inspiring example of 

the ‘everyday cheermonger’, someone who spreads positive emotion through social contagion 

without consciously specialising in this function or advertising it as a professional service. 

Observation of music teachers who have this ability also offers us important lessons concerning 

the synergies and trade-offs among the various goods that music-making can provide. 

Elizabeth enables pupils and parents to enjoy progression towards better musical abilities 

without detracting from the joy of savouring every musical moment along the way. Her calm 

and supportive responses to children’s mood swings teach children and parents how to cope 

with the inevitable stresses of learning difficult instruments. She spreads musical and social 

empathy through her facilitation of duets, jazz improvisations, and larger ensembles, and of 

parental and toddler participation. So unlike mere entertainers, Elizabeth’s role goes beyond 

temporary mood-lifting. Those who witness her teaching feel more substantially elevated, 

persuaded to lead more exemplary and fulfilling lives than they otherwise would.  



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Elizabeth has played a central role in the development of the 'Suzuki' approach to instrumental 

music instruction in Scotland. In portraying this approach, I also aim to link the understanding 

of music-making to broader themes of love, perfection, and self-transcendence. The arguments 

here about the importance of music for happiness, and about cultural variety in the promotion 

of musicality, can be extended in various ways to include other arts, leisure activities and 

therapies. I discuss several qualifiers to the common association of music and happiness: music 

education needs a democratic ‘no child left behind’ approach with a sensible balance between 

the momentary enjoyment of music as a process, and the longer-term pursuit of excellence; full 

benefits of music are best realised through active musical engagement and social music-making 

and music must be recognized as not just an optional leisure activity or means to other ends, 

but as a pathway to ‘peak’ or ‘self-transcendent’ experiences (also commonly called ‘ineffable’ 

or ‘sublime’ by music psychologists and philosophers). 

Two further happiness-facilitation themes are broached here. Concerning upbringing in 

general, I want to emphasise that joy-spreading and music are fascinating capabilities for which 

we all have inborn talent. But these potentials are only realised if they are nurtured through 

good parenting, good schooling and a supportive cultural environment (Creech, 2010). Finally, 

the case study touches on a theme which has repeatedly cropped up in happiness scholarship 

and in lay theories of happiness: the importance of savouring ordinary everyday pleasures 

(Bryant and Veroff, 2007). When teachers like Elizabeth help children to enjoy music practice 

and to link it with other enjoyable activities, and when they persuade parents to enjoy the very 

imperfect musical sounds produced by children, and to enjoy the here and now rather than 

reducing childhood learning to the status of a pathway towards adult capabilities, they are 

teaching us how to savour. The western ‘academic’ or ‘elite’ classical music tradition has 

produced exquisite music but has also done a great deal of damage by scorning the more 

ordinary pleasures of simpler music and less polished musical performances. 

 

2. Grand twinkle 

Eleven children aged from 3 to 5 line the stage, all with home-made toy violins. Their teacher 

Elizabeth, a bundle of energy in her mid-70s, watches them in delight from the edge of the 

stage, and gestures to the pianist, who plays a chord. The children all bow, to rapturous 

applause, before Elizabeth herds them carefully towards the waiting arms of their moist-

cheeked grinning parents. Another line is quickly assembled, this one of slightly bigger 

children, all with real violins, some of which are improbably small - 1/32 size, little bigger than 

an adult hand. These little cherubs bow, then together with Elizabeth they play a rhythmic 

adaptation of Twinkle Twinkle, and bow again. And so on, via Swedish and Scottish folk tunes, 

blues, and Shostakovich sonatas, the informal but masterfully regimented concert continues for 

a couple of hours with an interval for juice and home-baked goodies. 

It is in a school hall, but it is not a school event: it is a Sunday afternoon event co-organized by 

a few violin teachers and parents. No-one is forced to sit still for too long, and children’s 

performances, though ritualised and neatly structured, are nonetheless smiley and informal. 

The youngsters listen to and enjoy a lot of the music, but are also allowed to get up and run 

around. Parents do not sit passively either: they are up on their feet chaperoning the young 

ones or preparing snacks. School concerts can be fun and informal too (and in Scotland they 

most definitely are more so now than they were a generation ago), but here the parents are 

active participants in their offspring’s education. They are heavily involved: they have helped 

make the event happen, they know all the tunes, some have learned violin together with their 

children, and they have been co-responsible for their children’s music practice.  



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One or two of the children are stunning prodigies, playing difficult concerto and sonata 

excerpts beautifully at early ages. Less excellent musicians of variable abilities perform solo or 

in groups but with no noticeable reduction in commitment or in applause levels. Unlike the 

school concerts I remember from my youth, there is little sign here of anxiety about 

performance, or of reluctance among the performers. Partly, we can attribute this relaxed 

ambience to the supportive cultural ethos and social network, but a still more important clue is 

available by watching Elizabeth’s body language. Whether sitting or standing as each child 

performs, and whether in a concert or in a lesson or group practice session, Elizabeth cannot 

help but give an unambiguously clear bodily display of involvement in the music, of empathy 

with the player, and of hedonistic savouring of every note.  

If happiness is infectious, so is hunger. There are no limits to Elizabeth’s appetite for the 

music that children play, and parents, too, seem to acquire an appetite for performances that 

can be deeply moving even when they are squeaky, out-of-tune, and rhythmically suspect. 

