IN-PERSON: Livable Cities – New York

Abstract

The connectivity of music and the arts as a form of healing has a long history but has never been fully identified as a clinical practice. That should change. A scoping review to find an answer to the question of whether live music performance can serve as a tool for social work practice revealed that there is an opportunity to utilize music and creative arts therapies within social work practice to support empowerment, self-expression, and community bonding. Research studies touched upon community social work practice through music instruction, audience engagement, inequality in audience attendance, music as an intervention tool, and finding ways to bridge the gap between multiple disciplines. Historically, we have seen examples of music festivals such as the Watts Summer Festival in Los Angeles and the Harlem Arts Festival in New York bring urban communities together in the name of healing and celebration. The success of the 1969 summer festival in Harlem was the subject of the 2021 documentary Summer of Soul. Performance events in Europe are starting to consider how to create spaces of inclusion and safety. The need to lower the barriers for the arts to be accessible to all solidifies that social work and the arts should collaborate, because this field understands that music and the arts should be a right, not a privilege.