Making music offers enormous possibilities--and faces significant limitations--in its power to generate belonging and advance social justice. Tony Perman and Stefan Fiol edit essays focused on the forms of interplay between music-making and community-making as mutually creative processes. Contributors in the first section look at cases where music arrived in settings with little or no sense of community and formed social bonds that lasted beyond its departure. In the sections that follow, the essayists turn to stable communities that used musical forms to address social needs and both forged new social groups and, in some cases, splintered established communities. By centering the value of difference in productive feedback dynamics of music and community while asserting the need for mutual moral indebtedness, they foreground music’s potential to transform community for the better. Contributors: Stephen Blum, Joanna Bosse, Sylvia Bruinders, Donna A. Buchanan, Rick Deja, Veit Erlmann, Stefan Fiol, Eduardo Herrera, David A. McDonald, Tony Perman, Thomas Solomon, and Ioannis Tsekouras

Community Music at the Boundaries examines how music enhances the lives of those living in what might be considered marginalized settings. Built on foundational principles of community music, the volume addresses music and accessibility, health, justice and the prison system, faith, and education, by contributors from more than ten countries.

Congregational music can be an act of praise, a vehicle for theology, an action of embodied community, as well as a means to a divine encounter. This multidisciplinary anthology approaches congregational music as media in the widest sense - as a multivalent communication action with technological, commercial, political, ideological and theological implications, where processes of mediated communication produce shared worlds and beliefs. Bringing together a range of voices, promoting dialogue across a range of disciplines, each author approaches the topic of congregational music from his or her own perspective, facilitating cross-disciplinary connections while also showcasing a diversity of outlooks on the roles that music and media play in Christian experience. The authors break important new ground in understanding the ways that music, media and religious belief and praxis become ’lived theology’ in our media age, revealing the rich and diverse ways that people are living, experiencing and negotiating faith and community through music.

The Oxford Handbook of Music Making and Leisure presents myriad ways for reconsidering and refocusing attention back on the rich, exciting, and emotionally charged ways in which people of all ages make time for making music. Looking beyond the obvious, this handbook asks readers to consider anew, "What might we see when we think of music making as leisure?"

What does it mean for music to be considered local in contemporary Christian communities, and who shapes this meaning? Through what musical processes have religious beliefs and practices once ‘foreign’ become ‘indigenous’? How does using indigenous musical practices aid in the growth of local Christian religious practices and beliefs? How are musical constructions of the local intertwined with regional, national or transnational religious influences and cosmopolitanisms? Making Congregational Music Local in Christian Communities Worldwide explores the ways that congregational music-making is integral to how communities around the world understand what it means to be ‘local’ and ‘Christian’. Showing how locality is produced, negotiated, and performed through music-making, this book draws on case studies from every continent that integrate insights from anthropology, ethnomusicology, cultural geography, mission studies, and practical theology. Four sections explore a central aspect of the production of locality through congregational music-making, addressing the role of historical trends, cultural and political power, diverging values, and translocal influences in defining what it means to be ‘local’ and ‘Christian’. This book contends that examining musical processes of localization can lead scholars to new understandings of the meaning and power of Christian belief and practice.

Bands structured around western wind instruments are among the most widespread instrumental ensembles in the world. Although these ensembles draw upon European military traditions that spread globally through colonialism, militarism and missionary work, local musicians have adapted the brass band prototype to their home settings, and today these ensembles are found in religious processions and funerals, military manoeuvres and parades, and popular music genres throughout the world. Based on their expertise in ethnographic and archival research, the contributors to this volume present a series of essays that examine wind band cultures from a range of disciplinary perspectives, allowing for a comparison of band cultures across geographic and historical fields. The themes addressed encompass the military heritage of band cultures; local appropriations of the military prototype; links between bands and their local communities; the spheres of local band activities and the modes of sociability within them; and the role of bands in trajectories toward professional musicianship. This book will appeal to readers with an interest in ethnomusicology, colonial and post-colonial studies, community music practices, as well as anyone who has played with or listened to their local band.

Using illustrative examples from a variety of traditions, Benjamin Brinner first examines the elements and characteristics of musical competence, the different kinds of competence in a musical community, the development of multiple competences, and the acquisition and transformation of competence through time. He then shows how these factors come into play in musical interaction, establishing four intersecting theoretical perspectives based on ensemble roles, systems of communication, sound structures, and individual motivations. These perspectives are applied to the dynamics of gamelan performance to explain the social, musical, and contextual factors that affect the negotiation of consensus in musical interaction. The discussion ranges from sociocultural norms of interpersonal conduct to links between music, dance, theater, and ritual, and from issues of authority and deference to musicians' self-perceptions and mutual assessments.

Engaging in Community Music: An Introduction focuses on the processes involved in designing, initiating, executing and evaluating community music practices. Designed for both undergraduate and graduate students, in community music programmes and related fields of study alike, this co-authored textbook provides explanations, case examples and ‘how-to’ activities supported by a rich research base. The authors have also interviewed key practitioners in this distinctive field, encouraging interviewees to reflect on aspects of their work in order to illuminate best practices within their specialisations and thereby establishing a comprehensive narrative of case study illustrations. Features: a thorough exploration and description of the emerging field of community music; succinctly and accessibly written, in a way in which students can relate; interviews with 26 practitioners in the US, UK, Australia, Europe, Canada, Scandinavia and South Africa, where non-formal education settings with a music leader, or facilitator, have experienced success; case studies from many cultural groups of all ages and abilities; research on life-long learning, music in prisons, music and ritual, community music therapy, popular musics, leisure and recreation, business and marketing strategies, online communities – all components of community music.

Community music as a field of practice, pedagogy, and research has come of age. The past decade has witnessed an exponential growth in practices, courses, programs, and research in communities and classrooms, and within the organizations dedicated to the subject. The Oxford Handbook of Community Music gives an authoritative and comprehensive review of what has been achieved in the field to date and what might be expected in the future. This Handbook addresses community music through five focused lenses: contexts, transformations, politics, intersections, and education. It not only captures the vibrant, dynamic, and divergent approaches that now characterize the field, but also charts the new and emerging contexts, practices, pedagogies, and research approaches that will define it in the coming decades. The contributors to this Handbook outline community music's common values that center on social justice, human rights, cultural democracy, participation, and hospitality from a range of different cultural contexts and perspectives. As such, The Oxford Handbook of Community Music provides a snapshot of what has become a truly global phenomenon.

Every day people come together to make music. Whether amateur or professional, young or old, jazz enthusiasts or rock stars, what is common to all of these musical groups is the potential to create communities of musical practice (CoMP). Such communities are created through practices: ways of engaging, rules, membership, roles, identities and learning that is both shared through collective musical endeavour and situated within certain sociocultural contexts. Ailbhe Kenny investigates CoMP as a rich model for community engagement, musical participation and transformation in music education. This book is the first to produce a valid and reliable in-depth study of music communities using a community of practice (CoP) framework - in this case focusing on the social process of musical learning. Employing case study research within Ireland, three illustrations from particular sociocultural, genre-specific, economic and geographical contexts are examined: an adult amateur jazz ensemble, a youth choir, and an online Irish traditional music web platform. Each case is analysed as a distinct community and phenomenon offering sharpened understandings of each sub-culture with specific findings presented for each community.