They are not alone in finding children’s music-making uplifting: Placido Domingo, one of the 

greatest singers the world has ever heard, wept at a concert by the Venezuelan ‘El Sistema’ 

Youth Orchestra, saying they had evoked the strongest emotions he had ever felt (Gould, 2005); 

the cellist Pablo Casals wept ‚copiously‛ at a performance by 1,000 young Japanese pupils of 

Suzuki’s violin school in 1961 (Suzuki, 1983: 101-2). 

It is often hard to empathise with other people’s sources of enjoyment. To some, music 

clubs and events like this one no doubt imply a heady mix of pushy parenting, unrealistic self -

esteem promotion, and enforced merriment. I’m confident, though, that most parents get a 

strong and comforting sense of social and pedagogical progress from events like this. Doubtless 

many participants came reluctantly to today’s event. In the run-up to the concert, children will 

have been wailing at being dragged away from their electronic nannies, parents stressed by the 

requirement to disrupt their Sunday routines by baking brownies and mending violins. But few 

are able to resist the compelling force of Elizabeth’s organizational and motivational zeal, and 

once here they all enter happily into the spirit of the occasion. The iconic moment is when all 

the children and teachers, including the sonata and concerto players, join with the beginners in 

a ‘Grand Twinkle’ at the end. No doubt the beginners notice that this big rich sound that 

surrounds them and fills their bodies is a bit larger than their usual squeaks. But they also feel 

part of it, and they get a hopeful sense of where the squeaks might one day be heading. In the 

Grand Twinkle, they experience self-transcendence, to which we’ll return later. 

Have you ever allowed a piece of music to remove you gently from a foul mood and into a 

state of blissful calm or exhilaration? Have you felt similarly persuaded by a person whose 

mere presence, like beautiful music, seems effortlessly to invade those who come within their 

thrall, who seems to float above the troubles and indignities that cause so much anguish to the 

rest of us? What if the same person has the gift of spreading both music and joy? Elizabeth has 

no doubt always spread happiness, but since taking up the violin in her late 40s and becoming 

a teacher in her 50s, she has developed a genius for facilitating people’s social and musical 

wellbeing.  

 

3. On social entrepreneurs and foot soldiers 

Teaching music is not my main purpose. I want to make good citizens, noble 

human beings. If a child hears fine music from the day of his birth, and learns to 

play it himself, he develops sensitivity, discipline, and endurance. He gets a 

beautiful heart. (Shinichi Suzuki, 1983: 105) 



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Readers familiar with the ‘Suzuki Method’ of learning to play musical instruments will 

recognize that the above event follows the teachings of the Japanese violin teacher and ‘Talent 

Education’ promoter Shinichi Suzuki (Suzuki, 1983; Haugland, 2009). Inspired by a variety of 

western composers, musicians, philosophers, education theorists and scientists, Suzuki 

revolutionised music education in his native Japan and the social movement he inspired is a 

shining example of the benefits of multidirectional cultural globalization. His philosophy and 

practical instruction have inspired many thousands of teachers and musicians in North 

America and Western Europe and has been a crucial influence on the astonishing success of the 

Venezuelan ‘El Sistema’ youth music and social justice programme mentioned above (Gould, 

2005). He is a classic example of a social entrepreneur who energetically promotes good simple 

ideas for human betterment through social transformation. 

Not all witnesses of such Suzuki events describe them as benign sources of happiness. 

When first introduced to Europe in the 1970s, the Suzuki Method attracted expressions of 

concern about the semi-militaristic organization and ‘Japanification’ of music education. Like 

Montessori and Steiner schooling, it remains marginal to mainstream music education (in 

contrast to its more dominant role in North America). But Suzuki certainly qualifies for 

membership among the happiness promoters’ of fame: his steadfast insistence on the 

importance of loving nurturance of young children’s musical potential, his tireless promotion 

of parental involvement in musical education, and his recognition of the crucial lifelong 

strengths that adults can learn from observing the natural capabilities of children, have all been 

immensely important sources of wellbeing for thousands of people worldwide since the 1930s.  

Social movements rely on footsoldiers, though, not just on charismatic founders. So here I want 

to focus on the everyday niceness and loving energy that flows from one implementer of the 

Suzuki approach, Elizabeth, who has promoted the approach in Scotland since the 1970s. What 

is distinctive about ‘everyday’ cheermongers like her is that they spread good feelings and 

good happiness prospects unobtrusively and without fanfare or explicit happiness philosophy. 

They make no specific professional claim to happiness expertise. Whether through innate 

character, learned capabilities, or sheer willpower, they are exceptionally good at spreading 

happiness. They enhance the lives of those they interact with, both directly by making them 

feel good about themselves, but also over the longer term by helping other people find paths to 

lifelong happiness. It makes sense to acknowledge this, and to learn from their example. There 

are no doubt many millions of people worldwide who make exceptional contributions to the 

sum of human happiness in fairly direct and everyday ways not by producing grand plans or 

culture-defining new capabilities, but by helping people help themselves and others in various 

ways. 

Suzuki’s core assertions are that everyone has the potential to become ‘talented’, and that 

every child ought to be given the chance – with parental support, encouraging lessons, and a 

supportive cultural environment – to develop their innate musical abilities, just as they are 

given the chance to develop their ability to understand and speak a language. The fact that 

such assertions are regarded as noteworthy underlines the uncomfortable truth that while the 

virtue of universal schooling has caught on worldwide, there is a long way to go before the 

nurturing of musical capability is seen as a universal priority. The idea that everyone could and 

should learn to read and write developed thousands of years after the invention of literacy. It 

will take a little longer to get over the false belief that only a few people can be musical. 

