Whatever happened to Community Music?

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This research network proposal takes forward a number of core concerns issuing out of a recent AHRC 'Connected Communities' scoping study on community music (McKay and Higham 2011). The purpose of the network is to improve understanding of the historic, current, and potential roles that community music (hereafter CM) can play in promoting community engagement, within the terms of the AHRC's 'Connected Communities' initiative. Given that CM activity in the UK is currently negotiating a period of relative austerity, the network organisers see this as a crucial moment to critically reflect on the contemporary condition of CM and to revitalise understandings of its (potential) role in connecting communities. Such a revitalisation of understandings of CM stands to benefit not only the AHRC's 'Connected Communities' initiative but also to connect with the 'Big Society's emphasis on localism, voluntarism and community empowerment.In the UK, CM has undergone significant shifts over recent decades. Undoubtedly, these shifts have been due - in no small part - to what Everitt (1997) has termed the 'subsidy revolution' facilitated by the funding opportunities made available by the National Lottery. One key development accompanying the upsurge in state funding has taken the form of 'increased expectation and an emphasis upon 'outcomes'' (Price 2002: 3). This has brought important changes in the ways those involved in facilitating CM activities both go about and think about their work, something perhaps most evident in the 'noticeable shift in focus...from collective to individual outcomes' (Matarasso 2007: 449). Such a shift is also indicative of a more subtle yet significant move away from CM's longstanding concern with issues of community empowerment, participatory processes and democratic decision-making practices (including learning about community-level decision making and grass-roots organisation processes). Such concerns, articulated within a broader philosophy of empowerment and reflected in the work of writers such as Saul Alinsky, Carl Rogers, Ivan Illich and Paolo Friere, were central to community development theorists and the burgeoning community arts movement of the late 1960s/early 1970s alike. Over time however, their centrality has been diminished for a CM movement which, as a recent AHRC 'Connected Communities' scoping study notes, has been primarily 'resource-oriented rather than actively reflexive' (McKay and Higham 2011: 6).To date, this resource-orientation, on the part of CM managers and practitioners, has served to inhibit a productive dialogue between the former and those commissioning, funding and developing policy relevant to CM activity, with the result of obscuring the potential contribution of CM activity to community development. The formation of this research network, comprising of academics and researchers with expertise in the areas of informal music education and community cultural development (including the authors of the aforementioned AHRC scoping study), established CM funders and commissioners, experienced managers and respected practitioners will provide a forum within which to both explore the potentially valuable dimensions of CM for community development and formulate a future research agenda through which to respond to a series of core concerns facing CM initiatives in the UK.The network organisers have developed a series of structured network events, engaging key stakeholders at appropriate junctures, in order to address issues including: - Individual and collective motivation to participation - CM participation as a pathway towards community engagement/activism - Evaluation of different models of developmental practice and community engagement - Community as a site of democratic expression and/or oppositional critique - Freedom and control in community engagement - Relationships between intent, process, and outcome in CM activity - Ethical issues in CM practice