On the value of publishing in community music

Should certain negative results cause music theory to abandon its dependence on perception studies for the corroboration of its key principles? Recent experiments in music perception that have failed to confirm certain important principles of music theory are reviewed from the perspective of musical communities. A musical community is defined to be those listeners for whom a given musical perception is real and useful. It is argued that (1) the significance of experimental results should be interpreted not only according to traditional criteria of statistical significance but also according to the status of relevant musical communities; (2) a perceptual object that is real for only a small minority of listeners may yet be deemed significant if that minority performs some crucial activity in the musical culture; (3) important perceptual objects can be explicitly taught by advanced musical communities; (4) although this perspective calls into question the objectivity of theoretical principles, music theory must continue to incorporate the results of experiments in music perception.

<p>This qualitative research project set out to explore my role as a student music therapist within a community music setting. I am a student music therapist, working with a community music company involved in a variety of community music groups and projects. I wanted to understand what I might offer the community music company by bringing a community music therapy perspective to the work. The research involved an exploration into the literature relating to Community Music Therapy as well as Community Music and required me to regularly question the reasoning and philosophy behind Community Music Work. To answer my question I engaged in secondary analysis of data generated during the first 24 weeks at this community music placement. The data included session notes, audio recordings of supervision sessions, and my reflective journal. The literature includes examples of collaboration between community music therapists and community musicians, and I sought to experience this at my placement. The hoped for collaboration did take place during the period of data collection, enabling detailed reflections of it. This exploration therefore helped me to develop as a community musician and music therapy student. The practice was broad and involved regular transitions in role, often within the same session. These included participant, accompanist, song-leader, community music therapist, and drum circle facilitator. Findings suggest that Community Music and Community Music Therapy are disciplines with many similarities in appearance and structure, but tend to diverge when looking at goals and overall objectives and foci. Social equality seems to be commonly shared value between Community Music and Community Music Therapy. The ways in which this value is acted upon is also explored. Performance and Performativity as aspects of group behaviour was found to be mentioned in the literature, and again this was mentioned in the data collected as part of the researcher’s placement.</p>

<p>This qualitative research project set out to explore my role as a student music therapist within a community music setting. I am a student music therapist, working with a community music company involved in a variety of community music groups and projects. I wanted to understand what I might offer the community music company by bringing a community music therapy perspective to the work. The research involved an exploration into the literature relating to Community Music Therapy as well as Community Music and required me to regularly question the reasoning and philosophy behind Community Music Work. To answer my question I engaged in secondary analysis of data generated during the first 24 weeks at this community music placement. The data included session notes, audio recordings of supervision sessions, and my reflective journal. The literature includes examples of collaboration between community music therapists and community musicians, and I sought to experience this at my placement. The hoped for collaboration did take place during the period of data collection, enabling detailed reflections of it. This exploration therefore helped me to develop as a community musician and music therapy student. The practice was broad and involved regular transitions in role, often within the same session. These included participant, accompanist, song-leader, community music therapist, and drum circle facilitator. Findings suggest that Community Music and Community Music Therapy are disciplines with many similarities in appearance and structure, but tend to diverge when looking at goals and overall objectives and foci. Social equality seems to be commonly shared value between Community Music and Community Music Therapy. The ways in which this value is acted upon is also explored. Performance and Performativity as aspects of group behaviour was found to be mentioned in the literature, and again this was mentioned in the data collected as part of the researcher’s placement.</p>

This chapter outlines the historical and current relationship between community music and music therapy—in particular the seeming overlap between community music and the newer sub-discipline of music therapy called community music therapy. The chapter argues for a re-imagining of certain key areas of joint concern and potential linked to the broader shared agenda of working musically with people. These topics indicate a way for community music and music therapy to align and collaborate in a relationship that can be both ‘joint’ and ‘several’—ensuring that the work remains creative, effective, responsible, and professional for people and their communities.

This paper looked into the role of Rhythm in Bronze (RiB), a local music group in Malaysia, in community music work practices that uses Malay gamelan as the medium. The research delved into the different aspects of the approaches used to enhance music learning through community music; particularly the activities used and how they relate to Vygotsky’s theory of socialization in learning. Community music gathers people from different backgrounds. Experiences and knowledge shared helps the community through the development in terms of personal growth, self- esteem and self-confidence. These terms are just some of the aspects that community music promotes, apart from music making. Along the process of community music, creativity and expression are important in music making, as this will further develop creative thinking skills among musicians. Qualitative approaches such as observation, interview, and group’s past work were used in this research to gather information and data on how music has been taught to children through community music. Social interaction has certainly shown a big role in developing children thinking and perceptions through the activities implemented. In the other hand, Zoltán Kodály, Carl Orff, and Émile Jaques-Dalcroze approaches identified through data analysis as it has helped the children to have more fun and always looking forward to the sessions. This documented writing will certainly help people to understand between the whole concepts of community music in the context of Rhythm in Bronze

This chapter discusses the collaboration of community musicians and community music therapists working to create a community orchestral dialogues experience for youth patterned after a Middle Eastern model. The author explores the definitions of community musicians, music therapy and community music therapy, and how these definitions diverge and converge. The author explains and discusses Orchestral Dialogues: Accepting Self, Accepting Others and the learning that took place for the youth involved, as well as for the staff, both community musicians and community music therapists. The final section of the chapter provides lessons learned and implications for future collaborations for community musicians and community music therapists.

