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This chapter looks for regularities in the complex and ever-changing pattern of individual preferences to music, with a particular focus on age changes from early childhood through to adolescence. These questions are of vital concern to musicians, teachers, and audiences, but the approach here is from the perspective of psychologists. This chapter reviews the vast and scattered literature on the development of taste and preference, and tries to explain the main findings in terms of three main theoretical approaches: experimental aesthetics, developmental approaches, and social identity theory (SIT).

The fundamental characteristic that distinguishes the psychologist of music from the music theorist or analyst is the former's concern with empirical measurement of musical behaviour or response. A secondary concern is with ‘generalisability’. Psychologists are concerned to discover commonalities of response that hold across members of a population. Problems of operationalising musical responses are not trivial ones. These problems explain, to a significant degree, why psychologists have made so little progress in exploring the higher levels of musical response, including the emotional and aesthetic aspects of the response. The selection of research topics must be guided by further considerations, and these considerations are ones that psychologists and music theorists probably share. For this reason, the central topics in psychological research have been concerned with aspects of musical structure that are common to the widest body of music for which there exists a formal literature of theory and analysis: Western tonal music, whether art, folk, or popular.

Musical responses to the sinking of the Lusitania (1915)—a watershed in World War 1—appeared on both sides of the Atlantic. In Britain, Frank Bridge composed his Lament for string orchestra, dedicated to Catherine Crompton, a child who had perished along with her entire family. The piece, performed professionally in London, was written for a type of ensemble that was popular with wealthy amateur women string players. Since strings were associated with the expressivity of the human voice and were becoming understood as having therapeutic properties, Bridge’s music may be considered a “lullament” for its combination of elements of lullaby and lament. This hybrid genre of grief further carried gendered and class-ridden meanings. The work reinforced and transcended British cultural and musical norms and boundaries.

Claude Debussy’s final works were written under the twin shadows of terminal illness and World War I. In response to the latter, he emphasized his stature as a “musicien français” and used quotation and paratexts to challenge the boundaries of abstract music. Noël des enfants qui n’ont plus de maison, a work often dismissed as blatant propaganda, stands out for its lack of discretion in text and music. The reception of the performance of Noël at charity concerts and at a concert organized by Jane Bathori confirms both its contemporaneous importance and its ambiguous place in Debussy’s music and thought. Reframing that work in the context of the Great War facilitates a reconsideration of the whole of Debussy’s wartime compositions.

World War I gave John Philip Sousa, always an astute businessman, several opportunities to reshape his image and rebuild his career. Sousa embraced first neutrality, and then preparedness, notably in championing “Wake Up, America” during his residency at New York’s Hippodrome. When the country entered the war, Sousa was acclaimed for his quintessential patriotism, and he enlisted in the Naval Reserve to train bandsmen at the Great Lakes Training Station. He even changed his appearance, shaving off his celebrated beard; and he joined in anti-German jingoism, writing a wedding march as a substitute for Wagner and Mendelssohn. By war’s end, he had recaptured the public imagination and rebuilt his legend for the years to come.

World War I, with its attendant music and noise, was followed immediately by an influenza epidemic (the “Spanish flu”) that was met by a resounding silence. To meet the epidemic, theatres closed and gatherings were prohibited; Western culture itself paused until the danger passed. Realistic portrayals and responses through music were rare (in contrast to the war), but they may be detectable in works by artists as diverse as Charles Tomlinson Griffes and Blind Willie Johnson. The nationalism of the conflict yielded to a new transnationalism, neither peaceful nor stable, described most memorably by Randolph Bourne, himself a victim of the disease.

Musical performance is an irreducibly social phenomenon, manifested through the multiple relationships between performers and audience. In live contexts, the nature and meaning of performance encompass the two-way interplay between performers and audience. This chapter surveys a range of research, from the philosophical to the empirical, into the parameters of this interplay, both during and after performances, focusing most specifically on those aspects that have implications for the creative practice of the musician. These aspects go beyond sound parameters to features of the performance often seen as ‘extra-musical’, such as the visual and gestural aspects of performance, the architecture of the performance space and perceived norms of behaviour within the concert context. Consideration is given to how these elements contribute to different levels of experience, from the ‘basic’ appreciation of structural elements through to the ‘peak’ experiences which music performance sometimes engenders. Also considered is audience feedback, both formal and informal, and how it may have an impact on creative performance.

The sinking of the Lusitania and the subsequent shift in the United States from neutrality toward participation in World War I affected Charles Ives in both his music and his business as a life insurance executive. The tragedy’s effect on the insurance industry was far-reaching, and government proposals to supply insurance to soldiers were initially resisted. As an artist, Ives sided with the soldier as “everyman” in his war songs and in his use of the hymn “In the Sweet Bye and Bye” in “From Hanover Square North” and “The Things Our Fathers Loved.” Ives’s insurance firm suffered financial losses initially but then supported engagement, participating fully and generously in public initiatives like the Liberty Loan campaigns.