Part I, Reflections and Essays the Community in Community Music: Hospitality – Friendship
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Creating Partnerships, Making Creating Partnerships, Creating Partnerships, Making Links, and Links, and Promoting Change Links, and Promoting Promoting Change Edited by Don Coffman & Lee Higgins Proceedings from 2006 Seminar of the Commission for Community Music Activity Creating Partnerships, Making Links, and Promoting Change Proceedings from the International Society for Music Education (ISME) 2006 Seminar of the Commission for Community Music Activity July 10-14, 2006 National Institute of Education, Singapore Sponsored by: Edited by Don Coffman and Lee Higgins Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................... i Part I, Reflections and Essays The Community in Community Music: Hospitality – Friendship...............1 Lee Higgins Community Music and Ways of Learning................................................20 Kari K. Veblen On Contested Terrain: Finding the “Groove” in Postmodern Music Teaching Practices ..............................................................................36 Nur Intan Murtadza Community Musicians and Music Educators: Minding the Gap .............44 Don D. Coffman Part II, Reports of Practice Traditional Music Teaching and Learning in the Canary Islands: Old Paradigms for New: Symposium on Music Education as Cultural Knowledge and Transformation..........................................................55 Emma Rodríguez Suárez Local Government Funding and Community Music: Their Impact on the Cultural Life of Local Communities in Western Australia .................69 Joan Pietersen Community Music in Singapore: Cultural Diversity and Identity ...........79 Sylvia Chong Japanese University Students Looking Back on Their Musical Experiences: Has Community Music Played a Vital Role in their Lives?..................................................................................................87 Mari Shiobara Instrumental Instruction in Community Bands from Bahia, Brazil ..........96 Joel Luis Barbosa Music Education in Practice in Non-Govermental Organizations: Two Case Studies in the Brazilian Urban Context....................................102 Magali Kleber The “Live” Concert, a Transient Episode or a Continuous Educational Event in a Multi–Culturally Divided Society?..................................111 Dochy Lichtensztajn Community Music in the Rehabilitation of Youngsters at Risk..............122 Graciela Sandbank Facets of Community Musical Activity in Japan: The Motivation behind a Music Company’s Outreach Project .................................................128 Tatsuko Takizawa Introduction The 2006 ISME Seminar of the Commission for Community Music Activity was held July 10-14, 2006 in partnership with the National Institute of Education, Singapore. The overall theme was “Creating Partnerships, Making Links, and Promoting Change.” Scholars from eleven nations presented fourteen papers guided by one of the following sub-themes; community music and areas of conflict, community music and formal education, community music and youth, and community music, funding and policy making. This publication has gathered papers from the seminar and is sectioned into two parts. Part One contains essays that examine some of the fundamental concepts, paradoxes, and dilemmas that have surfaced over the years as community musicians have endeavored to define the field. In Part One Lee Higgins challenges readers to re-examine the meaning of “community music” and his detailed presentation of the etymology of those words reveals some fascinating tensions. He notes that the word community connotes support for community members yet it also can be exclusive to outsiders. How can community musicians create environments that are consistently welcoming? He suggests that community musicians focus on developing the aspects found in the word hospitality. Using a rich array of examples, Kari Veblen examines how informal and incidental learning differs from formal and intentional music learning. Learning by ear, learning by feel, and peer interactions are examples of informal learning. Kari challenges us to consider the question: Can techniques such as these be embraced by formal music educators? Nur Intan Murtadza looks to find the “groove” within what she describes as “postmodern teaching practices.” Intan’s paper shares some preliminary findings from a doctoral study that explores how musical forms and content from one culture translate to another. Intan asks the question how is the essence of music conveyed through teaching and learning in other cultural settings? Don Coffman’s paper considers the parallels between music education and community music. He argues that community musicians have more in common with music educators than they often realize. In his conclusion Don suggests that both approaches to music making have much to gain from meaningful collaboration. i Part Two contains reports from a variety of countries about specific projects in community music and overviews of community music making in specific locales. Drawing from her musical memory, Emma Rodríguez Suárez considers the aural process of both formal and informal teaching and learning in the Canary Islands. Through participant-observation, Emma constructs her narrative with local “community musicians” and presents us with an insight into the transmission processes of traditional Canarian music. Joan Pietersen recounts her personal journey of community music involvement and explains the partnership and responsibility of community music groups, community musicians and local governments, who by their joint efforts play a crucial role in sustaining the cultural life of communities in Perth, Western Australia. She views community music as a significant commodity in connecting community groups because of its intrinsic capacity to overcome barriers of language and prejudice through the common bond of music. Singapore, the site of the seminar, may be a small country geographically speaking, but it has cultural roots that extend well beyond its borders. Chinese, Malay, and India cultures are quite visible. Sylvia Chong summarizes the different community music activities in Singapore, showing how these communities are brought together through music and also how music making allows peoples to acknowledge their differences. Mari Shiobara asked Japanese university non-music majors to recount their personal musical histories, specifically focusing on the role of classroom music education and community music making in forming their musical identities. After entering university, some students found ways to continue making music, however the rest have become solitary music listeners. Noting that students with histories of community music involvement were more likely to continue music making, she concludes that there is a need for more community-initiated musical activities in order to foster continuous musical experiences for these students. Community bands play a very important role in the Brazilian music education, because they are the only schools of music in hundreds of cities, providing instruction free of charge for thousands of people who cannot afford it. Joel Barbosa reports on a pedagogical project carried out in seven community bands based on collective instruction designed to improve learner motivation. The results include the re-opening of some bands’ schools of music, the revitalization of some inactive bands, and the creation of new bands. ii Through two case studies Magali Kleber presents an analysis of music making in Brazilian NGO’s. For Magali these sites are political and play a role in promoting social change. Under the auspices of Marcel Mauss’s “Total Social Fact,” Magali considers four dimensions of a music making experience in an attempt to provide an account of its social reality. Dochy Lichtensztajn’s work focuses on schools in Israel that have been divided by ethnic-cultural and national splits. In her paper Dochy advocates the live concert experience as a mechanism for racial integration. After presenting two examples Dochy concludes that the live concert has the power to bring about change in the school community and its immediate locale. Also from Israel, Graciela Sandbank describes two projects using community music for the rehabilitation of youngsters at risk in Israel: one in collaboration with the Ministry of Education and the second in collaboration with the Ministry of Welfare. Both projects demonstrate the positive outcomes of the collaboration between policy makers and community musicians. Tatsuko Takizawa’s paper describes how certain technological developments in musical instrument manufacturing has enabled the senior- age generation to become involved in group music-making activity in Japan. Takizawa considers the motivation behind this and suggests that these actions could be considered as “outreach.” These papers reflect a growing confidence in the development of community music as a discipline and a site for discussion. Plenary sessions allowed for insightful exploration of the themes resulting in deeper understanding of the issues and subsequently greater impact for each members work. Towards the end of the meeting participants agreed that community music has made some significant steps towards a greater recognition within music education generally. This has been marked by the on-going development of the International Journal of Community Music. iii Part I, Reflections and Essays 1 The Community in Community Music: Hospitality –