Can Music Create Peace?

Musing on a big question, from The Beatles to Curtis Mayfield, Woodstock to Ukraine.

I was driven to the writing that follows firstly by the realization that I have been at peace the last few weeks with respect to my mother’s passing. The death itself was obviously a deeply saddening event, and the subsequent four long weeks until and through the funeral were emotionally draining, and there were lots of tears and heartbreak, and I don’t like the word “closure” because it applies a zero-sum outcome to everything, and life death doesn’t work like that for the living. But… I’ve subsequently become extraordinarily grateful for so much about her death, especially compared to stories I’ve heard these last few weeks from other sons and daughters of deceased mothers who were not so fortunate. Ruth went peacefully, when it was her time, with my brother and myself holding her, in the safety of a loving care home, and the funeral plans she left many years back were followed thoroughly – she had her funeral at the Beverley Minster for Christ’s sake! and people came from hundreds of miles – and we had a proper happy(ish) life celebration at the pub opposite the house where she gave birth to me almost 61 years ago. And following her departure, during a week when no other music sat well with me, her choice of funeral song (“So Quiet In Here” by Van Morrison) including its reference to an undisclosed place – literal or metaphorical – where it’s “so peaceful in here,” brought me not just comfort but sent me on a journey of delving deep into Morrison’s prolific career, with not only some excellent contributions from readers, but a couple of books in the mail also.

As a result, the concept of peace – internal perhaps more than external - was already on my mind when, earlier this month, I was exposed to an artist(s) and an album by the Flow State newsletter. Being one of those who can only work to instrumental music, and mainly ambient music at that, the thrice-weekly Flow State recommendation in my Inbox is my lifeline to keeping this supply of music updated and refreshed, informed and enthused. Now, Flow State is news sensitive, meaning it will often honor a musician’s passing (such as Kevin Ayers this past month), and it also pays attention to international affairs, which may explain why, early in March, it shared out a collaboration between two Ukrainian artists, Ambiotik and 58918102, entitled Ordered Chaos.

This is hardly the first time Flow State has made a conscious effort to promote Ukrainian artists over the last few years, but it seemed additionally potent/important in light of what had happened at the White House between Presidents Zelensky and Trump a week or so earlier, the sense that Ukraine was being abandoned by the new US administration in favor of an aggressive imperial-minded Russia, and that as a result, the relative internal peace that Europe has experienced since World War II was also, suddenly, at increased risk. (Certainly it was the lead news item in Europe for several days.)

Flow State described Ordered Chaos thus: “It reminds us of Cluster & Eno, decidedly ambient with krautrock influences”. One of the two artists, 58918012, who gives his real name only as Yura, described it instead as “lush, soft, light ambient music with some gentle melodic and rhythmical elements here and there”. For my part, what I heard was something closer to the latter than the former, but neither description did justice to what immediately struck me (albeit quietly) as one of the most beautiful and peaceful ambient albums that’s ever crossed my ears – although I allow that, being in a peaceful emotional frame of mind, perhaps I was especially receptive to it. Either way, it immediately made me think: if these artists are Ukrainian, then given everything they are going through and have gone through for the last decade and more, how can they possibly make music so profoundly peaceful?

Subsequently exploring 58918012’s catalogue on Bandcamp, I find he has used the platform for no less than fifty-two (yes, 52) releases in the last five years alone (he released another solo album just a couple of weeks after Ordered Chaos), and that, as you might hope given this output, they vary in mood and intensity. For example, the March 2022 release Needle Tip is dark and dense and driven by what I will call doombeats, or as he put it, “a reflection of this bloody WAR initiated by russia [sic] against Ukraine,” that had commenced only two weeks earlier. On the other side of the musical scale, Lullabies from 2020, featuring the female vocalist Marfa, is “a tribute to Ukrainian culture in general and ethnic music in particular” and takes a decidedly orchestral-ambient approach to time-honored songs intended to sing Ukrainian babies to sleep.

