Acts of hospitality: the community in Community Music

Abstract

This article will investigate the notion of ‘community’ within the aspirations of Community Music. Guiding this study are the questions: How is community made manifest through Community Music? What joins the notion of community to that of music? Two distinct sections will frame this research: (1) an etymological consideration of the word ‘community’, followed by a rethinking of its status as a hospitable act of welcoming; and (2) a case study that examples a vision of Community Music as an act of hospitality. The article will conclude by suggesting that this act of hospitality serves to remind us of the broader theme of music education, equality and social justice.

Notes

1. Cultural democracy in its extreme condemned the cultural heritage of Europe as bourgeois, As far as community arts had any common philosophy, it did argue that a cultural democracy in which creative arts opportunities, enjoyment and celebration would be available to all was paramount to its cause.

2. Gemeinschaft is often understood alongside the word Gesellschaft, meaning society. As an advocate of traditional cultural values, Ferdinand Tönnies work, Community and society, originally published in Germany in 1887, explores these terms concluding that, with modernity, society replaces community as the primary focus for social relations.

3. Com+munis. Common + defence.

4. Com+munnus. Having common duties or functions. Doing one's duty to the whole, mutual service.

5. I am thinking of those 10 minutes or so spent dropping the children off or picking them up from school, or those hours spent with work colleagues in the office.

6. Times of emergency can ignite a sense of contextual fellowship, the death of Princess Diana, 9/11 for instance. Also reflect on waiting for the train or plane, at times of delay or cancellation; during these moments people bond and begin talking.

7. Liminal in a sense of transitional, those ‘in-between’ spaces that have importance in people's lives, for example your morning coffee in Starbuck, the train journey to and from work, or the gym every Saturday morning. These moments have a consciousness of communality.

8. Most often associated with technologically-mediated communities, such as chat rooms, one might even think off the ‘ebay’ community.

9. Jean-Luc Nancy (1991) speaks of a community without community, suggesting that a ‘Community without community is to come, in the sense that it is always coming, endlessly, at the heart of every collectivity’.

10. Although Derrida does not embrace the word community, he is nevertheless concerned with its implications; his work on asylum seekers and refugees (Derrida, 2000, 2001) deals with the themes of displaced peoples and their treatment as strangers in new lands. Further reading can be found in Derrida and Ferraris (2001), Derrida (1997), and the response of John Caputo (1997) to a roundtable discussion with Derrida in 1994.

11. The implication of the sign of a hospitable community within Community Music is a structure of the musical future to come; a refusal of any interpretation of community that privileges ‘gathering’ over ‘dislocation’. This is a direct reference to the account by Derrida (1994) of Heidegger's favour ‘of the accord that gathers or collects while harmonizing.’ Dislocation also resides in the postmodern idea of increased fragmentations that requires continue negotiation; what Lyotard calls the differend.

12. The ‘Arts’ animateur became popular throughout 1980/1990s Britain. The posts began to dwindle in the late 1990s. It was The Council of Europe's response to its own directives within the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, implementing the creation of the ‘sociocultural animateur’, described by Sue Braden (1978, p. 178) as ‘part priest, part artist, who breathes life into a community.’