This think piece explores how community music activities, developed through collaborations between academic and non-academic partners, can foster active citizenship, social cohesion and the development of non-musical competencies. Situated within a UK context marked by sustained arts defunding and policy narratives that privilege STEM, the article asks how community music might articulate its value more explicitly. Drawing on practice-based reflections from the Cohesive Harmonies project, I examine two complementary frame-workers: researcher-driven interventions, exemplified by the Bradford Dhol Project, and organization-led initiatives, illustrated through Music in Citizenship. Through qualitative insights generated from workshops, interviews and surveys, this article considers how structured musical participation can cultivate non-musical competencies, such as confidence, agency, belonging and emotional regulation. Rather than positioning these competencies as replacements for artistic value, I consider how they emerge through musical processes themselves. The article reflects on how articulating such outcomes may be necessary in the current policy climate, while remaining attentive to the creative and relational foundations of community music practice.
This article takes up Lee Higgins’s suggestion that community music can function as a critical lens, using it heuristically to examine the recent rise of corridos tumbados , a trap-inflected offshoot of the Mexican corrido . The genre consolidated during the worldwide COVID-19 lockdowns, when face-to-face gatherings were curtailed, a development seemingly at odds with community music’s welfare-state, facilitator-centred and co-present model. Drawing on Higgins’ typology (music of a community, communal music-making and facilitated intervention) and critical debates about the field’s ‘positive bias’, we map the ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes that enable corridos tumbados ’ platform-driven transnational circulation. We argue that the genre’s consolidation is best understood as an acceleration of digital affordances whose operating principles long predate the pandemic, rather than as an anomaly. This reframing shifts facilitation from a single host to an ecology of artists, influencers, algorithms, platforms and low-threshold conventions, through which inclusion, exclusion and commodification are co-produced. By allowing the lens to work both outwardly (on corridos tumbados ) and inwardly (on community music), we propose a ‘digital turn’ that equips practitioners and educators to locate their work within wider digital infrastructures and their attendant power asymmetries.
Community music in the United Kingdom has often been perceived as operating outside of governmental influence, given its emergence from the 1960s community arts movement. However, this perception is under increasing scrutiny, with several scholars highlighting how community music has evolved through its interaction with policy-making. This article builds on this perception by examining the relationship between community music and cultural policy and the impacts this has had on the field. To consider this relationship, I provide a historiography of community music and cultural policy-making, tracing their interactions. These interactions have given rise to ‘socially engaged arts practice’, an arts practice that funders and policy-makers have adopted to achieve social impact. To illustrate this evolution, I explore a Youth Music-funded programme, examining how funders and policy-makers influence its design, delivery and evaluation, leading to the incorporation of elements of socially engaged arts practice. I reflect on the tensions that these funded models of practice create for the realization of cultural democracy and the grassroots nature of community music. By doing so, I question whether it is time to reframe community music as socially engaged music-making, given its alignment with policies of democratizing culture and top-down programme development models.
This Special Issue of the International Journal of Community Music , ‘Thinking more about community music’, responds to provocations raised by Lee Higgins in his recent book, Thinking Community Music (2024). The spirit of this Special Issue is to promote individual perspectives on the future of community music as a field of practice and research. David A. Camlin’s lead article discusses the double-edged sword of the ‘academicization’ of community music, where more musicians than ever have had opportunities to learn about community music in higher education programmes, but fewer have had opportunities for fostering deep relationships in communities due to the modular, time-bound nature of coursework. Articles by Efpraxia Farmaki and Melissa Forbes focus on facilitation. Farmaki shares her experience of personal transformation based on her facilitation work in a men’s prison; Forbes takes a different approach, arguing that community music’s conception of facilitation should be expanded as leadership . Policy provides the animating focus in the fourth and fifth articles. Tenley Martin argues that community music would receive more policy recognition by focusing on ‘non-musical competencies’. Ryan Humphrey argues that, in many ways, community music already does this, having essentially rebranded as a form of top-down, ‘socially engaged music-making’, distancing itself from the ethos of cultural democracy. In marked contrast to the articles by Martin and Humphrey, the article by Sarah Goldfarb, Tina Reynaert and An De bisschop draws on French didactic theory to argue for a re-centring of music as a foundational ethos in community music facilitation. The final two articles continue the theme of facilitation, but from different vantage points. Whereas Maria Varvarigou, Andrea Creech and Susan Hallam delve into the pedagogical possibilities of the non-formal spaces endemic to many community music practices, Alexandra Sanchez, Elisa Robbe and July De Wilde examine the pedagogical possibilities of online communities connected to the practice and evolution of corridos tumbados . The issue concludes with a tribute to Don Coffman, who is retiring after nineteen years of service to the journal, the last ten as associate editor.