Yura’s personal Bandcamp profile is short and succinct, and you can read it on the right hand side of his every release: “Music is one of those very few things that makes me truly calm and happy. Sometimes it comes from the inside, sometimes from the outside. But it's always my feelings. There's nothing more to say. Enjoy.” (I would quote Ambiotik’s self-description on Bandcamp, but it’s in Ukrainian and he has a much smaller catalogue, though I sense a real artist at work in what I have heard.) The sense that Yura can’t stop making music and just wants to share it – which would be problematic if he was not so evidently good at it - is furthered by the fact that while I was researching his music, he dropped the price of $50 to purchase his entire digital catalogue on Bandcamp, all 52 releases, available for download up to CD quality, in half, to $25. (I bought it, let me suggest some of you do the same.) This could bring us into a discussion on the financial value of music in 2025, but thankfully other people are tackling that subject in depth.

Instead, I found myself asking the question, Can Music Create Peace? It’s one that has two distinct strands. There is the question of whether music can create external peace, and whether it can create internal peace. If the answer to both questions is in the affirmative, then we could consider this a Venn diagram, and the closer the two circles come to sitting entirely on top of each other, the better the world would be and hopefully the happier we would all be as a result. However, that is certainly not the world we live in now.

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Tony Fletcher, Wordsmith, posts twice a week. If you like what you read, please subscribe.

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I am unsure that the latter question – can music bring internal peace? – needs extensive exploration; its affirmation goes back to the words of Plato, Socrates and Confucius, and there are few among us who have not found some sort of solace and comfort, an inner harmony and tranquility, from music at some point in our lives. Whether this comes through playing it (as per Yura), singing along to it (perhaps in a spiritual setting), or just listening (as to myself with Van Morrison the week after my mother’s death), there is adequate academic and scientific study about the impact of music on our brains and our hormones, and ample personal testimony to its peaceful value in our lives.

The other strand - can music bring external peace? (by which I mean peace between peoples individual, tribal and national, who may otherwise be sparring or actively fighting) - is far more debatable, and thereby deserving more examination. Unsurprisingly, I found no shortage of literature to draw upon for this examination, from academic studies through to magazine articles online and in-print, Ted talks and other YouTube videos. college courses, and even international conferences.

Much of this dialogue is optimistic. For example, an essay by Professor Jeremy Begbie on “Modeling Harmony: Music in Peace-Building” within the 2016 book Mediating Peace opens with the near-empirical statement that “There can hardly be a corner of the globe that has not witnessed the power of music to promote peace in the midst of conflict,” going on to explore the history of “vertical harmony” – i.e. the combination of notes that the Western musical tradition deems as natural and therefore peaceful – and how the latter word also has wider resonance with harmony between peoples.

American pianist George Lepauw answers the title of his TedX Talk from 2024, “Can music actually foster world peace?” with an equally confident affirmative. He opens this talk with the familiar story of the Christmas Eve Truce in the trenches of Flanders in 1914, recounting how the sound of a German soldier singing “Stille Nacht” brought British soldiers into vocal harmony, leading to a night of mutual ceasefire, the exchange of pleasantries and gifts, shared singing of Christmas carols, and even, so it is often stated, an international football match. Lepauw cites this as an example of how “Music had brought peace to enemies,” and follows on immediately that, “had it not been for the generals’ orders to resume fighting, this conflict would have been over then and there”. He later cites Leonard Berstein’s conducting of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in Berlin on Christmas Day 1989 (ironically, something I was drawn to just a few weeks earlier) as another positive example of music bringing peace, along with that of Marianne Anderson performing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” at the Lincoln Memorial in April 1939, after refusal by the Daughters of the American Revolution to allow Anderson, who was Black, use of D.C.’s Constitution Hall, led First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to resign her membership and the concert’s profile, performance and historical relevance be duly elevated. (I wrote more about this here. Eleanor’s letter is below.)

Back over in Mediating Peace, James Amanze, a lecturer at the University of Botswana, writes about “The Role of Music and Dance in Peacemaking and Reconciliation” regarding “The Case of Rwanda after the 1994 Genocide,” and how those who participated in the genocide and then fled the country were required to stay in “solidarity camps” upon return, where they “were taught and required to sing songs with lyrics such as ‘We are no Hutus, we are no Tutsis. We are all Rwandese now’… It is reported that most of the songs sung in camps were about peace, unity, and how to live together”.

