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In this autoethnographic reflective essay, I explore the challenges that the COVID-19 crisis presented to community music training and practice within a university setting, through the evocative 'storying' of key experiences from my own work. I acknowledge the sense of grief that came with losing opportunities for music-making face to face. Whilst online music-making matters, the visceral experience of sound within space was deeply missed by staff and students. In contrast, I also explore the possibilities that COVID-19 pushed us to explore. These include connecting with international partners in our regular teaching, establishing a digital collaborative project with a local school and creating online placement opportunities. I explore the unexpected developments in teaching, learning and scholarship that have occurred as a result. I also acknowledge the questions and critiques that the pandemic revealed. Whilst the longing for in-person music-making continued, it was reassuring to know that we retained our capacity to connect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous community music research indicates a diverse field with many forms of practice. Understanding the views of community music practitioners about their approaches offers an important way to understand their professional identities and strategies they employ. A qualitative study interviewed five community music practitioners from the same company to investigate their approaches. Two had 30 years of experience and were training three practitioners in workshop leading; one trainee (Joseph) has additional support needs (ASN). Two lay researchers with ASN contributed to thematic analysis. Two themes were identified: pedagogical identities accentuated personalization and enacting inclusivity as key dimensions of being a workshop leader; interpersonal processes demonstrated the crucial nature of individualized communication, humour and building relationships. Although Joseph's interview shared these themes, he also identified confidence, adaptability and creativity as key qualities for himself to develop and expressed a strong personal identification with participants' development of self-efficacy. While interviewees had varied musical backgrounds and skills, common principles may offer a basis for the translatable beneficial impacts of community music across the highly diverse facilitators and settings that characterize this field. Appreciating pedagogical contributions of practitioners with ASN can help in envisaging new identities and ways of being creative and inclusive in community music practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I provide a conceptual analysis of care in community music. Despite growing interest in the belief that an ethic of care should inform our community music practices, truly considering what caring means may be challenging. Caring through musicking is further complicated by the inherent power imbalances in interventionist forms of community music. I refer to this conundrum using the term (un)caring. The topographic decision to write (un)caring using a bracketed qualifier is meant to reflect the dialogic nature between caring and uncaring. This concept analysis proposes that (un)caring is informed by negotiation of the following critical attributes: (1) (un)attentiveness, (2) (un)responsiveness and (3) (in)competence. This concept analysis contributes to the continual development of community music theory by providing an evaluative and theoretical lens through which community music practitioners could engage in critical discussions concerning the ethics of community music practice and research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the musical lives of eleven US-based families, micro-communities of sorts, as they were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and associated physical isolation directives. With a focus on family pods as sites and sources of community, we employed processes of virtual ethnography including interviews, observations and the distribution of cameras to help empower participants, especially the children, to become active collaborators in a research study called Project COPE. Families indicated that musical practices during this time of learning, listening, moving and creating with instruments, voices and one another served a variety of purposes. These included self-regulation, identity formation, transmission, social cohesion, emotional bonding, embodied communication, well-being and a recognition of communal music expression as a human need. We note that in some cases, this rupture has been an opportunity for refocusing, reworking and re-envisioning in ways that impact community music practice. In returning to in-person music making, practitioners should be aware of the creative ways in which families were musically active during this time apart. We urge diligent community musicians to continue responsive practices in relation to the ways in which families facilitate their own musical lives and community in the home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Podcasts have become an important part of music reception practices, providing new ways of engaging with reviews and recommendations, artist interviews and popular music histories. This article presents a replicable working methodology that can be applied to study the data associated with podcasts of any genre. In our analysis, we explore approximately 16,000 listener reviews of the Top 50 podcasts in the Apple (UK) music chart in order to discover what it is about music podcasts that draws listeners to regularly engage with their favourite shows. This method, based on unsupervised machine learning algorithms, automates data-scraping for podcast reviews and ratings. We describe and critically reflect on this process in order to understand not only how listeners describe their range of motivations for engagement with music podcasts, but also the limitations of this approach in a media and cultural studies context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the significance of night-time spaces associated with the Cape Verdean community in Rotterdam, home to the third largest Cape Verdean diaspora in the world. Through interdisciplinary approaches including interviews with key figures in music production and nightlife, mapping of key historical and contemporary sites, and close analysis of artefacts and music lyrics, this article considers how music practices of huge historical and cultural significance have been deeply embedded in the night-time cartography of the city. Following Doreen Massey's formulations, it considers urban space as a mobile junction of historical, sociopolitical and cultural layers, in constant transformation, and argues that night-time spaces were, and continue to be, integral to the development of a political–cultural consciousness among the Cape Verdean community in Rotterdam, in colonial and postcolonial contexts. These discussions are also relevant given current debates on the value of the 'night-time economy' in Rotterdam's post-industrial landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the field of community music scholarship continues to evolve, opening up a dialogue around music making with trauma survivors and implementation of trauma-informed practice is both timely and critical. Whilst there has been