Music and sustainability: organizational cultures towards creative resilience – a review

Abstract While the potential of creativity and of the arts for societal transformation towards sustainability has gained attention over recent years, a specific focus on music is lacking in sustainability science. What are the specific potentials of music, and why should we care? Collective musical practice enhances group cohesion, and musical improvisation trains social creativity, both of which are important resources for organizational resilience. Turning to the experience of music on the individual level, cultures of sustainability can be fostered through a musical aesthetics of complexity that opens up to the ambiguities, ambivalences, contradictions and creatively chaotic dimensions of a transformation towards sustainability. However, music is a “double-edged sword” and its emotional power can be deployed instead to strengthen prejudice, simplify worldviews, and restrain creativity. This paper offers the first broad transdisciplinary review of research at the intersection of music and sustainability. It exposes the mechanisms operating at this intersection and highlights key areas where the social experience and practice of music can contribute to the cultural dimension of sustainability in communities, organizations and society.