This ‘think piece’ draws on my doctoral research to examine my experience of facilitating a singing group in a Greek prison. Through this community music practice, I reflected on how my gender, ethnicity, socially privileged position and identity as a professional musician and academic shaped my interactions, interpretations and sense of responsibility. Central to this exploration are the concepts of positionality and reflexivity, which enabled me to critically examine my assumptions, values and role in this specific environment. The researcher’s diary, field notes and audio recordings of the sessions were used as research tools, and the data were analysed through document analysis, supporting a systematic process of critical self-examination and reflexive interpretation. Finally, I came to realize that the music facilitator in prison settings can undergo transformative changes in perceptions and overall frame of reference. Therefore, this article explores my personal transformations through the lenses of positionality and reflexivity, considers their impact on my practice as a group singing facilitator and formulates questions intended to inform and guide future research on the facilitator as a self-aware practitioner within the prison environment.
After nineteen years of service to the International Journal of Community Music , Don Coffman announced his spring 2026 retirement. This article provides context on Don’s broad impact on the field of community music, with colleagues highlighting value and inspiration from Don’s mentorship, welcoming style, kindness, support as a leader and collegiality. Across his career, Don’s service to the field has included: researching; editing; facilitating school, adult and community bands; presenting at conferences; collaborating on projects; and serving as a professor and chair. All of us who have worked with Don and have been inspired by his life’s work wish him the best in his well-deserved retirement.
Community music practitioners are commonly described as ‘facilitators’ when working in the interventionist mode, yet this terminology may inadvertently limit our understanding of this sophisticated role and its transformative impacts. Drawing on cognitive linguistics, this article examines how language shapes our conceptualization of community music practice. Etymological and linguistic analysis shows that ‘facilitation’ invokes the conceptual metaphor of craft work, emphasizing the musicians’ tools and techniques, while ‘leadership’ suggests journey-based conceptual structures of pathfinding, direction and transformation. This examination is followed by an exploration of two contemporary leadership theories – positively energizing leadership from positive organizational scholarship and identity leadership from social psychology – which offer comprehensive frameworks for understanding the complex, multifaceted role of community musicians working in the interventionist context. Examples of practice drawn from the author’s leadership of a singing group for people with Parkinson’s and from interviews with music leaders demonstrate these leadership approaches in action. The reconceptualization of ‘facilitation’ as ‘leadership’ provides theoretically grounded language to describe, understand and value the social potential of community music making as an essential public health resource.
In this think piece, we explore how pedagogical frameworks can effectively support the planning and practice of music facilitators working in community music contexts. We focus on the framework for facilitating musical learning, interrogating how this framework can support the development of musicians as group leaders whose practice is founded upon experience, action and reflection. While community music is often associated with non-formal learning, we expand that perspective by highlighting the pedagogical richness in facilitation approaches that are responsive to context, integrate diverse pedagogical modes and strategies and engage participants in meaningful music learning experiences. Drawing on research and practice on planning, facilitating and evaluating music learning in diverse community settings, we demonstrate how the framework for facilitating musical learning offers a tool for critical reflection among musicians as they design, lead and reflect on their practice particularly in contexts where the boundaries between music education and community music are blurred.
In the United Kingdom, the professionalization of community music within the academy has changed it as a practice, from a dispersed and dissensual field consisting of diverse communities of musical relationships to a more homogenous set of practices reified in curriculum and standardized through assessment. There are both gains and losses arising from this professionalization, but what is most at risk is the diversity of situated approaches to music in community contexts which gave rise to the term ‘community music’ in the first place. Through personal reflection on a career in participatory settings, mainly in the United Kingdom, and philosophical discussion, an argument is developed to champion the idiosyncratic and highly situated nature of community music in the face of homogenizing academic influence.
Drawing on Lee Higgins’s concept of hospitality in community music, this article explores whether hospitality can be understood not only as a pedagogical or ethical stance but also as a sonic reality embodied within musical processes and musical outcomes. Grounded in French-speaking didactic theory, the study reconfigures the traditional didactic triangle to foreground the dynamic relationship between music, facilitator and participants. Using a qualitative case study of a large-scale community orchestra project, the research analyses five co-created musical pieces, combining close analysis of their musical structures, materials and formal development with an examination of the collaborative processes that shaped them. The study draws on multimodal data, including observations, interviews, recordings and post-process transcriptions, analyzed through key concepts from comparative didactics, particularly mesogenesis, topogenesis and chronogenesis. Findings show how structured yet flexible musical starting points, carefully designed didactic situations and responsive didactic contracts enable participants to engage creatively in co-composition. Hospitality emerges not only in interaction but also within the music itself, audible in the acceptance, transformation and layering of participants’ ideas over time. The study introduces the notion of the facilitator as a ‘composer in dialogue’ and argues for the centrality of musical analysis in community music research, with implications for facilitator training and hospitable co-compositional practice.