an acknowledgement of the presence of trauma connected to specific contexts, community music literature has not yet begun to respond to the potential prevalence of trauma within any community music setting. As a field in which music projects will often be operating with groups of vulnerable people, trauma-informed practice is beginning to be acknowledged, but without a broad base of research to support training and implementation. As a community musician working with known trauma survivors, it is my assertion that the question of whether pedagogic frameworks should be developed in order to promote safe and appropriate practices needs to be addressed, especially where traumatic experience can remain hidden, but still be profoundly impactful. This article explores the origins of trauma-informed practice as well as providing an example framework from the York St John University Prison Partnership Project. A literature review of community music scholarship explores the potential benefits of music making for those who have experienced trauma and emerging themes are examined through the lens of trauma-informed practice. This article also suggests that trauma-informed practice could be integrated more widely within community music in order to: (1) acknowledge that in any group or context, statistically, a number of participants are likely to have experienced trauma; (2) acknowledge that because trauma is often hidden, having an understanding of manifestations of trauma responses will better equip practitioners; (3) understand that trauma-informed practice enables practitioners to work reflexively and responsively within their groups, thereby building solid foundations on which to develop safe and secure environments in which music making can flourish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A migrant camp is a 'non-place' where personal identity is put at risk. Music is a means of personal adaptation in camps, even if it means allowing little place for the real reasons for displacement of the very people shaping these new hybridizations of music. The present power of music in such a place is to create strong relationships, 'shortcutting' both narration and the longer time needed in order to create relationships. The kind of personal advantage it is for someone to be a musician is a topic surprisingly forgotten, obscured by theoretical habits of seeing music essentially as an expressive activity directed to an audience, or as being a communicative activity. Music has a performative power different from language, as a non-verbal art having a strong and direct relationship to the body. Musical interactions on the field give migrants the ability to balance their problematic situation of refugees, shaping a real present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a broad discussion of power and influence within contemporary participatory music practices in relation to practices of intervention. The discussion is presented through the respective experience and professional perspectives of music therapy, music education and community music – each illustrated by current practice examples and their accompanying dilemmas; and covering both local and international projects. In a shared closing discussion, the four authors review the key question: whether professional influence and power in participatory music practices 'shows the way' or 'gets in the way'. They conclude that intervention takes place on a continuum, in different ways, and to different degrees and levels. What is vital is to retain practical and ethical reflexivity on the dimensions of intervention as a practice that can offer both creative opportunities, but which can also be part of subtly oppressive power relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community arts in Australia, as in many other countries, continue to permeate society, illuminating the past and shaping the future. This article situates itself as an aspect of community music through creative music-making within a larger research project that started at Deakin University (DU) (Melbourne, Australia) in 2011 called 'Flows and Catchments'. Through the lens of creative arts and music-making, I argue that community partnerships between local communities and tertiary institutions are a fertile ground to celebrate arts practice where the cultural and artistic life of the community is promoted, fostering respect and understanding between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. In 2012, I presented a music workshop at the 8th Annual Lake Bolac Eel Festival (LBEF) in Western Victoria. Using the African term Masakhane, which means 'let us build together', I provide a snapshot of my experience through journaling and anecdotal feedback as I reflect in and on the teaching and learning episode of the volcanic composition. The community partnership between DU (academics in an urban space) and the LBEF (local community in a regional place) provided an opportunity for people of all ages to engage, explore and experience music-making collectively in a social context. As a tertiary music educator, I propose more pathways being established with regional communities in order to deepen the knowledge and understanding of them; schools, communities, artists, academics and tertiary students can form cultural synergies in place-based settings like those of festivals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sweden has a long tradition of implementing cultural activities in community-based organizations, even though the concept of community music is rarely used. One project in line with this tradition is El Sistema, a global movement that reached Sweden a few years ago. This article aims to discuss to what extent and in what ways El Sistema in Sweden can be regarded as an example of community music practice and further to argue for a critical approach when analysing this particular music education venture. By using discursive tools we try to move beyond preconceptions based on educational and cultural beliefs. In addition, a critical perspective also makes it possible to pay attention to what is at stake in a specific music education context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The work discusses pedagogical dilemmas related to band courses offered to community bands by schools of music, governmental agencies, music festivals, foundations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Brazil. Even though these courses are for bands, most of their educators belong to the classical conservatory practice and teach its manner of playing to the bands' instrumentalists. This article relates a multiple case study of three community bands of the Para State. The study focuses on the manner of clarinet playing in these bands. It considers the instruments and accessories, the didactic approaches, the instrument technique and the performance characteristics. It points out that the clarinetists' manner of playing is common among community bands and yet very different from the approaches employed in the classical conservatory practice. The sonic characteristics of this manner of playing have cultural values and meanings that are part of the bands' identities. Thus, the study opens up a discussion on what pedagogical postures coordinators and teachers may have in band courses when these two contrasting music practices meet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]