Young Musicians for Heritage Project: can a music-based heritage project have a positive effect on well-being?

Abstract

This paper examines the intrinsic potential for well-being outcomes in a heritage-related music project. We look at how creative activities that are embedded in a community can serve to enhance the cohesion and well-being of communities through the work of its youth groups. The paper also examines the important roles of partnership working and peer mentoring and how they need the time and resources to be nurtured in order to ensure sustainability and self empowerment as long-term legacies of arts-based community well-being initiatives.

Keywords:

• arts
• music
• well-being
• health
• heritage
• young people

Notes on contributors

Ornette D. Clennon is a Visiting Enterprise Fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. He writes for Media Diversified, and is also a Public Engagement Ambassador for the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE). His enterprise work has been recognized with a NCCPE Beacons New Partnerships Award.

Carola Boehm's research revolves around interdisciplinarity and higher education. She is the assistant editor of the Journal of Music, Technology and Education and is Head of the Department of Contemporary Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.

Notes

1. Our creative activities did exhibit some qualities of hedonic well-being especially as new skills were acquired and a greater sense of self-efficacy was achieved.

2. Swindells et al. (2013) acknowledge that both hedonic and eudaimonic well-being perspectives are both generally regarded as comprising a healthy mental state.

3. The embedded mentoring and learning processes that co-creating music with his peers afforded also demonstrated aspects of Situated Learning (Hanks 1991), where learning in a social context enabled our participant to use music as a starting point to gain new leadership and social skills. The development of his social skills was a significant factor in the participant being able to discuss his sexuality openly in the group to the point of applying his new social and leadership skills to mentor others in this area.

4. In this context, a eudaimonic well-being outcome gained from the dynamic process of the “flow”.

5. A hedonic well-being response.

6. The combination of eudaimonic and hedonic well-being outcomes is evident here, as the participant did evidently gain satisfaction or “pleasure and happiness” from recording and performing her raps throughout the eudaimonic and longer lived process of gaining in self-confidence.

7. Although I do recognise that this is a continuum of practice rather than absolutely discrete practices.

8. With a small “p” referring to the specific structures and behaviours of a setting and its programme.

9. Although slightly more conceptual.

10. An interesting echo of the definition of a eudaimonic category of well-being outcome.

11. Unless, of course, they were specifically set up as research projects.

12. This would be a more sensible way of judging many evaluations of arts projects.

13. Here I am advocating the use of a modified version of Grounded Theory methodology, where the evaluator (or practitioner) would collect all the possible data about the programme in the way Charmaz (2006, 2) writes, “grounded theory methods consist of systematic yet flexible guidelines for collecting and analysing qualitative data to construct theories ‘grounded’ in data themselves”. This could be an interesting development in evaluation studies in the field of community arts and health, where the reported outcomes would come from a robust system of data collection and analysis that in turn could be used as secondary data in any future research project designed to test the programme's hypotheses or theories.