To Örebro University

The author suggests that music harbours a special capacity for its listeners to sympathetically relate to foreign sets of values. Music has the ability to function as a limit-transgressing and unifying link at both a collective and individual level. That music is particularly suited for this has to do with the emotional power of music, the affective impact by which music in its very specific way becomes a felt experience in time. On the one hand listeners may be affectively addressed by (in principle) any music, irrespectively of cultural difference. But above all, music – one’s «own» music – has the possibility to become a confirming self-object, enhancing a self-confidence that enables critical assimilation, rather than authoritarian dismissal. This may thereby facilitate and enable constructive and enriching encounters with others. Listening to and learning about the aesthetic values that define different cultures, styles and genres of music – but also others’ individual preferences and aesthetic appraisals – may thus function as cultivation of social competence in an aesthetic context. However for this sympathetic function of music to come off certain requirements must be met.