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​To Music is to Co-Become

​A Process-Relational Understanding of Musicking
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​Any kindergarten teacher will tell you that three things bring people together: food, music, and storytelling.

To that we might add shared activities like gardening, painting, dancing, baking, playing games, walking together, making crafts. Still, the holy trinity - music, food, and storytelling - have a special magic and all three can help make the world a better place. If combined with a philosophy of generosity, emphasizing equality over hierarchy, and compassion over domination, music can be part of a larger whole when it comes to transforming the world. We need ideas, too, and other kinds of action—organizing, caregiving, policy-making, protesting, planting. But we also need joy, and music gives us that joy. It lifts spirits, builds bridges, and helps us remember that we're not alone. In its own way, it’s a form of healing, resistance, and hope.

What Is Music? From Object to Activity

For centuries, Western thought has treated music as a noun—a fixed object like a score, a symphony, or a song. But in Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (1998), New Zealand musicologist Christopher Small proposed a radical rethinking. He invited us to consider music not as a thing but as an activity—something people do. To name this activity, he coined the verb musicking.

“To music,” Small wrote, “is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance.”

With this simple shift, Small opened up a wide field of participation. Musicking includes not only performing and listening, but also composing, rehearsing, dancing, stage managing, running sound, setting up the venue, and even selling tickets. All who contribute to a musical event are musicking. Music becomes not an object to be possessed or perfected but a shared process to be lived.

Musicking as a Web of Felt Relationships

At the heart of musicking is felt relationship. According to Small, every act of musicking establishes a web of felt relationships—between performer and audience, among the performers themselves, and between individuals and their cultural or spiritual worlds. These relationships are not side effects; they are the meaning of the music. In this view, musicking becomes a form of social and even spiritual ritual, enacting values and exploring ways of being together in the world.

Musicking as Co-Creative Relational Energy

From a process-relational perspective, musicking is more than a cultural or human-centered act—it is an instance of co-creative relational energy. Drawing on Alfred North Whitehead’s metaphysics, each musical moment may be seen as an actual occasion of experience: a pulse of becoming shaped by the prehension of others and the transmission of affective energy.

The sounds, rhythms, movements, and silences within a musical event are not merely coordinated—they are mutually influential vectors of feeling, dynamically informing and transforming one another. This is a field of mutual prehensions, where each participant feels and is felt by others. These interwoven feelings create shared subjective forms—emotional and aesthetic patterns that shape and are shaped by all involved.

Musicking as a Nexus of Co-Becoming

We might say that musicking is a collectively shared occasion of experience—or, more precisely, a nexus of occasions of experience in which people participate. Each individual brings a unique perspective, mood, body, and history, yet the moment draws them into a unified yet diverse process of becoming. The group, though composed of many centers of experience, begins to function as if a single organism—co-creating meaning through sound and movement.

This nexus endures only as long as the music lasts, yet it leaves tracks in the soul—echoes of shared feeling, rhythmic memory, and embodied resonance that persist long after the final note. Musicking becomes a way of carrying others within us, prehending the beauty or intensity of the event into future moments of life.

Genres of Musicking

Musicking is not one thing. It takes shape through a rich diversity of genres, each with its own textures, histories, instruments, cultural settings, and emotional resonances. Whether formal or improvised, sacred or profane, celebratory or confrontational, musical genres are modes of relational energy, inviting different kinds of participation, feeling, and becoming.

Classical music offers deeply structured sonic landscapes—spaces for reflection, tension and release, and often a sense of timeless grandeur. Folk music tends to be more communal and grounded in local memory, functioning as a vessel for cultural heritage and oral tradition. Rock and roll and country music often stir emotion through storytelling and shared rebellion, articulating longing, heartbreak, hope, and rootedness. Hip-hop emerges as both poetry and protest—a rhythmic nexus of self-expression, cultural critique, and empowerment. Electronic music explores the boundaries of sound, sensation, and space, building immersive environments that are at once bodily and atmospheric. Jazz, blues, gospel, metal, reggae, chant, ambient, punk, and many others expand the spectrum still further.

From a process-relational standpoint, each genre can be seen as a style of world-making—a way of shaping co-creative relational energy through particular sonic forms and performance practices. Each genre invites different subjective forms and patterns of prehension. Some call forth contemplation and awe; others foster dance, rage, intimacy, or ecstatic joy. None is inherently superior to another; all are expressions of human (and sometimes more-than-human) attempts to make meaning through sound.

Genres also evolve. They intermingle, hybridize, and respond to new cultural conditions. This fluidity is not a loss of purity but an expression of the creativity of the universe itself, ever unfolding, always in process. Genres are not fixed containers, but living traditions—historically rooted yet open to transformation.

