Finding my place: Examining concepts of community music as a visiting artist in rural East Timor

This article explores being a musician in a foreign community, considering the author’s experiences as a visiting artist in East Timor as a manifestation of this. East Timor is one of Asia’s poorest and least-developed countries, a former Portuguese colony that suffered brutal occupation by Indonesia for 24 years and which has only been an independent state since 2002. The author establishes a community musician’s role as an ‘outsider’ to the communities in which they work, and considers this in terms of her four-month artist residency as an unknown foreigner in a developing rural community, where post-colonial legacies, traumas of recent conflict, and ongoing poverty gave additional layers of complexity to her work. Through narrative enquiry and an autoethnographic lens she describes a community music project that grew organically from very informal and unstructured beginnings, highlighting the importance of trust and mutual exchange. The author’s experiences and interactions ultimately suggested a transition from outsider to accepted community member, and are discussed as acts of hospitality, gifts and tests utilizing L. Higgins’ conceptual framework for community music activity.