As a final example among dozens I could draw from, in 1999 the Palestinian-American academic Edward Said co-founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra alongside the Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim, who wrote in the International Herald Tribune in 2008 that “the same two people who might encounter each other at a checkpoint in the roles of border guard and citizen under occupation sit next to one another in this orchestra,” and that “music makes it possible for the subjects of mutually hostile governments to support one another because it engenders a true and effortless spirit of creativity and brotherhood”.

Noble sentiments these may all be, but none can present true evidence to confirm their own claims. In fact, Begbie is on firmer ground when he admits that for all “its peacebuilding promise,” music “also has the potential to divide and alienate, provoke hostility and foment violence”, going on to reference how full-throated Serbian folk singing served to antagonize and strike fear into the hearts of Croats during the violent dissolution of the former Yugoslavia; ditto, historically, the songs of Protestant versus Catholic Irish, something many Brits have been exposed to. (One day I’ll tell you the story of being taken into questioning by the UDA in Belfast and being “encouraged” to purchase some cassettes of militant Protestant songs!)

This example of how music can be used to violent means with perhaps greater effect than it can be towards peaceful ends is further borne out by Amenze admitting that nationalist Hutu radio stations broadcast specific anti-Tutsi music by “rapper” Simon Bikindi and how “Eye witnesses tell that Hutu killers sang Bikindi’s songs as they hacked or beat to death the Tutsis using their government issued machetes.”¹ As for the solidarity camps, they sound suspiciously like the forms of (re)indoctrination used by totalitarian and fascistic states throughout history (Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge being an example), with extra song and dance.

And then, with regard to Lebauw’s great claim, the extent of the fabled Christmas Truce is constantly questioned by historians, besides which, most of the Western Front remained in full combat throughout the same period. I would even suggest that we can pitch Lebauw’s claim on its head and suggest that, had music truly had the capacity to create peace, then the carol singing that led to the apparent night of cease-fire would have so pacified and unified the troops that they would have refused to cross back into their respective trenches and shoot at each other, generals’ orders be damned. Similarly, Lepauw’s citation on Berstein’s “Ode To Peace” fails to acknowledge that the concert took place after the Berlin Wall came down, a historic event that involved geopolitics, Glasnost, and the bravery of East and West German citizens in challenging its physical being, all with little musical influence. Finally, the example of Marian Anderson says more about the slow progress towards racial integration in the United States than anything to indicate that it led to actual peace. (World War II broke out months later: after the USA joined the Allied war effort in 1941, Black soldiers continued to serve in segregated units. This is something I also wrote about last year after visiting the FDR Presidential Library and Museum, suggesting that the Black folk singer Josh White had a profound impact on FDR’s institutionally racist thinking, again thanks to his wife.)

Perhaps a better source of reference can be found in the essay “Can there be ‘Music For Peace’?” by Towson University Music Professor Gerald L. Phillips from the International journal on world peace in 2004. Phillips begins his own exploration from a place of great suspicion, asking the question. “What if the only thing those who offer ‘music for peace’ really do is present a performance just like thousands of others, except for a few platitudes in the name of peace and a self-congratulatory reception at the end?” He explores this further by quoting Arthur Danto asking, in part, “Did the Beatles cause, or only prefigure, the political perturbations of the sixties?”

The first question is certainly valid, if a touch cynical. The latter question I am happy to consider by exchanging the word “reflect” for “prefigure,” and although doing so brings us no closer to an empirical answer, I think it allows me to state that the Beatles’ American popularity, especially the phenomenon of their appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in February 1964, has frequently been cited as distinctly connected to the assassination of President Kennedy the previous November, and the need for Americans to find their own relief from the depression the country had reputedly settled into. The Beatles thus appeared on the scene – and on Ed Sullivan - with perfect timing. But this timing could not have happened without Beatlemania already being in full flow in the UK, nor without the Beatles reacting to their initial successes by having already grown as songwriters and recording artists at a pace previously unknown amongst pop artists. I could certainly write a separate essay arguing that there was no other British pop group capable of fulfilling the role that the Beatles fulfilled at that moment in history, and that this was a unique flow of events in which several factors shifted the western social fabric into uncharted territory.

