This article will review the themes found in the literature on eudaimonia: ethical behaviour, a sense of meaning and purpose, autonomy – being able to make wise decisions and manage behaviour, contemplation, relationship with spirits of the ancestors and celestial beings and relationships of mutuality, respect. It will use these to critique various events online during the pandemic, such as the Embodiment conference, the SHIFT conference and the ZOOM peace choir. These developments related to music and wellbeing will be used to interrogate the purposes of music education and what might be learned from these new developments in relation to technology in relation to themes, such as values, orality and literacy, process and product.

This article will examine the historical and contemporary literature in this area, to produce a model of the phenomenography of the musical experience which is linked with strands in the literature exploring the relationship between religion and spirituality. It interrogates the attitude of Christian theologians to the place of music in worship and its relationship to the sacred. It charts the move from this to a more generalised view of the spiritual dimension of music linking these with cataphatic and apophatic theological traditions. It uses frames from Buber’s view of encounter and Turner’s notion of liminality to link strands in the spirituality literature to the musical domains and the transformative properties of the liminal space.

This article will examine the power of the liminal space as a transformative experience. It will also examine a holistic model of the musical experience that brings together the environmental, the expressive, the intellectual, the social and the intuitive within its very nature. It will link this with contemporary developments in the area of spirituality/liminality. It will illustrate this from three projects - a Singing for Well-being choir, the Space for Peace event in Winchester Cathedral and a local community pageant. It will draw on the work of John Dewey, Christopher Small, Victor Turner, Estelle Jorgensen, Heidi Westerlund and Richard Shusterman.

This article uses a postmodern methodology to set out a model of life which consists of a time of growing up and learning to speak, and of growing down when the power of speech and cognition gradually disintegrates. It describes how this was presented at a conference partly by means of drama (including movement and music) at the beginning and ending of a lecture which was designed to show the important role of music at the beginning and end of life. The centre of the presentation sets out the research into the role of music in personhood, wellbeing and health. It examines the role of music in connectedness, community and identity. There is much evidence for the relationship between music and health which is leading to the possibility of doctors prescribing music. The growth of community choirs has seen the growth of a musical aesthetic which values wellbeing highly. A phenomenography of the musical experience clarifies the relationship between music and wellbeing and the potentially transformative effects of the liminal space created by the four domains of musicking - Materials, Expression, Construction and Values. It also sets out a way of presenting research that engages the mind, body, emotions and spirituality of the audience.