The community in music

An understanding of community music requires careful thought about what community means, how it is created and sustained, the kinds of community we wish to create and sustain and why, and how music and education relate to such considerations. Communities are fluid, porous, negotiated affairs: dynamic patterns of human interaction. To understand communities we need to understand the practices that stitch and weave them together. To ask What community? is also to ask What kind of practice?, What kind of people are deemed capable of engaging in it?, What kinds of attitudes, beliefs, and actions does it exist to sustain?, and What kinds of attitudes, beliefs, and actions are necessary to sustain and nourish it? Communities are not just places where we engage in musically educational practices: they are also creations of those practices. It is thus imperative that we consider both the kind of community we presume to serve and the kinds of community that predominate the music(s) we endorse as educational vehicles.