  



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4. Music and happiness 

To introduce the concept of happiness into a conversation or into policy analysis is to ask 

questions about what our activities are for – what their value or importance is, what they mean 

to us, what joy they bring, whether that joy lasts and is compatible with other sources of 

wellbeing. Music is universally valued and the enjoyment of it is a fundamentally important 

innate capability, as researchers in the emerging field of evolutionary music psychology have 

been showing (Grinde, 2000; Peretz, 2006; Levitin, 2007; Sacks, 2008; Hodges & Sebald, 2010). 

Yet its power and beauty are elusive and mysterious. So it is not surprising that discussion of 

music is linked with discussion of happiness and with the healing of social rifts and of 

individual minds and bodies. Plato argued that ‚music<gives a soul to the universe‛ and 

Shakespeare described it as the ‚food of love‛; both recognized our astonishing ability and 

willingness to transcend ourselves through music. Even the notoriously miserable philosopher 

Schopenhauer admired music as the bath of the soul.1 

Musicians and avid music listeners need no research evidence to convince them of the 

importance of music for personal happiness and social quality. Advocates of music therapy, 

music education, and community music have for decades been producing evidence in support 

of music, but most of this has been partisan, anecdotal, and lacking in scientific rigour (for a 

critical overview, and an outline of a scientific approach, see Skingley et al., 2011). While some 

recent scholarship treats the happiness benefits of music as akin to those of other ‘leisure’ 

activities (Hill and Argyle 1998), or as a kind of ‘therapy’ at personal level (Bunt, 1994; Darnley-

Smith & Patey, 2003) or group level (Jenkyns et al., 2002; Pavlicevic, 2003; Oldfield, 2006), or as 

a temporary influence on emotions and moods (Kreutz & Lotze, 2007), there is also a long 

tradition of more fundamental respect for music’s role in the development of fulfilling lives and 

good societies. Like happiness, the forms and experiences of music can be exhilarating as well 

as calming; private or collective; active and deliberate or passive and unconscious; and they 

involve fleeting moments of exquisite pleasure as well as the lifelong musical narratives 

through which our engagement with culture and our private and collective identities are 

developed. 

The aspects of musical experience that Elizabeth promotes most effectively are active and 

socially engaged musicianship – active musical citizenship, if you like. The difference between 

passive and active enjoyment of music is a bit like the difference between stimulating the 

brain’s pleasure centres artificially with drugs, and doing so naturally through exercise or 

dance. As Roland Barthes put it, there are ‚two musics that are totally different arts: the music 

one listens to, and the music one plays‛ (1977: 149). Although most music therapy and 

education focuses on active musicianship, the rewards of listening (which can of course be 

conscious and in some senses active) are well researched (Menon & Levitin, 2005). In 

Csikszentmihalyi’s discussion of ‚the body in flow‛ he argues that although flow often arises 

from listening to music, ‚even greater rewards are open to those who learn to make music‛ 

(1990/2002: 111). Although at a personal level it is debatable whether the rewards of active 

music-making are necessarily ‘greater’ or just different, it is clear that playing music in groups 

entails both immediate and lifelong social benefits that are much more complex and significant 

than collective listening (Coffman, 2002). Music producers and the inventors of mp3 players 

can take a lot of credit for massively improving the ability of millions of people to listen to 

music. But if this detracts from active musicianship, then many of us will have lost something 

vitally important for our wellbeing and fulfilment. 

                                                
1 These quotes can be found in Plato The Republic, Shakespeare Twelfth Night, respectively. 



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The Suzuki Method encourages both passive and active musicianship from the earliest 

stages of life. Families are reminded of the importance of a supportive musical environment in 

which children learn to enjoy and remember a variety of kinds of music. And the democratic 

insistence on everyone’s potential to become good active musicians serves as a powerful 

antidote to those who assume that only an elite minority should play musical instruments. 

Numerous studies have confirmed that in music, as in many other specialised capabilities, it 

takes ten thousand hours of practice (e.g. 3 hours a week over a decade) to become a world-

class expert (Levitin, 2007: 193), but on a small fraction of that you can become really good, and 

a time investment comparable to tooth-brushing and having a shower is all it takes to get some 

sense of the joys of active music-making. But in any case, ‘investment’ is misleading: most of 

the fun is in the process, not the final achievements. 

 

5. Music clubs and social capital 

Robert Putnam’s image of ‚bowling alone‛ (2000) is now well known as a metaphor 

representing the decline of informal social engagement in the USA. Music is rather more varied 

and versatile than bowling, and you can actually spend a lifetime deriving intense enjoyment 

from playing or listening to music alone. When necessary, fellow players and audiences can 

simply be imagined. But most musicians would agree that participation in musical ensembles, 

and performing to audiences, provide some of the most rewarding and deeply-felt sources of 

fulfilment in their lives. The economistic and instrumentalist metaphor of ‘social capital’ is 

woefully inadequate to describe the value of musical participation, but it is also true that music 

plays crucial functions in many of the most valued forms of associational life worldwide. 

Unsurprisingly, not long after scholars and policy-makers began taking an interest in social 

capital during the 1990s, a steady stream of interest in music-making and social capital 

followed (Dowling 2008; Langston & Barrett, 2008) 

Elizabeth’s weekly fiddle club involves a small cross-section of the children who played in 

the above concert. Here they play a mix of jazz, folk, and classical pieces. Sometimes the club 

makes excursions to a local old people’s home or goes busking on the Royal Mile during the 

Edinburgh Festival. Here again, people often have to be prodded into participation, and it is 

rarely stress-free. But if asked to evaluate the importance and value of the club, parents and 

children alike will be unequivocal in their gratitude to Elizabeth for making it happen. They 

know they’ve been dragged into a collective self-help system that often intrudes on other parts 

of their lives, but which they wouldn’t want to do without. 

