Entangled musical lives: Affordances of spaces in young people’s music engagement for connectedness and wellbeing

Abstract

The affordances of spaces in young people’s music engagement through which they derive a sense of connectedness and wellbeing are explored in this chapter. Specifically, the chapter examines how the material, relational, and multimodal nature of young people’s music engagement (referred to here as entangled musical lives) promotes connectedness and wellbeing within physical, virtual, and hybrid life spaces. Drawing on theoretical perspectives from new materialism and multiliteracies, which allow for the interdisciplinary study of two dimensions of music making in their entanglement—meaning and materiality—this chapter offers insights into how music, connectedness, and wellbeing might be conceptualized as an enactment of possibilities for reconfiguring this complex entanglement. Applying these insights to our understanding of how young people navigate and negotiate musical spaces can help us to understand and reassert music and materiality into the embodied practices of young people’s music engagement.