To recognize the variety of musicking genres is to honor the multiplicity of ways humans become together through sound. Each genre holds potential for communion, critique, healing, and transformation—depending on how it is lived, felt, and shared.

The Moral Ambiguity of Musicking

Yet not all musicking is ethically good. While it always creates some form of co-creative relational energy, the emotional bonds it fosters can bend in many directions. Musicking can deepen affection and solidarity, but it can also reinforce exclusion, superiority, or even contempt. The shared beat can unite a group even as it sharpens its boundary against outsiders.

From a process-relational view, this ambiguity is inherent in any nexus of becoming. Every musicking event is ethically open—capable of enacting compassion or cruelty, generosity or alienation. Its value lies not merely in the sounds or forms themselves, but in the relational dynamics and intentions it embodies and evokes.

Resonant Communion: The Healing Power of Positive Musicking

When musicking fosters compassion within a group and openness toward the wider world, it becomes an instance of what we might call resonant communion. In such moments, the co-creative relational energy generated in the musical event becomes a force for healing, justice, empathy, and renewal. Participants feel not only bonded with one another, but sensitized to the joys and sufferings of others beyond the immediate circle.

This kind of musicking does not retreat from the world but faces it—sometimes joyfully, sometimes prophetically—with moral imagination. It rehearses new forms of community. It heals wounds. It bears witness to the possible. Musicking at its best becomes a relational rehearsal for beloved community, offering a glimpse of what Whitehead calls harmonious intensity—a momentary but real realization of beauty-in-relationship.

Small Group Musicking: Comfort and Energy

Not all musicking takes place on grand stages or in prophetic action. Some of its most meaningful forms happen in small, intimate settings, where the aim is not transformation of the world, but companionship in it. Campfire songs, lullabies, singalongs at senior living centers, hymns sung in a circle, or impromptu jams among friends—these are acts of musicking for comfort and energy, helping people feel at home in the world and with one another.

In these contexts, musicking generates co-creative relational energy not through spectacle, but through shared presence. The familiarity of a melody, the rhythm of voices joined in unison, the laughter that follows a missed lyric—these create a field of warmth, memory, and lightness. They offer emotional grounding, and sometimes joyful defiance in the face of illness, grief, isolation, or fatigue.

From a process-relational perspective, such moments are no less significant than more outwardly dramatic forms of musicking. They are nexūs of gentle becoming, where participants are not only entertained but sustained. Each voice adds to a web of mutual prehensions; each silence holds the dignity of being-with. For elders in memory care or children around a campfire, the music itself may be fleeting, but the felt connection can linger as a healing trace.

This kind of musicking reminds us that beauty, connection, and spiritual nourishment can arise wherever people are willing to be with one another in sound. It is not performance—it is presence.

Socially Progressive Musicking (Protest Music)

In some contexts, musicking becomes more than an expression of shared feeling or healing—it becomes an instrument of prophetic witness and social transformation. We may call this socially progressive musicking: the use of co-creative relational energy to challenge injustice, affirm human dignity, and imagine more compassionate ways of living together.

Socially progressive musicking occurs when the harmonies and rhythms of a musical event align with values of liberation, equity, ecological care, and peace. It can take the form of protest songs sung in the streets, spirituals rooted in collective resilience, feminist punk defying patriarchal norms, or indigenous chants reclaiming sacred presence in colonized spaces. In each case, the music does more than reflect the world as it is—it enacts a world as it could be.

From a process-relational point of view, this kind of musicking expands the moral arc of a nexus. The momentary community formed through mutual prehensions and shared subjective forms becomes a seedbed for ethical imagination. It offers participants an aesthetic experience of justice-in-the-making—a glimpse of the possible. Through sound, people prehend not only each other’s presence but also each other’s pain, hope, and yearning for change.

Importantly, socially progressive musicking does not require grand stages or perfect performances. It can happen in quiet circles of lament, in spontaneous drum circles, in community choirs that welcome every voice. Wherever music becomes a medium for empathy, solidarity, and ethical becoming, it carries the power to shake loose the inertia of the present and stir the conscience toward more just futures.

Theological Musicking

Musicking can also be theological. That is, it can serve as a medium through which people explore, express, and even encounter the sacred—whether named as God, Spirit, the divine, or the deep relational ground of being. We might call this theological musicking: music-making and music-hearing that invites open and relational understandings of God and the universe.

In the context of process theology, musicking becomes a way of participating in the ongoing creativity of the cosmos—a creativity in which God is not an omnipotent ruler outside of time, but a co-sufferer and co-creator within the evolving universe. Here, God is felt not in absolute control but in the lure toward harmony, intensity, novelty, and beauty. The tones, silences, and rhythms of a musical moment become more than aesthetic features; they become sacramental signs of divine presence and invitation.