Elizabeth is impressive in her ability to organize large-scale concerts and workshops with 

cheerful informality, but it is in her smaller-scale engagement with fiddle club that her 

exceptional capabilities are most evident. Every child and every parent knows that they will get 

some of her attention at fiddle club, and that Elizabeth will notice and feel their absence when 

they miss a week. Just as they sense her involvement in their music when they’re playing, they 

sense that their participation in the events she organizes matters to her in an intensely personal 

way. It’s not that she needs them to make up the numbers or that she feels that one class missed 

is a delay on their path to excellence: it’s simply that she seems to feel the intrinsic value of 

everyone she encounters more keenly and more democratically than most of us do.  

In his blockbuster bestseller How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie reminded 

readers that whereas most of us try hard to get others to like or admire us, or be influenced by 

us, a few exceptional individuals achieve much better results simply by showing a genuine 

loving interest in other people. This describes Elizabeth perfectly, and I’m sure Carnegie would 

have been the first to admit that people like her don’t need to read self-help literature. 



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6. On talent, effort, love, and self-transcendence 

The keystone of Suzuki’s musical pedagogy is that ‚talent is not inherited‛ but must, like 

language, be nurtured from birth by loving parents and by a supportive cultural environment 

(Suzuki, 1983: 9). His hunches have since then been supported by a mass of research that has 

comprehensively demolished the common myth that musical ‘talent’ is some kind of inborn 

genius, possessed by a few individuals, that simply expresses itself effortlessly. In reality, many 

thousands of hours of hard practice are the main factor in the production of musical excellence 

(Sloboda, 2005, chs. 15 & 16; Levitin 2007, ch. 7), but to persuade children to spend even a 

fraction of that time practising requires teacher and parent motivators who facilitate what the 

psychologist Carol Dweck has called a ‚growth mindset‛ (Dweck, 2006, especially ch. 7).  

All cultures value music highly, but in some cultures – especially literate and stratified ones 

– active musicianship is marginalised to a small minority of specialists who are labelled as 

genetically destined to this occupation and/or capability. Even in contemporary western 

societies, where music pervades almost every aspect of our everyday experiences and almost 

limitless musical choice is available to all, for most people music remains largely a passive 

listening experience, and many schools offer pitifully inadequate opportunities for children to 

learn to play music or even sing. 

If we agree with most musical educators that the capability of active musicianship should 

be democratized, the question then arises as to whether the objective is to aim for ultimate 

excellence or to emphasize the enjoyment of the process, including those thousands of hours 

spent practising. To learn a musical instrument you need to get used to delaying gratification, 

promising yourself that things will go better for you in the long run. This can be approached 

masochistically as a form of long-term self-mortification, or more positively you can turn the 

pains and frustrations of practice into a process of ‘flow’, in which endless repetitions and 

infinitesimal signs of progress become a source of absorption and fascination. You need a 

balance between recognizing nasty sounds that you can do something about, and hearing or at 

least imagining better sounds that might eventually come under your control. You also need a 

balance between effort and gratification: if you can enjoy the imperfect sounds you make while 

practising, this is good so long as this enjoyment doesn’t amount to lazy satisfaction that stops 

you from trying to improve. 

Playing with others can help you through this process, giving you a positive aural illusion 

of sounding much better than you are, while also showing you a bigger and better sound to 

aim for. It is amazing how good a sound can come out of ten beginners playing together. 

According to the music philosopher Jeanette Bicknell, music moves us primarily because all 

kinds of musical engagement, even solitary listening, are intrinsically social: music gives us 

compelling reminders of our need for attachment to others (2009: viii). Perhaps this is why, 

when people describe moments of extreme passion in musical listening, they tend to refer to 

puzzling combinations of pleasure and anguish or pain, a ‘poignancy’ which as Jerrold 

Levinson (2004) has argued reflects the bittersweetness of life itself. You experience 

momentarily the unbelievable beauty of passionate union with Beethoven’s soul, yet at the 

same time he was some weird grumpy guy who died in Germany a long time ago and the 

people playing his music to you are very uncool people in penguin suits. The feeling of 

empathy with composers is extremely powerful yet often deeply puzzling (Putman, 1994). The 

combination of psychotropic rhythms and crowds is a heady mixture leading to unforgettable 

and seemingly magical altered states of consciousness (Sylvan 2005; Ehrenreich 2006; Aldridge 

& Fachner, 2009). More mundanely, if you’re going to play music with other people, you also 

need to learn that social participation often means expanding your interests demographically 



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and spatially as well as temporally. You need to do things that appear to be largely dutiful and 

altruistic rather than self-interested, and you need to develop musical empathy with fellow 

players (Schögler & Trevarthen, 2007; Laurence 2008).  