It was evidence of their supreme standing that in the spring of 1967, The Beatles agreed to participate in a global television experiment called “Our World,” for which they were commissioned to write a song that could be easily understood around the planet. The result was “All You Need Is Love,” its premier transmitted live to an estimated 400 million viewers in 40 countries. While not directly referencing peace, the song certainly inferred that one noun could lead to the other, per the expression “peace and love” that is commonly used. But did The Beatles cause or merely reflect what became known as “the summer of love,” and either way, did the musical and cultural events of 1967 – the love-ins, the emergence of the hippy culture, flowers in hair, the Monterrey International Pop Festival, the Beatles singing “All You Need Is Love?” – do anything substantial to create peace and love? The next year saw student riots in France lead to violent protests and even more violent put-downs all across the Western World, while the Vietnam War only escalated, so perhaps not. And while this reality check did not dampen their collective and individual pursuit of peace, did John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band’s impassioned single “Give Peace A Chance” do any more to end the Vietnam War than anything else related to his Bed-In with his wife Yoko Ono in 1969, which was widely laughed off by the media at the time. Did his 1971 single “Imagine,” for all its international renown did or his and Yoko’s single “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” from the following year?

Likewise, the three-day festival of peace and music at Woodstock in 1969, often highlighted as a watershed moment in society, was swiftly followed later that year by the mayhem and murder at Altamont, and as the tagline for the documentary Trainwreck describes it, the 1999 30-year Woodstock anniversary “delivered days of rage, riots and real harm.”

No, none of Lennon’s music, nor that of The Beatles, ended the Vietnam War or other conflicts, let alone brought about substantial world peace. But in terms of influence upon a generation of young Americans fearful of the draft, these songs were part of a larger body of work, musical and elsewhere across youth culture, which mobilized a generation to increase not just their demands to end a specific war, but to pursue the cause of peace. Music alone could not bring peace, but as Lennon was also very aware, naming yet another song for it in 1968, nor could violent revolution.

It is a little easy to reference The Beatles in a conversation about music and peace. Perhaps we need to look to musicians who led by example. (Lennon came in for accusations of materialistic hypocrisy regarding “Imagine” in particular.) The folk singer Pete Seeger never ceased believing that singing together could help bring about peace, to which end his concerts did not so much request as demand audience participation.² I have a vivid memory of a 2006 New Yorker profile concluding with the journalist driving through Seeger’s nearest town of Beacon, New York one day (Seeger, a true environmentalist, had built his own log cabin in the woods outside of Beacon where he raised his family) and seeing Seeger standing on a corner, alone, holding a banner with that single word, “Peace.” But to the extent that Seeger succeeded in his life, one could point more firmly to his single-issue work dedicated to cleaning up the Hudson River, using his boat the Clearwater as a communications and educational tool. Without Seeger’s direct activism, we might still not be able to swim and fish in the Hudson; however, there is little evidence that his actual music created this change.

We can also look to Curtis Mayfield as a powerful example of how a western musician lived and made music of peace. A frequent observer of society’s flaws, especially those of the USA around race, he nonetheless exuded a perpetually peaceful countenance, per such beautiful - and indeed influential – songs as “Choice of Colors,” “Miss Black America” and “Move On Up.” This does not mean that he always chose the safe option. Phillips in his essay asserts that “artworks cannot just ‘demonstrate’ for peace, but must also resist the subversive force of contemporary ideologies centered in commodification, control and power.” Arguably, Mayfield did just that when employed to provide the soundtrack to the film Superfly. After seeing early rushes and determining that this Hollywood blaxploitation of inner city ghetto life served primarily as a “cocaine informercial” he then penned, recorded, sang and performed songs like “Freddie’s Dead” and “Pusherman,” that warned people away from the drug instead (Kelly). As a single individual, Mayfield was no more effective at ending drug use in America’s inner cities or bringing black and white Americans together in true peace than the student who stood in front of a tank before the massacre at Tiananmen Square, but both served as inspirational figures campaigning for a better world and should be celebrated as such. (

Jagged Time Lapse

’s Dan Epstein and I did a great Crossed Channels episode on Curtis recently, focusing on his early solo career.)