When people music together with this awareness, the event becomes a kind of theological act—a ritual of response to the divine lure within and among them. Whether through contemplative chant, spontaneous improvisation, spiritually charged folk music, or experimental soundscapes, theological musicking enacts a process view of divinity: God as relational, evolving, persuasive, and deeply present in the world’s joys and wounds.

Theological musicking includes, but is not confined to, explicitly “religious” music. Any musical moment that awakens awe, evokes wonder, honors interconnection, or helps people trust in the sacredness of becoming can be theological in this sense. It is not about the repetition of fixed doctrine, but the embodied exploration of divine possibilities—what God might be doing in the moment, and how we might join in.

In open and relational terms, such musicking helps people prehend God not as a distant authority but as a fellow participant—an inwardly felt presence calling each occasion of experience toward healing, connection, and compassion. Theological musicking, then, becomes a way of tuning in to this call, and of helping others do the same.

God and Musicking

In the process-relational worldview, God is not a distant, controlling force but the ever-present lure toward connection, beauty, healing, and wholeness. God dwells not outside of experience, but within it—calling each moment toward its greatest possible depth of feeling and harmony. In this light, God can be understood as a lure toward resonant communion within the human heart, inviting individuals and communities into patterns of relation that honor both diversity and togetherness.

Musicking becomes one of the ways we respond to this divine lure. When people join together in co-creative relational energy—through rhythm, melody, harmony, and silence—they are participating in something more than social interaction. They are entering into a kind of sacred attunement. The sonic dimensions of musicking can become windows into the ongoing life of God—especially God’s consequent nature, the divine reality that feels, absorbs, and weaves together the experiences of the world into a harmony of harmonies.

From this perspective, sound itself can be sacramental. Not merely symbolic, but a real and felt medium through which divine presence becomes known. When sound is joined with the body—through movement, breath, vibration, and gesture—it becomes an embodied response to the divine call. Musicking, then, is not only an aesthetic act but a spiritual practice: a way of being-with-God in the present moment.

This sacramentality is not limited to formal religious music. A jazz improvisation, a folk chant, a whispered lullaby, a hip-hop beat, or a spontaneous drumming circle can each carry divine resonance. What matters is not the genre but the depth of presence, honesty of expression, and openness to relational beauty. Wherever musicking draws people into deeper feeling, mutual recognition, and compassionate becoming, God is there—luring, listening, and loving.

In this way, musicking reveals a God who is not static but dynamic, not controlling but companioning—a God who resonates with every cry, every harmony, every silence, and every pulse of relational life.

Interfaith Musicking

In our pluralistic world, musicking can also become a space for interfaith encounter. When people of different religious or philosophical traditions come together to create or share music, they are not merely exchanging beliefs—they are entering into a shared field of co-creative relational energy. In these moments, theological differences need not be erased; rather, they are felt through rhythm, melody, harmony, and silence.

Interfaith musicking invites participants into a mutual prehension of one another’s hopes, fears, and sacred longings. It fosters empathy without requiring agreement, and makes space for spiritual hospitality—where divine mystery is explored not through debate, but through the weaving of sound and presence.

​Eco-Musicking

Musicking need not be confined to human relationships alone. It can also draw us into communion with the more-than-human world. We might call this eco-musicking: musical practices that attune us to the rhythms, voices, and energies of Earth and its many inhabitants—animal, vegetal, elemental, and planetary.

Eco-musicking can take many forms. It might involve sounding with birdsong at dawn, creating compositions that incorporate field recordings of water, wind, or insects, or using natural materials as instruments—stones, shells, gourds, and wood. It can also emerge in contemplative listening to the silence of forests, the hum of insects, or the pulsation of waves. Whether explicitly musical or profoundly attentional, eco-musicking fosters a felt sense that the Earth is alive with relationality and responsive presence.

From a process-relational perspective, the world is not made up of passive objects but of occasions of experience, each with its own perspective, however simple or complex. Eco-musicking becomes a practice of tuning in to the wider field of becoming, co-creating with nonhuman participants and acknowledging their agency. It is a way of saying: you are here, you matter, we are becoming together.

Eco-musicking can evoke reverence for the Earth not as a backdrop to human activity, but as a community of subjects. It resists the logic of domination and invites the aesthetics of interdependence. It reminds us that musicking is not only about what we make, but about what we hear—and what we allow to shape us in return.

In this sense, eco-musicking is both a spiritual and ecological act. It brings the sonic and the ethical into alignment, sounding the possibility of a world where humans live not above nature, but in tune with it.