The research project He Whiringa M & amacr;ramatanga: Kaupapa M & amacr;ori Music and Healing bridges M & amacr;ori music, health and intergenerational trauma healing. Funded through the Health Research Council of New Zealand (HRC) and supported by T & umacr; Tama W & amacr;hine o Taranaki (TTWOT), this research project draws on Kaupapa M & amacr;ori theories and praxis to explore distinctly M & amacr;ori music theories and practices as a pathway to accelerating M & amacr;ori well-being by M & amacr;ori authors and knowledge-holders. This article is positioned from a wahine M & amacr;ori ('Indigenous M & amacr;ori woman') of Ngaa Rauru Kiitahi, Ng & amacr;ti Rangi, Te & Amacr;ti Haunui-a-P & amacr;p & amacr;rangi and Ng & amacr;ti T & umacr;wharetoa with ethnic affiliations to Singapore. This project uses Kaupapa M & amacr;ori methodologies, practices and methods, specifically thought-space w & amacr;nanga, to gather diverse M & amacr;ori to create a book. That book aims to focus on M & amacr;ori talking about M & amacr;ori music as well as its healing properties for M & amacr;ori. M & amacr;ori music forms have long served in the realm of communal healing, well-being, hauora M & amacr;ori ('M & amacr;ori health') and collective history-making as well as memory. This article discusses Kaupapa M & amacr;ori theory and praxis, the ethical considerations of the book project and thought-space w & amacr;nanga as methods of M & amacr;ori community-building for M & amacr;ori music and healing.
This article explores the spiritual and relational dimensions of community engagements with First Nations music through the Gamilaraay framework of Maal ('One/ Self'), Bulaarr ('Two/Relationship') and Gulibaa ('Three/Community'). Drawing on five yarning interviews across South-East Queensland and Northern New South Wales, Australia, the study centres Indigenous methodologies, relational philosophy and embodied storytelling to investigate music's role in healing, identity and intergenerational well-being. Framing music not as entertainment but rather as a lived practice, the article affirms music's role as a relational, cultural and spiritual force. Using a Gamilaraay Indigenist approach led by Glenn Barry, the article proposes re-Indigenizing community music research by centring ancestral wisdom and collective well-being. The findings contribute to Indigenous-led music scholarship by offering a culturally secure model for engaging with First Peoples' knowledge systems and health. Delivered by Intellect to:
In this article, we present findings from a seven-day immersive learning experience (ILE) where students from the Universidad Veracruzana visited the Huasteca Veracruzana region to learn the importance of music-making for secular and ritual purposes from Huasteco culture-bearers. We reflect on how a culturally responsive music education can inform future post-secondary education in the Mexican context via collaboration with community-led organizations and community music making initiatives. We discuss the importance of challenging the perception in the Mexican public school system that Indigenous ways of knowing and being are static. We argue that music educators have the agency to disrupt this narrative. To do so, it is necessary to provide music teacher candidates with opportunities to collaborate with Indigenous culture-bearers. We provide an overview of the Huasteca region and the seven-day ILE that occurred there. We share the narrative about how to establish collaboration based on reciprocity at the community level.
Music-making among Indigenous peoples (First Peoples or First Nations) is often framed by traditional identities and world-views that are unique to the people and have stood the test of time. The creation of music and dance arts among the Indigenous Karanga people of Zimbabwe is informed by epistemes that date back to pre-colonial times. In this article, we argue that despite the centrality of Indigenous world-views in the making of music, studies in Indigenous music often overlook this crucial point, leading to misconceptions about and distortions in music-making among First Peoples. We present the connection between the Indigenous Karanga world-view and local music-making, focusing on organizational structure, instrumentation and performance practice. We draw on experience from a collaborative community project conducted between 2016 and 2021. We worked with 35 members from a traditional Karanga community in southern Zimbabwe to set up a community-based musical arts centre that was designed to specialize in Indigenous Karanga music, song and dance. We realized that music-making of the Indigenous Karanga people of Zimbabwe resonates with Delivered Intellect to:
This article examines Indigenous/non-Indigenous artistic relationships and how artistic collaboration in relationship can inform music education meanings and values. Our collaborative storying explored our individual experiences as Indigenous (Sherryl) and non-Indigenous (Danielle) artists engaged in the Where Waters Meet project with the Canadian Chamber Choir, through analysis of the written score, rehearsal process and performance practice. We ground our analysis in N & ecirc;hiyaw knowledge epistemology. Themes included the teaching 'sing the song until it becomes a part of you' and the Cree concept of t & acirc;pw & ecirc; ('truth').
