Chekhov's corner 'Transforming lives through music' as a public health intervention: further reflections on our evaluation of sistema Scotland

We previously contributed a short discussion piece to this section, which described some of the challenges inherent in evaluating the public health impacts of an arts-based social intervention, Sistema Scotland’s’Big Noise’ programmes. This contribution aims to follow-up by exploring two interwoven aspects of these difficulties in more detail. The first is the role of participants’ experiences of challenge and struggle, as part of their engagement with the main, orchestral element of this intervention, in generating the impacts on confidence and self-esteem that we identified in our initial evaluation. The second is the role of music, the learning of instrumental skills and the undertaking of orchestral performances in underpinning these outcomes.