In August 2020, two colleagues and I began an ongoing conversation on music, consent, power, language/jargon, accessibility, and inclusivity. We are not music therapists, but each of us, from our own professional and personal perspectives, is interested in the therapeutic nature of music. One colleague is a community musician in Glasgow, Scotland. She works for Good Vibrations and the Resonate Project which facilitate inclusive musical workshops and experiences. The other colleague is an amateur musician, participant advisor for one of her music groups, and a representative of people with additional support needs. I am an ethnomusicologist who specializes in Javanese and Balinese gamelan outside of Indonesia particularly as they pertain to community music making. We met through playing gamelan and through the Resonate workshops. Our conversations were a doorway for each of us into community music, musical academia, and the musical life of a woman with special needs. In our conversations, the question of accessibility as it is tied to language and power arose several times. In April 2021, we offered an edited video presentation of our conversations at the 2021 Mid- Atlantic Chapter of the Society of Ethnomusicology (MACSEM) virtual conference. In fall 2021, we hosted an event in collaboration with Good Vibrations at which we used our MACSEM video to facilitate an open conversation among academics, community musicians, music therapists, people with additional support needs, and members of the general public. One goal of this work is to provide unheard voices a place to speak. Our submission to Voices is a video reflection on our experiences beginning with our three-person, off-the-cuff conversations that originated over a year ago. Through this video, we will (literally) share our voices with your readership as we discuss our experiences of language, power, and whose voices are heard. We also reflect back on previous conversations by including our collaborative editing of the video itself. During our overall discussions, we came up with the title, “From nowhere to somewhere: Creating to Join a conversation.” This really helped focus our shared idea of what this is all about: three people from different life experiences and opportunities finding ways of speaking together and creating a format to have a voice in this arena.

This study surveyed music therapists (682 respondents from 1,890 survey recipients) to examine their experiences in terms of reported perceptions of their situations, their practices, their approaches, and their personal, work, and family concerns. A first report from this survey (Curtis, 2013) looked at the experiences of present-day music therapists in Canada and the United States. This follow-up report examines the experiences of those survey respondents who self-identify as community music therapists (103 of the 682 survey respondents). Of those respondents, 13.6% were men and 86.4% were women. Canadians accounted for 18.4% and respondents from the US accounted for 81.6%. From among the entire 682 respondents, significantly more Canadians (55.4%) self-identified as community music therapists in comparison with their US counterparts (15.3%; p<.05). Quantitative and qualitative analyses provided information concerning Canadian and US Community Music Therapy respondents in terms of their: demographic information; education and work situations; personal, family, and work concerns; perceptions of discrimination; and theoretical orientations. Emerged themes from the qualitative analysis of respondents’ thoughts on Community Music Therapy included: firm identification; identification with a caveat; community building/belonging; drawing from Community Music Therapy principles; formal track record; reducing stigma; and working with groups. A need for future research (e.g., surveys, interviews, auto-ethnographies, etc.) into the profiles of community music therapists practicing in other parts of the world was highlighted.

The National Cultural Policy Discussion Paper—drafted to assist the Australian Government in developing the first national Cultural Policy since Creative Nation nearly two decades ago—envisages a future in which arts, cultural and creative activities directly support the development of an inclusive, innovative and productive Australia. "The policy," it says, "will be based on an understanding that a creative nation produces a more inclusive society and a more expressive and confident citizenry by encouraging our ability to express, describe and share our diverse experiences—with each other and with the world" (Australian Government 3). Even a cursory reading of this Discussion Paper makes it clear that the question of impact—in aesthetic, cultural and economic terms—is central to the Government's agenda in developing a new Cultural Policy. Hand-in-hand with the notion of impact comes the process of measurement of progress. The Discussion Paper notes that progress "must be measurable, and the Government will invest in ways to assess the impact that the National Cultural Policy has on society and the economy" (11). If progress must be measurable, this raises questions about what arts, cultural and creative workers do, whether it is worth it, and whether they could be doing it better. In effect, the Discussion Paper pushes artsworkers ever closer to a climate in which they have to be skilled not just at making work, but at making the impact of this work clear to stakeholders. The Government in its plans for Australia's cultural future, is clearly most supportive of artsworkers who can do this, and the scholars, educators and employers who can best train the artsworkers of the future to do this.

