Music making as place making: a case study of community music in Japan

ABSTRACT

A body of research on ‘place’ in various disciplines indicates that the concept stands at the nexus of time, space, and experience. Acknowledging also that place represents a meaningful learning context, this study examines its pedagogical underpinning within the framework of community music making. Three cases of community music making in Japan are introduced to identify the processes of place-based music learning. Characteristic features include students’ involvement in instrument making, school-community collaboration, interdisciplinary learning opportunities, and diverse formats and localised styles of music making and learning. The findings support the view that music making is also place making.

KEYWORDS:

• Place
• place-based education
• ibasho
• community music
• Japan

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Koji Matsunobu holds PhDs in music education (Tokyo Gakugei Univeristy) and secondary and continuing education (the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). Prior to joining the Education University of Hong Kong he held academic positions at the University of Queensland, Australia and the University of Kumamoto, Japan. He has taught psychology and sociology of music, research methodology, and world music. He has written widely on spirituality, creativity, mindfulness, arts integration, world music pedagogy, place-based education, Japanese music, and qualitative research.

Notes

1 Of the five cases that the author initially examined, only three are included in this paper. This is due in part to constraints of space, but more particularly to the fact that these contributions are deemed to align more closely to the paper's instrumental purpose of drawing on place theory.

2 Although this research was a case study, not ethnography, I was aware of the emic/etic dynamics (De Munck 2009). Like most ethnographers I tried to seek an emic-derived understanding of events through thick descriptions of field notes while addressing comparative, cross-case, etic theories (on ‘place’).

3 This happened twice. On both occasions, consent was obtained from the participants, with the exception of one person who left before it could be given. This individual later provided me with verbal consent via the community leader.

4 For instance, in the second case I became a friend of a couple who immigrated from China and who ran a Chinese restaurant. They were able to tell me about recent tensions in the community between the Japanese members and an increasing number of workers from Brazil. While this helped me to get a sense of each place, such views were not included, the basis of the case report relying instead on a combination of observation and interview data.