Despite an almost universal love for music, the question of who can or cannot be a musician has historically been at the behest of Eurocentric music education. Enter community music—an alternative approach to music teaching and learning with the goal of redefining what it means to be a musician.
Lee Willingham, Professor of Music Education at Wilfrid Laurier University and the editor of Community Music at the Boundaries, has compiled contributions from a wide variety of academic scholars, researchers, music practitioners and administrators who seek to provide structure and validation to community music practices while challenging the status quo of formal music education.
These contributions include Kelly Laurila’s “Song as the Catalyst That Promotes Envisioning Ethical Spaces”; Elizabeth Mitchell’s “Musical Identities, Personal Identities: Performance for Children with Disabilities” and Kathleen Turner’s “Words of Choice: Challenging A Discourse of Disadvantage and Social Change in Community Music”.
Divided into six parts and 32 chapters, Community Music at the Boundaries explores a wide breadth of themes such as community borders, health and wellness, incarcerated settings, education reform and cultural identity.
Willingham establishes that all communities are inherently formed by creating boundaries—another reoccurring theme throughout the book. In practice, community musicians seek to navigate these social, cultural, physical, financial and psychosocial boundaries and barriers of entry to create ethical spaces where the bridging of cultures and communities can occur.
Community music settings such as church choirs, youth orchestras or drum circles are identified as non-formal, existing outside of traditional music education. These settings typically include facilitators and mentors who must balance the provision of meaningful goal-oriented learning opportunities for participants while simultaneously yielding control to participants so they can guide their own experiences.
This community music practice is well exemplified in Mitchell’s work with Arts Express in Waterloo, Ontario. Arts Express works in partnership with the Faculty of Music at Wilfrid Laurier University and is a week-long inclusive creative arts day camp for children diagnosed with physical, developmental or neurodevelopmental disorders.
The children participating in Arts Express were noted to have a strong sense of accomplishment, pride and confidence in their musical performances—a particularly significant experience for children who might not otherwise have access to music-making opportunities.
Another example of community music in practice is the collaboration between Mino Ode Kwewak N’gamowak (Good-Hearted Women Singers)—an Indigenous women and girls drum circle—and the Waterloo Regional Police Chorus. Laurila, the facilitator of this collaboration, made note of the meaningful relationships that were developing between participants and the re-evaluation of their previous attitudes towards one another.
Community Music at the Boundaries provides a plethora of other examples of the positive benefits and healing capacity of community music participation. These benefits include improved self-esteem, enhanced mood, lower blood pressure, stress relief, stronger relationships, improved academic achievement, increased concentration and motivation, stronger immune systems, and a greater sense of belonging.
Despite these undeniable benefits, community music appears to resist categorization or definition, struggling to forge its own academic identity while competing alongside similar faculties such as music therapy. Perhaps only by engaging in community music experiences first-hand can individuals witness the benefits thoughtfully laid out by Willingham and hopefully further disseminate those positive changes throughout broader society.
While I do not personally have any experience with formal or non-formal music education, I am an elementary school educator. It is impossible to miss the countless parallels between what Turner describes as the ideal community musician and, in my opinion, the idyllic childhood educator.
“I now see the community musician as someone who encourages imagination, celebrates personal and collective expression, supports aspiration, champions achievement, embodies and facilitates creativity, hopes for kindness, asks for value, and engenders pride,” Turner writes.
My reading of Community Music at the Boundaries has caused me to reflect on my own educational practices, and I have been inspired to find ways of better understanding my students—utilizing music-making as a catalyst to promote and develop a more welcoming and cohesive classroom community.
For individuals interested in facilitating community spaces with a mindful focus on individual identity, equality, diversity and inclusivity, this book is an important and insightful read.
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