Musikalske Besøgsvenner

In 2021, a completely new concept arose: Musical Visitor Friends (Musikalske Besøgsvenner). Live music presented in the familiar and safe surroundings of the home for a citizen and his visiting friend. Since 2021 31 musicians has played more than 300 concerts all over the country. These are professional composers and musicians from different genres, cultures and years of Danish musical life, who all know the art of playing and creating cohesion and togetherness with their audience.

ROSA is responsible for the overall planning and a specialist committee selects the artists. The concerts are determined in collaboration with the country's visitor services and humanitarian organisations and a number of venues have also joined as partners, who all want to benefit from the project's experience.

Researchers from Aarhus University have followed the project to investigate whether the meeting between the citizen and the musician results in value creation. The short answer is yes – you can find all of the research reports here.

The video "A Journey to Kilimanjaro" (En rejse til Kilimanjaro) from 2024 highlights parts of the research findings:

Music can evoke memories from the memory. At the moment when the music is playing, concertgoers can experience being transported to a previous experience in another place. The music thereby has an ability to manipulate experiences of time and space. This type of mobility contrasts with the immobility that the participants experience on a daily basis with challenges related to physical and/or mental impairments.

The video is produced by one of the researchers, Amalie Bakkær Munk Andersen, who is a visual anthropologist and scientific assistant at the Department of Anthropology, Aarhus University.