The present study analyzes the results from 1,639 questionnaires returned by Catalonian musicians from music schools, conservatories, orchestras, associations of professional musicians, and sundry other musical groups. The objective was to identify the principal risk factors associated with the appearance of health problems caused by the musicians’ occupations. The most noteworthy results were that 77.9% of the respondents have or have had some occupation-related health problem during their playing careers, and 37.3% of these have had technique impairment. The musculoskeletal system was the most frequently involved area (87.7% of the affected respondents). Risk factors identified include age, grade, dedication, professional status, changes in routine, and the instrument played (especially percussion, brass, and strings). In contrast to other studies, no relationship was discovered between gender or dominant hand and higher risk. The areas of the body most affected were the upper extremities and the neck. There is some indication in the data that the problems in males may be related to pathologies produced by overuse-strain; while those experienced by females are linked more with tension-posture. The conclusion reached is that, in spite of there being common factors, each community of musicians, each with its specific social, employment, and educational characteristics, presents a distinct pathological model, which makes the epidemiological data obtained in any study difficult to extrapolate to other communities.

A focus of the emerging discourse on Community Music Therapy (CoMT) has been to discuss its departure from the principles of the ‘consensus model’ of music therapy. This has helped to define where CoMT begins, but the question of where it ends has been less definitive. The following article addresses this question, drawing on the results of a recent qualitative study that involved a grounded theory analysis of in–depth interviews with Australian music therapists and community musicians. The three main results of this study are discussed in order to suggest new directions for music therapy practices that are simultaneously connected with and delineated from Community Music practices.

Many adults with musical skills struggle to find outlets for their musical interests. Despite the ubiquity of the internet, it can be difficult to find community music groups unless one knows what one is looking for. This article documents the inventorying and cultural mapping history and development of the Canadian Community Music Group Database, a non-commercial, online resource with over 1600 entries that allows for various forms of data visualization. The author shares his struggles with sustaining the database, while challenging community music researchers in other countries to emulate the aims and purposes of this project in order to better support those who may benefit from a consolidated music participation database and to help advance community music research generally by surfacing issues related to what is and what might be in community music.

This paper discusses the link between community music improvisation and the integration of refugees, asylum seekers and local residents, and proposes a new way of thinking about priority-setting in refugee integration and rehabilitation support schemes. Drawing on observations and interviews with an integrated music group in Wales, we explore the effect of participating in structured musical activities and improvisation in weekly meetings, as well as at public performances in community arts events. We observed that embedding improvisation led to four outcomes. It (i) encouraged individual unscripted performances, instilling confidence in solo performance, (ii) gave individuals who had experienced displacement and marginalisation a chance to lead in a safe, performative space, (iii) gave other participants a chance to follow and accompany this piece instrumentally or vocally, drawing on their own cultural traditions and thus creating innovative cross-cultural pieces; and (iv) provided participants and audience members with a unique and unrepeated, uplifting experience that triggered their imaginations, and prompted questions and further discussion between participants. These findings suggest that the combination of structured musical activity and improvisation may help to foster a sense of wellbeing and social inclusion, shift power dynamics, and create a space for cross-cultural dialogue. These unique outcomes highlight how music can create a community of people from seemingly completely different locations or situations. Furthermore, the well-established Welsh choral traditions and local community arts provided a receptive environment for this diverse group of performers. Therefore, it was not just the musical activities but their connection to the wider local community arts scene that delivered these individual, collective and wider societal benefits.

In the process of building a learning society in China, the government has paid more and more attention to education in communities. Community education is oriented towards all social members of society and offers a vast space for the popularization of music education. China's open universities are able to provide a learning platform and systematic support and service for music education in communities. Open universities can play an active role in promoting the construction of a harmonious society. This article discusses the necessity of music education in communities, advantages enjoyed by open and distance education, and the channels and methods for conducting community music education. This is illustrated by several recent initiatives made by the open universities in China, particularly the organization of the 2009 National Community Music Activity Broadcasting and Exhibition and the Community Singing Rating Activity. These efforts have generated new community music experiences and serve as examples to further study the concept and the social impact of community music.

People with disabilities working together to overcome oppression is a common theme in depictions of disabled people, featuring in works including the films Freaks and X-Men and the song Spasticus Autisticus. Indeed, collaboration between people with disabilities has been the foundation of the disability rights movement. This paper explores disabled solidarity and resistance as depicted in the film-clip to US-band Kounterclockwise’s song Whip. Set in a dystopian landscape, Whip explores police violence against black people with disability in the USA. Despite its fictional setting, Whip explores a real-life problem, and suggests its solution in the form of Leroy Moore and Krip Hop Nation. Although in reality Krip Hop Nation is a community of musicians with disabilities, in Whip they are a powerful, fully weaponised army defending their disabled brethren from evil. By mirroring the solidarity of the disability rights movement, Whip demonstrates the power of unity in the disability community. Points of Interest People with disability often work together to fight for their rights. They helped to create the American with Disabilities Act in the USA and the Disability Discrimination Act in the UK. The films Freaks and X-Men and the song Spasticus Autisticus show people with disabilities working together to fight for their rights. The film clip of the song Whip by American band Kounterclockwise shows people with disabilities protesting police violence against black people with disability. Whip shows musician Leroy Moore as a super-hero leading the ‘Krip Hop Army’ to protect people with disability. In real life, Leroy Moore leads a group of disabled hip hop musicians called Krip Hop Nation. In their film clip, Kounterclockwise show us that when they work together, people with disability can change the world.