For many of us, these important ways of stretching or moving the self across time and into 

larger social wholes don’t come easily. Without felicitators like Elizabeth we’d be a lot less 

good at it. Other people can be hell. Not only can they ruin our musical fun by making the 

wrong musical noises, but they can be downright antisocial even in the presence of a good 

facilitator. Elizabeth doesn’t ignore a misbehaving child, but neither does she draw attention to 

misbehaviour. When forced to reprimand children she achieves what few parents can achieve, 

quickly persuading the child that there are more interesting and fun things to do than cause 

trouble. Educational theorists may advise us to reprimand and punish the behaviour and not 

the child, yet for Elizabeth it comes naturally to brush bad behaviour gently aside with no hint 

of anger, hatred, or moral outrage. Parents attending her lessons and group practices get free 

instruction in good parenting, and several have agreed with me that they often find themselves, 

when in the midst of family traumas, asking themselves ‘what would Elizabeth do?’ We can 

only learn so much from parenting manuals, and in these socially fragmented days the 

opportunity to learn social skills like this first-hand is gold dust. 

The violin is not the most obvious choice of instrument for three-year-olds to take up. More 

biddable instruments such as recorders, ukuleles and pianos give young children at least some 

instant gratification. Nowadays computers, electronic keyboards, soundbeam technology, and 

programs like ‘sing star’ on PlayStation provide ample opportunities for giving children an 

immediate sense of musical power. By contrast, the violin stubbornly holds out for months or 

years before rewarding the beginner with something that sounds like music. Elizabeth, now in 

her mid-seventies and a good amateur violinist herself, knows that her main gift is in helping 

children and parents through the difficult early years. She passes pupils on to other teachers 

when they begin to need intense technical instruction. But by that stage most of her pupils have 

developed a sustainable love of all aspects of music: they enjoy their lessons, their practice time, 

performing solos, performing in groups, and playing together informally in fiddle club 

sessions. 

There is a fascinating consistency between Elizabeth’s unconscious instruction in how to 

deal with troublesome behaviour, and her conscious instruction to children in how to get 

through the potential nightmare of a difficult practice session. Just as parents quickly become 

infuriated with misbehaviour, children quickly become livid when their fingers and 

instruments refuse to express the sounds they were hoping to hear. Elizabeth, like all good 

music teachers, has a raft of tricks for helping children get through the tantrums that music 

practice inevitably provokes. If their fingers misbehave by playing the wrong notes, or their 

bows misbehave by going squint and scratching, you don’t ignore it but you don’t dwell on it 

as if it were a moral outrage. It’s to be expected, and when it happens repeatedly it’s time to get 

those fingers and bows to do something more fun, such as playing with finger puppets or ‘hunt 

the bow’, before returning to more serious practice afterwards. Children learn to treat their 

fingers and instruments lovingly and with a good mixture of discipline and indulgence. 

What is produced by Elizabeth and through the events and processes she facilitates is not 

limited to musical capabilities, important though they are. It includes also a wide range of 

abilities and dispositions that are perhaps best summarized by the concept of love. To progress 

in music, you must learn to make long-term commitments to your instrument that are quite 

distinct from the instant gratifications of making any noise by banging a drum or crashing a 

cymbal. Attachment to the instrument develops over a long period and requires recognition 



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that your relationship with it will at times be problematic. Just as the concept of romantic love 

is often expressed as a feeling of self-transcendence, of being at one with the lover, so musicians 

describe their relationship with their instruments and with music in terms of life-long passions 

that dissolve and extend the self into something more profound or ineffable than could be 

included within a bounded self. 

Like happiness, love is an important value in all cultures, though widely variable in the 

way in which it is treated. Whether the expected objects of love are actual or potential partners, 

kin, friends, society in general, activities, or the natural environment, love is often conceived of 

as a force external to ourselves over which we have little or no control. Similar attitudes to 

happiness have been common throughout history and around the world. But as we learn to 

anticipate and promote happiness, we can and must also learn to nurture love. Our inborn 

dispositions and abilities to love are, like our felicific dispositions, highly variable; but they can 

also be cultivated through individual and collective effort. As the ethnomusicologist Blacking 

long ago observed, music tends to play crucial roles in preparing humans for the ‚hard task‛ of 

loving other people (1973: 103); it does so, I would argue, by opening us up to self-

transcendence, making us not only recognize but also enjoy the fact that we are a lot less 

individual than we sometimes imagine ourselves to be. 

Self-transcendence is commonly recognized by psychologists and therapists, and religious 

leaders, as being essential for both wellbeing and virtue, an essential complement to self -

concern and self-enhancement (Meulemann, 2009). But if you have browsed through some of 

the copious literature on self-transcendence that has emerged since Viktor Frankl’s 1966 essay 

on it, you can’t help but have noticed that most of it focuses on transcending selves that are 

exceptionally problematic due to moribundity, illness or emotional dysfunction. You could be 

forgiven for thinking that unless you are dying, ill, or mad you don’t need to bother with self -

transcendence. Self-transcendence is a crucial capability for all of us, not just a therapy for 

exceptionally vulnerable or damaged selves.  

Self-transcendence can be about escaping the confines of the everyday self and its 

associated identities and roles. But it can also, more positively, be about a sense of harmony or 

union with other people, with our previous or future selves, and with broader nonsocial 

environments. More radically, we could also question the notion that there is, by default, a 

coherent and relatively isolated self that can be ‘transcended’ – and this kind of radical 

questioning is encouraged, if only temporarily, by mystical experiences such as trance states, 

communion with nature, and passionate involvement in music. As many anthropologists have 

shown, belief in a discrete, integral self may be dominant in western cultures but much less, or 

not at all, dominant in nonwestern cultures (Christopher, 1999). Baumeister (1991) considers 

music as one among many techniques we must sometimes use for escaping the ‚burden of the 

self‛ (other such escapes include alcohol, dance, and meditation), yet his metaphor of escapism 

perhaps wrongly presupposes an entity from which we can escape. A better metaphor might be 

that of tuning in to a different kind of conversation in our heads, a less egotistical and perhaps 

less analytical and more holistic and fluid one. Self-transcendence is an elusive concept. It is 

about ‘going beyond’ normal everyday self-concepts and normal coherence, and experiencing 

feelings and thoughts that free us from narrow self-concern and self-interest. 

