Purpose as the lens: what the community music and music education symposium revealed

In 1998, a report titled "Orchestral Education Programmes: Intents and Purposes" (P. Tambling and J. Harland) documented the first systematic study of educational work by six English orchestras. That document has stayed with Kathryn Deane ever since.

Built on case-study research, the report examined the aims and intentions behind instrumental music programmes as seen by the orchestras themselves. The authors developed a typology of 19 aims grouped under five major headings: music education (formal learning of and about music, often but not always school-based), teacher and curriculum development (again mainly in schools), orchestral self-interest, and community development. Subsequent work has updated these classifications and broadened them beyond orchestral contexts—most visibly in Sound Sense's contribution to the large-scale ArtWorks study of participatory arts in the United Kingdom. But the original framework planted a way of looking at community music and music pedagogy that Deane returns to again and again.

Deane contends that among the several lenses through which we can study community music, music pedagogy, and music education—client group, setting, genre, style of music-making—none is more revealing than purpose: why do we carry out the work we do, in the manner we do it? That question was not posed overtly at the Munich symposium on community music and music pedagogy held at Ludwig Maximilians University in February 2013. Yet it threaded, almost unspoken, through nearly every presentation and speech.

The community music projects reported at the symposium were largely transparent about their primary goal: cultivating community integration, social cohesion, or individual development. Andreas Wölfl's "Drumpower" initiative in Munich, for instance, might appear to be simple drum bashing. In reality it applies community music therapy techniques that channel the symbolic force and aggressiveness of drumming—"playing how you are feeling"—alongside structured discussion and explicit reflection, eventually steering participants toward violence prevention and social inclusion. Ulrich Glass's International Munich Arts Lab uses artistic activity to reignite motivation in young people who are not in employment or education, train them professionally, and help them find jobs. In Newfoundland, Susan Knight's Shallaway project devised a community opera intended to fight economic and social decline in isolated fishing villages after the cod fishing ban; she finds that "musicing strengthens communities, communitizing strengthens music-making." On another continent, Jane Southcott reports on a late-start wind band that unintentionally became a working model of agency, empowerment, and communities of practice: participants assumed shared responsibility for running the ensemble, making it more resilient.

Presenters focused on schools revealed a broader mixture of purposes. Alexandra Kurtz-Welzel observed that German music educators, grappling with challenges likely recognizable far beyond Germany, are seeking new concepts and techniques. Students often dislike their music classes. Inclusive education requires teaching students with and without special needs together. All-day schools demand greater partnership working. These trends sound tailor-made for community music—except for the charge from some music-education scholars that community music relies on "oversimplified and naive trust in the healing power of music" and may reinforce unexamined pedagogical habits. Whether this criticism cuts, Deane suggests, really depends on which kind of pedagogy one applies—that is, what purposes the work was built to serve.

Large-scale projects taking over a school or a neighbourhood, like those Annette Rüggerberg presented, certainly feature a disruptive pedagogy. Whether disrupting a routine is a good or bad thing depends on context. The showpiece series included community operas—one a reworked Faust, another Tchaikovsky's Iolanta—staged in Bremen. These productions produced wide-ranging outcomes: better student behaviour and academic performance (educational purposes), greater access to the arts for disadvantaged young people, paid employment for formerly unemployed mothers, and a fresh sense of neighbourhood self-confidence (which falls under personal and community development).

Projects like these have internal purposes that sound perfectly reasonable to community musicians. The outside challenge they face, however, is the pressure to also prove that they meet the educational aims of formal schooling. Peter Mall's poster session described early small-scale research meant to reveal evidence of such dual compliance. Douglas Lonie's investigation into current conditions in England moved the conversation forward: formal and non-formal pedagogies had clear differences, he observed—and those dissimilarities ought to be valued, partly because they increase the variety of musics, music-making processes, and learning opportunities, and partly because non-formal approaches could meet high standards even when measured by formal pedagogical rubrics. The real trouble, concluded Lonie, is not directly in practice but rather in communication: the two sectors lack a shared vocabulary. (A telling aside: most papers at the symposium spoke of "community music" opposing "music education" or "music pedagogy," whereas Lonie used "formal music education" versus "non-formal music education.")

Deane suggests that if translating either pedagogy or terminology between the spheres is proving too difficult, exchanging and clarifying mission might help. At least that kind of conversation could soften the opposition that springs up—usually unintentionally—when community music and music education are positioned as rivals.

According to some voices at the event, however, the script should be flipped entirely. Rather than having community music prove its relevance to formal curriculum, we should ask whether the traditional school curriculum—teaching about music—ought to adopt more of community music's approach: learning through music. Martin Milner, who teaches the International Baccalaureate at Berlin Brandenburg International School, asserts he has already taken that turn in his classroom. For his practice, music is both a process—"a social activity, a game of music anyone can play"—and a mode of inquiry: what could music be for? what do musicians actually do? This obviously demands a specific kind of teacher, one like Milner, who originally trained as a community musician. Yet the question raised during Q&A—would this kind of program produce a different kind of musician?—Milner answered honestly: he did not yet know.

So the synthesizers step in. For veterans who navigate between community music and music education easily—among them the boundary-walkers David Elliott and Lee Higgins—the synergy feels natural. Higgins’ background is in community music practice; he champions community music's academic profile as a field (he dislikes calling it a discipline) of both study and actual practice. Elliott, a veteran music educator, "gets" community music's practices intimately and also sees their practical limits. In words that echo Lonie, he attacked the persistent absence of shared terminology separating community music from conventional music education.

Don Coffman's contribution had the reassuring title "Common ground for community music and music education." Coffman responded affirming to the central question: "Can community music’s processes and practice translate into the music teachers’ classroom?" His presentation systematically compared formal and non-formal music-education practices across several dimensions, always bringing the issue back to its founding lens: "What are the goals of community music and music education?"

Purpose, again.

Deane reflected that focusing on purposes would be enough—that the rest (shared vocabulary, negotiated meaning) would follow. Coffman’s Q&A unsettled that notion. When someone asked about the neuroscientific mechanisms underpinning music’s effects, Coffman decluttered: for him that question lands squarely in music therapy, not music education—or anyway maybe not in music pedagogy. Yet for many community musicians, especially in the United Kingdom, asking just that ("why we do what we do how we do it") is completely legitimate; it goes straight to music-making as fundamentally purpose-driven. Still, the gap in disciplinary boundaries remained unclosed.

Time, Deane proposes, for another symposium—perhaps one titled "Collaborations, Intersections, and New Perspectives: Community Music and, Well, Pretty Much Any Application for Music."