Move On Up with Curtis Mayfield

And what about now? What role can or does music play at a time where it feels like the very rhetoric of society, from its so-called social media up to governance itself, favors violent confrontational rhetoric over peaceful empathetic discussion? Where do the youth fit into this picture given the language they’re subjected to? For a positive example, we can ook to the Museum of Peace, an online and in-class portal hosted by the University of St. Andrew’s in Scotland and populated by its student working under the banner of “Visualizing Peace.” The web site contains a number of interesting short articles with an array of fascinating titles, such as the “Eurovision Song Contest and its peace projects” to “The Sound of Peace: The Transformative Influence of Rock Nacional in Argentina,” “Get Your Brits Out”- ‘Kneecap’, Activism and Antagonism in Northern Ireland,” and “Pockets of Peace in Ukraine, Spring 2022” clearly relevant to where I came in.

But it’s easy to write about the concept. How easy is it to act upon it? The Museum of Peace should be applauded for at least trying to provide some answers, inviting student musicians from both St. Andrews and the London Guildhall School of Music to compose under the title of “Music for Peace.” Three listed responses indicate the challenges, musical and social. The dance producer Robert Southby composed an instrumental entitled “Visualizing Peace,” admitting to initial sceptisism, given that his music is typically “designed to be played loud and make people move, and therefore peace is not usually the aim of the music”. But he sought to meet the challenge, articulating both in music and the following words, how “There aren’t many places in the world where people who don’t know each other come together to experience the same thing both visually in front of them, but also physically as the sound vibrates through their bodies at the same time, and are brought together in music, bringing a sense of unity and peace through that shared experience”.

A young classical composer Ross Donaldson worked with the same title for his “small suite for orchestra,” citing Shostakovich as a surprisingly abrasive main influence for the fact that “his music often acts as his own criticism for oppression and breaches of peace from foreign, domestic and internal sources.” The students’ professor, Dr. Alice Konig, writing on the web page with both these compositions, subsequently tells us of Donaldson’s composition, which is also supplied as audio, to “listen out for solo lines… that merge into sections of polyphony and unison – an expression of the combination of ‘I/we’ and individuality/togetherness that is needed in all peacebuilding efforts.”

However, not all the “Visualizing Peace” student efforts came to fruition. In her own article entitled “When Music Does Not Feel Right,” Guildhall student Isadora Pulman-Jones writes of her attempt, as a British Jew in February 2024, “to create some sort of Palestinian/Israeli fusion piece, perhaps with lyrics in Yiddish – a cultural language of Judaism – and an instrumentation that was undeniably Palestinian, as a symbol of Jewish solidarity with Palestine, drawing on inspiration from the Barenboim-Said orchestral collaboration of [the] West-Eastern Divan Orchestra,” that which I mentioned earlier. However, she continues, as the situation in Gaza worsened through 2024, “my place as a Jewish musician creating for a project about peace began to feel futile and somewhat ‘tone deaf’” and therefore why, “After many failed attempted writing sessions, venturing in different directions, and trying to work out a way I could channel what I was feeling, I sadly decided to pull out of the project” And while it is true that the Western-Divan Orchestra continues to perform, so the situation in the Middle East appears so much worse than when the orchestra was founded in 1999. Music clearly has its limits.

Ultimately, it would seem that music itself cannot bring about external peace. We are kidding ourselves if we think it can. But it can serve as a catalyst for peace, it can campaign for peace, it can sing for peace (even if at times that means singing about war) and with its ability to influence, can perhaps at least stymie the geopolitical fondness for violent solutions to every perceivable problem. Allowing that music can certainly bring us inner peace - and that artists like Ambiotik and 58918102 can create such peaceful music as Ordered Chaos in the midst of their country’s defensive war – all of that may have to be enough.

1. Having listened to some of Bikindi’s music, it is pure African, not rap, and the comments, albeit many in local language, appear much more nuanced about his negative influence, to which I cannot attest either way.

2. However, in my book All Hopped Up and Ready to Go, I called into question Seeger’s isolationist and pro-communist stance with his 1930s-40s folk group The Almanac Singers which they only abandoned after the events of Pearl Harbor put the US on the same side as his tacit support of Stalin, at which (t)he(y) went from accusing FDR and Eleanor as warmongers to singing “Round and Round Hitler’s Grave.” Again, no one is perfect.