The study of music in action, whether solo or ensemble, practice or performance, reveals 

uniquely human ways in which our souls or identities are inescapably informed and inscribed 

by other people – listeners, composers from the past, fellow players. Much of the magic that 

music works, both immediately and over a lifetime, seems to have something to do with our 

transcendental existence, or ‘self-transcendence’ if you must imagine a core being to be 



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transcended. For those who have invested perhaps unrealistically in particular versions of the 

self, such as the concept of a uniquely admired discrete entity, musical engagement is a vitally 

important and humbling experience. If listening to profoundly moving music is a bit like 

gazing at the firmament in a clear night sky, being moved while playing is like being a star-

gazer, star-mover, and star at the same time. Musicianship gives us crucial opportunities to feel 

an ineffable sense of creative fusion with wider social and nonhuman universes. 

At a simple, concrete level, Elizabeth’s evident propensity to engage with other people and 

with music-making illustrates clearly the self-transcending value of musical citizenship. 

Whereas an elitist teacher might enjoy their star pupil’s performance largely with a view to 

boosting their own ego and that of their pupil (and hence their disparagement and 

discouragement of more ordinary pupils), Elizabeth enjoys and reveals the beauty of 

democratic musicality. Pupils may try to emulate her playing and her enjoyment of music, but 

they aren’t trying to produce in themselves a carbon copy of magisterial excellence. They 

recognize that through musical participation they become part of a much more important 

wider whole. 

But although Elizabeth’s example illustrates the ‘social’ nature of music, I think we should 

pause before accepting at face value Bicknell’s assertion that ‚music and the experience of 

music are fundamentally social, rather than strictly personal or individual‛ (2009: 89, my 

emphasis). Bicknell argues most persuasively that the musical self is a social one, yet seems 

unable to shake off entirely the metaphor of a socially isolated, pre-social self, a separate person 

who then engages socially through music. Though some of us act out this illusion more than 

others, and some are more troubled by the vulnerability of the self than others, there is no 

escaping the fact that our selves are ‘social’ from before we were born. For example, hearing 

music while in the womb is an important form of prenatal socialization. I agree with Bicknell 

(2009: viii) that music’s significance lies in its ‚elemental social character‛: there is fascinating 

overlap and synergy between the experiences of absorption in music and absorption in society. 

But I wonder in what sense she thinks this is different from a ‘personal’ conception of musical 

enjoyment. As Daniel Goleman’s synthesis of recent research on ‘social intelligence’ has amply 

demonstrated, we are ‚wired to connect‛ with other people, and we do so, for example 

musically, using our mirror neurons (Goleman, 2007: 13). Now that research on mirror neurons 

has shown that other people – in the form of our subconscious reflections of their emotional 

states – are in a rather literal and biological sense inside our heads, the idea of a non-social 

isolated self is hard to sustain. 

When you watch someone who expresses musical social engagement as clearly as Elizabeth 

does, you can’t help but recognize the artificiality of our distinction between ‘individual’ and 

‘society’. Nor can you help but wonder whether failure to recognize this artificiality is perhaps 

at the root of a great deal of human unhappiness. If music does help us to escape the self, this is 

perhaps because it enables us to feel our total absorption in society even if we find this very 

hard to think. Strangely, music is also often said to help us escape society, when for example we 

hide away in a musical bubble using headphones to screen off the outside world (Sloboda, 

1999). What seems to happen is that we use music to drown out either troublesome inner 

chatter or external chatter, or both. And if the absorption we achieve through active rather than 

passive musical engagement is that much more total, so much the better.  

I’ve asked other parents of Elizabeth’s pupils what they understand as the core of the magic 

that she works with children and parents alike. Often, they have referred to the boundless love 

she seems to feel for everyone who enters her ambit, and her loving commitment not only to 

pupils but also to the tiniest detail of her every activity. Love, like happiness, is both an 



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experience and a character trait. Perhaps more than any other human experience or virtue, love 

reminds us of the everyday importance of self-transcendence. Both love and music tend to 

involve bittersweet poignancy, and it seems no accident that love tends to be expressed 

musically or that music tends to experienced as a peculiarly ineffable and transcendent kind of 

love (Hodges, 1996: 36). Happiness and love are related but different, and if there are other 

goods that can rank alongside happiness as ‘ultimate’ values, love must surely be among them. 

 

7. Enjoyment, excellence, and learning to savour normality 

Recently, pushy parenting has again loomed large in public debate with the publication of the 

Yale law professor Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011). In this wilfully 

controversial autobiography, which makes no attempt to engage with many decades-worth of 

serious scholarship on the adverse life outcomes of authoritarian parenting and perfectionist 

instruction, Chua tells of her relentless hyperparenting project that drove her two daughters to 

academic and musical ‘success’ via Chua’s interpretation of the ‘Suzuki’ method. This entailed 

getting her daughters to practice several hours a day from the age of three and denying them 

nearly all the social joys and relaxations of normal childhood. 

