Use classical music to improve your wellbeing and flourish.
In this special series Registered Psychologist Greta Bradman takes you on a classical music journey for wellbeing, pairing simple exercises with incredible music.
Wellbeing involves a kaleidoscope of factors, from your individual physical and mental health, to your relationships and the context of your life.
These days in considering mental health and wellbeing, the question is not about helping you survive and stay around some acceptable base level of living; it is about seeing you thrive. When you’re thriving, you’re able to experience more positive emotions than not, you feel engaged with and interested in many of your activities, you enjoy positive relationships in your life, you perceive meaning in what you do, and you have a sense of achievement.
Classical music can contribute so much to a life of thriving, whether through helping you cultivate positive relationships out of small moments, or support relationships, or connect you with a sense of vastness and meaning that is greater than you are.
When Martin Seligman talks of thriving, he uses the word flourishing, and his PERMA model of happiness (which we’re using across Music for Wellbeing) involves Positive emotions, Engagement (or ‘flow’), positive Relationships, Meaning, and Achievement.
There’s great rationale for integrating classical music into its component parts. Not as music therapy, but with music as a cushion on which we might sit, reflect, and get into aspects of PERMA.
The use of music provides a rhythm for our mood, a sea anchor amidst the storm of thoughts and feelings. A way to centre us along the journey. Plus, neuroscientific research into the effect of music on the brain offers hugely compelling evidence on the benefits of classical music on wellbeing and the brain. In relation to PERMA, classical music offers a brilliant vantage point from which we can practice noticing, accepting, and embracing our full spectrum of experience.
The six Music for Wellbeing playlists, culminating in this one, Flourishing, each focus on one aspect of Seligman’s PERMA model. Let’s recap the five elements that come together in flourishing.
Classical music brings about in us positive emotions. It can transport us to places of wonder and jubilation. It can excite and amuse, captivate and bring joy. And we know that classical music literally has an impact on positive feelings. When we listen to music we love (especially classical!), we get a hit of feel-good neurochemicals, serotonin and dopamine. It can also stimulate the neuropeptide ‘love hormone’, oxytocin, which can contribute to wellbeing through its effects on everything from social bonding, to helping us de-stress and even physically heal from major surgery.
You may have used classical music to help you get into flow, that is really engage with a task. This could be driving a long distance, or finishing a paper, or doing exercise. Music can help provide a rhythm for your mood but can also help you zone out in order to home in on your current experience. This speaks straight to the “engagement” component of PERMA.
Relationships involve connection and belonging, and classical music is made and shared socially. Not only that, the sense of connection and community that is built through a relationship with classical music itself is so precious. You can even have shared memories around classical works that stretch back through generations within the one family. In my family, two pieces that bind generations to one another are Beethoven’s Sonata Pathétique, and the hymn, Amazing Grace.
Meaning is a tricky concept to pin down for many, and classical music can offer a starting point for reflecting on meaning in your own life. Identifying core values can go a long way with helping with meaning, but there is something about the power of music that transcends the need for language. With classical music, you are reconnected with what matters to you. You’re inspired to do better; it can help you lean into your highest ideals.
Achievement is made all the sweeter with music to play in celebration. And music can help you get there in the first place too. You can persevere, with a soundtrack that means something to you, which can motivate you and push you to keep going.
Seligman’s PERMA model has at its core the goal of allowing you to flourish in life. To live a life that is fulfilling and meaningful to you, on your terms. Classical music can take a similar function. It can provide a lens through which, with a combination of effortful, intentional listening and allowing the music to wash over you, you can be transported into a space where things are made possible, made more beautiful, and your priorities in life can become more clear.
Your Music for Wellbeing: Flourishing playlist is one to listen to and allow the music to wash over you. Revel in its beauty. Allow it to take you wherever you wish to go.
There can be no doubt, from our lived experience as well as from the evidence base: classical music is great for wellbeing and life really is better with music.
Greta Bradman is a soprano, Registered Psychologist and ABC Classic presenter.
Music for Wellbeing: Flourishing playlist
Bedřich Smetana: Má Vlast (My Homeland): II. Vltava (Die Moldau)
Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, Jiří Bělohlávek (conductor) [12:00]
Claude Debussy: Arabesques for piano, L. 66
Simon Trpčeski (piano) [07:32]
Margaret Bonds: The Ballad Of The Brown King: IX. Alleluia
The Dessoff Choirs, The Dessoff Orchestra, Malcolm J. Merriweather (conductor) [02:34]
Joe Hisaishi: Spirited Away “One Summer’s Day”
Joe Hisaishi (piano), London Symphony Orchestra, Roman Simovic (conductor) [03:57]
Franz Schubert: Schwanengesang, D. 957: IV. Ständchen
Genevieve Lacey (recorder), Karin Schaupp (guitar) [03:47]
Steve Allen & William Barton: Heartbeat
Riley Lee (shakuhachi), Steve Allen (guitar), William Barton (didgeridoo) [07:53]
Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer & Chris Thile: Nebbia
Chris Thile (guitar), Edgar Meyer (bass), Stuart Duncan (fiddle), Yo-Yo Ma (cello) [04:27]
Ralph Vaughan Williams: The Lark Ascending
Academy of St Martin in the Fields, Iona Brown (violin), Sir Neville Marriner (conductor) [16:04]
Sergei Rachmaninov: Vocalise
Renée Fleming (soprano), English Chamber Orchestra, Jeffrey Tate (conductor) [05:34]
Ennio Morricone: The Mission “Gabriel’s Oboe”
Gilda Buttà (piano), Yo-Yo Ma (cello), Roma Sinfonietta Orchestra, Ennio Morricone (conductor) [02:21]
Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 4 in G Major: III. Peacefully
Sydney Soloists, John Harding (conductor) [18:38]
Peter Sculthorpe: Little Suite: III. Left Bank Waltz
Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, David Porcelijn (conductor) [02:42]