Sociocultural work and Community Music in Germany

This article is based on a version published over ten years ago in the Handbuch Musik in der Sozialen Arbeit/Handbook of Music in Social Work (Theo Hartogh and Hans-Hermann Wickel, 2004). The international discourse about Community Arts/Music was then still largely unknown in Germany. Nationally, the subject was classified as Soziokultur/social culture within which social work was the mainstay. The opening hypothesis of the article, which has since been updated, proposed that developments in national Soziokultur and international community music were running a similar course and pursuing similar goals. In the following text, the developments in the musical sub-division of German Soziokultur are reconstructed and presented in relation to the observations of Higgins in Britain. It will subsequently be examined, whether the term community music is appropriate to describe the theory and practice of social music-making in Germany.