As every kind of educator knows, bringing up children involves seemingly irreconcilable 

trade-offs between enjoyment and excellence, between the ordinary masses and the ultra-

talented elite, and between present fun and future capabilities. And if you have a lot of children 

in your charge, it is never easy to promote simultaneously the ordinary flourishing of the 

majority and the extraordinary capabilities of the exceptionally quick learners. Inevitably, some 

individuals and some institutions either take the elitist path of favouring and promoting 

exceptional excellence, while others go for common enjoyment of the masses at the expense of 

excellence. If educational success is measured by the exceptional achievements of the gifted 

few, at least some of the aspects of the wellbeing of the masses must be damaged as they 

become second-rate witnesses to the elite’s pursuit of excellence.  

The same trade-offs also map onto trade-offs between childhood and adulthood, and 

between educational processes and educational outcomes: if excellence is the privileged 

objective, schooling is reduced to a means by which deferred benefits are to be achieved, 

whereas if the joy of learning is privileged then at least some of the anticipation of future 

excellence must be foregone in the interest of a happy childhood.  

Elizabeth’s biography is instructive in this regard. She grew up in the profoundly elitist 

musical tradition that prevailed in posh Edinburgh schools until recently. Music was mainly 

focused on a select few ‘musical’ people, usually from ‘musical’ families, playing almost 

entirely the elite repertoire of a few musical geniuses in the western ‘classical’ (or ‘academic’, or 

‘high art’) tradition. The masses were meant to appreciate, but not participate except passively 

as consumers. After just a year of learning the violin at school, Elizabeth, like perhaps a 

majority of instrumental beginners in those days, was told that there was little point in 

continuing as she lacked talent and had no prospect of becoming an excellent violinist. 25 years 

later little seemed to have changed in the Edinburgh classical music tradition: her son returned 

from one of his violin lessons to say that after he’d played through the piece he’d practiced all 

week, his teacher had slumped onto the piano and wept at his incompetence. By then in her 

late forties, Elizabeth responded by buying herself a violin and teaching herself. Within a few 

years, she had introduced the Suzuki method to Scotland and was helping several thousands of 

individuals grow up to enjoy playing and listening to music from a wide variety of musical 

traditions, and to participate in a vibrant social network. 



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I would argue that the Suzuki approach to music education provides substantial 

reconciliation of these trade-offs, but that this effect relies very strongly not only on the 

inspirational philosophy of the movement’s charismatic founder, but on the character and 

sheer effort of practitioners like Elizabeth. All too often, music teachers succumb to the 

temptation to focus most of their efforts on the long-term and selective grooming of a few 

exceptionally gifted musicians. The results are often breathtakingly beautiful musicianship that 

contributes to the most stunning achievements of humanity. But the human cost in this 

production process may include untold miseries for the vast bulk of children who learn to 

despise their own modest musical capabilities, and who end up seeing the whole process of 

learning and practising as a waste of time if it doesn’t lead to exceptional excellence.  

When Csikszentmihalyi interviewed musicians, he found many whose enjoyment of music 

had clearly been badly spoiled by the perfectionism of their teachers and parents (1990/2002: 

112). Many parents quite correctly entertain ethical doubts about making children perform 

musical solos. Musical biography studies in the United Kingdom have shown that happy 

memories of childhood musical performance are rare, and massively outnumbered by painful 

memories which frequently put children off active musicianship for life (Sloboda, 2005: 186). 

Levitin argues that contemporary Western society has seen a widening of the ‘performance 

chasm’ that separates the musical elite minority from the masses who gave up all musical 

ambition in childhood. Western musical culture, he argues, is uniquely discouraging to all but 

the experts: not only is musical amateurism more disparaged in the West than are other kinds 

of amateurism (such as cooking or sport), but other cultures don’t suffer the same obsession 

with extremes of excellence to the detriment of more modest capability registers (2007: 194). 

I share Levitin’s worries about elitism, but I doubt whether trends are quite as bad as he 

portrays. For example, Elizabeth’s approach to musical education is in Scotland far less 

exceptional today than would have been the case in the 1960s. In contrast to the elitist music 

teachers who discouraged her in the 1950s and her son in the 1970s, she encourages children 

and parents to enjoy and savour music at all levels of capability, while also teaching children 

that hard work can lead to deferred rewards too. An ethnographic study of active amateur 

musicianship in Milton Keynes in the early 1980s found a wide diversity of highly committed 

musicianship, much of it based on self-instruction and self-discipline as well a community 

support (Finnegan, 1989). This nonperfectionist approach to music sounds similar to what 

Margaret Mead said was normal in Bali in the 1930s, where everyone gets to take part and 

every man is at least at some key ritual moments a kind of musical ‘professional’: when 

villagers watch young people doing a show ‚the interest < fastens not on the final 

performance, as it does in America < but on the rehearsals‛ (Mead, 1941; cited in Merriam, 

1964: 160). 

Despite her earlier maltreatment by the musical aristocracy, Elizabeth is not driven by any 

compensatory demophilic dogma or cult of mediocrity. She adores musical excellence and 

glows with pride when her pupils, as some inevitably do, progress quickly to extraordinary 

ability at an early age. It’s just that she genuinely enjoys and savours, just as much, the more 

ordinary capabilities of the rest. She gives all of them strong encouragement to strive for ever 

better capabilities, but also, perhaps more inconspicuously, encourages them to enjoy whatever 

they can do at every stage along the way. Her pupils can have their cake and eat it (and by the 

way it isn’t at all uncommon for her pupils to come away from her lessons literally with 

crumbs on their lips, having mixed the pleasures of music with the enjoyment of snack time). 

