Cultural Policy and Community Music: No longer a challenge to the system

Description

Community music has a longstanding association with notions of activism and politicisation. It emerged from the community arts movement to support a counter-culture movement that opposed the institutionalised structures surrounding arts and cultural activity. However, the last few decades have seen the field become far more integrated within these systems and, in many senses, depoliticised thanks to interaction with cultural policymaking spheres. In this presentation, I explore and question the impacts of these interactions with cultural policymaking on the field of community music and whether such interactions are helpful or detrimental to the sustainability of the field’s ethos and values.

To explore these questions, I specifically examine how community musicians work with funders and policymakers to develop and deliver their programmes through undertaking a qualitative research design centred around three case studies of music projects. I employ various methods across these case studies, including focus groups, one-to-one interviews with facilitators, programme managers and participants, and participatory observations over several weeks. Additionally, I undertake a discourse analysis to explore how the use of language and practice of community music has changed and developed as its association and connection with cultural policymaking has grown stronger.

Findings from this presentation highlight how the interactions with cultural policymaking have led community music to become removed from its traditional ‘bottoms-up’ approach to working towards a form of practice that is led by and influenced by funders and policymakers. Such changes in this way of developing and delivering community music programmes causes tension with some of the traditional values associated with the field as models of practice that once aimed to support notions of cultural democracy appear to be replaced with models with pre-determined outcomes that support cultural democratisation instead. It is integral for us to understand, as music educators and community musicians, the effects of policymaking on our practice and the way we work with communities so that we can better develop our capacity to sustain the values that we deem integral to our work.

Period	29 Jul 2024 → 2 Aug 2024
Event title	International Society for Music Education World Conference
Event type	Conference
Location	Helsinki, FinlandShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International