Professor Tia DeNora Receives Honorary Doctorate at UiB

Professor Tia DeNora is a leading researcher in the sociology of music at the University of Exeter. She is an internationally recognized and prominent scholar with a very broad disciplinary and interdisciplinary profile within music research. 

DeNora is affiliated with KMD through the Grieg Academy with a previous appointment as Adjunct Professor and through collaboration in several research projects and the Grieg Research School of Interdisciplinary Music Studies. 

“I am delighted to receive this honor. This honorary doctorate is particularly special for me due to my long association with my colleagues at The Grieg Academy at KMD.  The pioneering work with The Grieg Academy Music Therapy Research Centre (GAMUT) on music interaction and music and health has been central to my research during these last ten years. My teaching there has also been very rewarding due to the wonderful students”, says Tia DeNora.

Music and wellbeing

Dean Åsil Bøthun at KMD expresses great pleasure that the University of Bergen is conferring the honorary doctorate on Tia DeNora.

“Tia DeNora has been groundbreaking in research on the connection between music and health. Her work promotes the importance of music and the arts as fundamental values for individual—and societal—health and well-being. She has been particularly engaged in interdisciplinary perspectives and approaches, which have had great significance for the fields at KMD.”

DeNora´s research is grounded in music sociology and critical perspectives. Through ethnographic research and theoretical reflection, her work explores how individuals and societies use and experience music to navigate their lives, and to create community, care, and wellbeing. 

“I think music functions in relation to wellbeing in several ways. Music is a temporal medium. At the individual level we may use music to relax, get us through difficult times in our lives, or remember someone we have lost. At the societal level it is very effective to draw and hold people together through mutual activities. Music creates bridges and social ties between us, which is a major feature to promote wellbeing,” she says. 

Music provides hope  

Tia DeNora is considered one of the pioneers of music sociology. The research field has developed extensively over the years, she explains. From the 1970s the field shifted from more philosophical to how music is a central part of being human. There is also an increasing focus on music´s dynamic qualities.

“The question that initially led me to music therapy, is how music can scaffold how people interact with each other. Music is an important part of what shapes us and contributes to our orientations and values. I am interested in how music is a part of political organisations and how people affiliate and care about issues and causes. These are questions of how music can get into our actions, help to condition and support us,” she says.  

“One important theme of my research is also hope, and how music can help people hold onto hopefulness and thus support action and activism. It could not be any more important in these turbulent times where people face difficulties. If anything, music is more important now than ever.”

She sees that the relationship between music, health and society has changed compared to when she first began her research.

“There is now more appreciation about what music can help to do, and an increasing awareness of how to understand it. We need to find new methods to look at musical interactions, at what happens when people engage with music in real time situations. There is much more hope for music´s use in situations of distress and trouble. But there is still a lot more work required regarding recognition at policy level, especially in the US and the UK,” she says.