  



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8. Conclusions: on music, social progress, and life enhancement 

I opened by arguing that participation in the musical events that Elizabeth organizes gives a 

pleasing sense of social progress. Democratizing the business of music-making, and doing so in 

child-friendly and parent-friendly ways which enhance the social experiences of music-makers, 

seem to me to be extremely important ways in which societies can progress. Plato recognized 

this at the level of individual pedagogy but his thinking on the social benefits of music never 

led to a strong tradition in studying and celebrating the role of music in facilitating good lives 

and good societies. Although there have been occasional attempts to discuss links between 

music and social progress (Frith, 2007; Allen, 1946), most writing linking music with progress is 

either about individual progress towards musical excellence, or else takes the form of obscure 

and irresolvable aesthetic and philosophical debates about the artistic, literary, and sonic 

qualities of musical compositions and performances. Music certainly does have ineffable 

intrinsic value that can’t be reduced to its psychological or sociological uses, but the extrinsic 

values of music need to be understood and celebrated too. 

Looking at Elizabeth, particularly in her capacity as an exponent of the Suzuki approach to 

music education and parenting, has given us opportunities to recognize a number of important 

cultural themes in happiness studies that would certainly merit more careful attention. First, 

the ability to facilitate happiness is an important life skill that combines character traits with 

hard altruistic work. Though highly valued when we bother to pay attention to it, the social 

function of the cheermonger is not often highly rewarded with money or status. Nor is it 

necessarily focused explicitly on the production of happiness. Elizabeth has never, to my 

knowledge, tried to justify her work in the name of happiness. She simply believes passionately 

in the various activities that she promotes – active musicianship, cooperative play, early 

learning with supportive parental involvement, noncompetitive pursuit of excellence, and 

social engagement. We could call cheermongery ‘emotional labour’, a term coined by the 

Marxist-feminist sociologist Arlie Hochschild with reference to the mood management of air 

hostesses (Hochschild, 1983). I agree with Hochschild that the value of this work needs more 

recognition, but unlike her I don’t want to look at it primarily in terms of exploitation and 

pathology: when emotion work (let’s at least give it a more morally neutral label) is done well 

and willingly it is a beauty to behold, and there is no doubt that exponents like Elizabeth take 

great pride and joy in their emotional contribution to society. 

Second, like many other skills, those we have looked at (musicianship, good parenting, 

prosocial behaviour, enjoyment of work, deferred gratification, etc) are ‘inborn’ in all of us but 

nonetheless don’t just ‘come naturally’: they need to be cultivated, and they require cultural 

support for their expression. We need educational systems (and of course not just schools but 

communities, social networks, and value systems) that cultivate and celebrate the full variety of 

capabilities that everyone is born with the potential to develop. 

Third, musical abilities – practising, anticipating improvement while enjoying the moment, 

making music, performing individually and collectively, listening – are some of the life skills 

that are most crucial for happiness, and yet these tend in many cultural contexts to be 

inadequately nurtured. All cultures recognize the value of music, some (e.g. youth cultures) 

perhaps more than others. But music tends to sit awkwardly with other values and its power is 

not always seen as an unmixed blessing. Those who play music, or create it, teach it, or 

otherwise facilitate it, are not always the culture heroes we might expect them to be. Active 

music-making and composition are often seen as ultra-specialist activities best left to a tiny 

gifted and/or marginal and even deviant minority, and often based on elitist and/or 

authoritarian, creativity-inhibiting instruction (Merriam, 1964; chs. 7 & 8). Many schools 



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worldwide make little or no attempt to nurture musical abilities, and those that do often fail 

due to the neglect of the importance of early learning. Even in Western schools, where there is 

nearly always some kind of musical instruction albeit mainly focused on listening and 

discussing rather than playing, it is still often not effectively mainstreamed within the 

curriculum, nor incentivised with public recognition, nor properly evaluated. Instead it is seen 

as an optional activity like sport or religion. 

Finally, goods whose value is not adequately theorised and measured, or whose absence is 

not necessarily perceived immediately as catastrophic, tend to be taken for granted. We all 

know, surely, how much we collectively rely on the goodwill and energy of cheermongers like 

Elizabeth. They keep us sane, they spread good feelings contagiously through social networks, 

they foster peace and love, they inhibit our tendencies to get angry and upset over petty 

quarrels and temporary setbacks. But we rarely think about happiness promotion as a critically 

important social function that could be better incentivised and celebrated. Music promotion is 

similarly undervalued and undernourished not because we don’t value music, but because we 

can’t see it as a critically important component in social processes and in cultural achievements 

which vary widely from one culture to another, or from one family or school to another, 

depending on how well they are nourished. 

Two of the key insights from positive psychology are that we can derive a great deal of 

happiness through the expression of thanks, and from the regular habit of savouring the good 

things in life (Bryant & Veroff, 2007; Emmons 2007). To promote my own happiness, I would 

like to offer thanks to Elizabeth, while savouring and promoting recognition of her 

extraordinary gift for joy-spreading. Just as the sublime qualities of music can’t be captured in 

words, so the ineffable niceness of a person can only be indirectly apprehended by watching 

their actions and relationships. We can nonetheless learn a lot more about music, and about 

everyday niceness, by doing our best to work out how everyday cheermongers work their 

magic. 

 
Author 

Neil Thin  

University of Edinburgh 

n.thin@ed.ac.uk 

 

Publishing Timeline 

Received 31 January 2011 

Accepted 5 April 2011 

Published 20 July 2011 

 

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