This article explores the adaptation of Miami Jam Sessions, a music therapy socialization group and mentoring programme, through the frameworks of the neurodiversity paradigm and community music therapy. Rather than following traditional deficit-based therapeutic models, the programme adopts a strengths-based, relational approach grounded in the social model of disability and neurodiversity paradigm. Central to this approach is an emphasis on shared musicking, community inclusion and reciprocal social learning. This article highlights how the programme evolved to meet the unique needs of its community, transitioning from a social skill acquisition programme to one that emphasizes the authentic application of social skills through collaboration and genuine social engagement. Framed within community music therapy, the programme moves beyond clinical goals to centre on building meaningful relationships and fostering social connections through music. This approach not only benefits neurodiverse individuals but also educates and transforms the broader community and exemplifies how music therapy can be reimagined to affirm neurodiversity, dismantle barriers and cultivate inclusive, joyful spaces for all.
This arts-based research study explores the lived experiences of 2sLGBTQIA+ individuals in community musical theatre. Conducted through auto-ethnography and four semi-structured interviews, culminating in a full-length musical production, the research uncovers themes of friendship, identity, exclusion and systemic power imbalances. Contrary to popular belief, these community spaces are not always inclusive or safe. Nevertheless, they still offer the closest thing to refuge for many who seek a place they can belong. This study challenges the assumption of inherent safety in theatre spaces and calls for more research and reform to ensure truly inclusive environments for every community member.
As a community musician seeking performance opportunities in Edmonton, I undertook a systematic exploration of the city’s 162 community leagues to understand their musical potential. What began as a practical curiosity about finding venues evolved into discovering an extensive but largely hidden musical ecosystem embedded within neighbourhood infrastructure. My environmental scanning revealed surprising results: 108 leagues demonstrated clear capacity for musical programming, yet most musical activity operated below the radar, woven into community events like volunteer appreciation dinners, seasonal celebrations and fundraising gatherings rather than existing as formal cultural programming. Music functioned as an enhancement to community life rather than as isolated entertainment. This discovery led me to develop a ‘performance ecology’ framework – a way of understanding how musical opportunities exist within interconnected networks of institutions, musicians and community members. Community music scholars helped me recognize that this ecological approach aligned with broader theoretical frameworks, particularly cultural democracy principles and social capital development, demonstrating how musical activity builds both bonding capital within neighbourhoods and bridging capital across different community groups. The systematic methodology I developed is transferable to other communities regardless of their specific infrastructure. By documenting over thirty-five types of community events with musical potential and identifying patterns across demographic groups and ongoing programmes, I found that most communities already possess both musicians and venues – what is often missing are the connections between them. This practitioner-led exploration offers concrete strategies for musicians, community organizations and cultural advocates seeking to enhance musical engagement. The key insight: community music is not something you add to community life – it is something you discover within it and help flourish through attention, connection and strategic support.
The Participatory Creative Music (PCM) Hub is a digital platform that showcases and supports participatory music practitioners by providing project examples, activities and resources in healthcare, schools, community, carceral settings and more. The Hub was established by the Canadian New Music Network in 2019 and, since then, has provided visibility for the work and connected participatory artists who usually work in isolation. The two authors, one practitioner and one researcher, describe the personal and institutional histories leading to their collaboration through the PCM Hub, including some of the tensions and learnings to date, particularly around the different terminologies and negative associations with community music. They also describe the need for ongoing outreach and relationship-building in addition to the online platform, and their current efforts to build a national network that integrates research and practices towards a vibrant national PCM practice that is responsive to diverse cultural and social contexts led by practitioners who are supported in their work.
This article documents the project Play On , a series of online curated conversations held between community arts practitioners and researchers based in Ireland and Australia. The Play On series featured contributions from community musicians and artists, researchers, activists and Elders. Together, we considered the challenges and opportunities we encountered in our work and discussed how we might respond to urgent issues impacting our field, our communities and our lives. The discussions from this project continued to impact us long after the series ended. They are presented here as four stories, representing the four curated conversations we had online during that time. Each one weaves together some of the multiple voices who contributed. We are of different nationalities but are based primarily in Ireland and Australia. Each story includes a series of questions or provocations for the reader to consider, discuss and debate in their own contexts. Our intention is to share our learning and stimulate further conversation about how we might approach the complexities and possibilities of our community music work.
