International Journal of Community Music - Volume 15, Issue 2, 2022

1:1 CONCERTS is a performance initiative where a listener and a musician share a ten-minute, non-verbal musical encounter in a non-traditional performance space. The authors conducted a survey and focus groups with musicians, listeners and ‘hosts’ (facilitators) of 1:1 CONCERTS in Australia, seeking perspectives on their experiences of the Concerts during the COVID-19 pandemic. David Camlin’s three dimensions of music – aesthetic/presentational, praxial/participatory and social – served as a framework for data analysis. The intimate locational and musical aspects of the encounter generated feelings of connection, privilege and pleasure for many participants; for some, COVID-19 lockdowns, social distancing and live-arts deprivation heightened those feelings. We argue that while 1:1 CONCERTS retain presentational features typical of western classical music concerts, the model emphasizes the praxial and social dimensions of music-making, prioritizing process as well as product in ways relevant for music and music-making as a social resource, well beyond the pandemic.

This article considers the musical lives of eleven US-based families, micro-communities of sorts, as they were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and associated physical isolation directives. With a focus on family pods as sites and sources of community, we employed processes of virtual ethnography including interviews, observations and the distribution of cameras to help empower participants, especially the children, to become active collaborators in a research study called Project COPE. Families indicated that musical practices during this time of learning, listening, moving and creating with instruments, voices and one another served a variety of purposes. These included self-regulation, identity formation, transmission, social cohesion, emotional bonding, embodied communication, well-being and a recognition of communal music expression as a human need. We note that in some cases, this rupture has been an opportunity for refocusing, reworking and re-envisioning in ways that impact community music practice. In returning to in-person music making, practitioners should be aware of the creative ways in which families were musically active during this time apart. We urge diligent community musicians to continue responsive practices in relation to the ways in which families facilitate their own musical lives and community in the home.

Masamba Samba School is an Irish community music collective, working with disadvantaged communities through percussion and dance. This report looks at how an Irish community music project, Masamba Samba School, reacted to the demands of COVID-19 across a number of arenas – rehearsal, performance, teaching and research. By casting the virus as an uninvited stakeholder in our projects, we began to investigate what the ‘needs’ of the virus were, and whether we could accommodate them and still deliver meaningful work with our clients. Masamba Samba School’s story is somewhat unique in that it continued to operate throughout the lockdowns, first by concentrating on online and offline activities, and then by slowly moving back into the ‘in-person’ teaching space. This article begins with a brief description of how our projects operated pre-COVID-19 and then describes the immediate response to the pandemic (largely a shut-down), recounting how COVID-19 affected school operations in different ways, detailing the practical steps Masamba Samba School took to resume the teaching and research arms of its work and discussing the advantages and disadvantages of these strategies. The final section speculates about the future for the organization and whether Masamba Samba School can return to the way it was.

Although group drumming has been found to help improve well-being among marginalized populations, including incarcerated individuals, additional study into the possible benefits of drumming within maximum-security facilities is still required. This phenomenological study examines the experiences of fifteen maximum-security-incarcerated individuals who participated in a twelve-session group drumming and the meaning of this group for them. An analysis of interviews that took place after the sessions revealed three main categories: (1) perceptions regarding the djembe – describing how participants initially perceived the djembe as insufficiently masculine, but then changed their minds about this; (2) benevolent relationships – relating to the facilitators’ non-judgemental, non-patronizing and egalitarian approach within a joyful atmosphere, and how this filtered into the mutual relationships among group members; (3) revealing new possibilities – describing how participants were able to unmask themselves and discover new aspects of their peers, express emotions within a pleasurable and safe space and release aggression. This study suggests that the use of drumming groups as a rehabilitative tool may enable incarcerated individuals to shift from a hegemonic masculinity, that fosters aggression, toughness, boldness, violence and control of others, towards an alternative masculinity that encourages openness, respect, support and the expression of emotions.

This study describes the development of the Dimensions of Community Band Participation (DCBP) Scale to measure musicians’ motivations for participating in community bands. Participants (N = 67) included members of a university-sponsored community band consisting of both university students and community members. Members ranged in age from 18 to 73 (M = 28). In addition to completing the DCBP Scale, participants responded to two additional open-ended questions that allowed researchers to assess participant involvement and retention in the community band. The DCBP provides insight into key reasons for participation across all age groupings within adulthood and calls attention to three important aspects of participation: fellowship, personal musicianship and conductor leadership. Implications for this measure include providing community band directors with insight into members’ expectations and motivations for joining and continued participation.

The purpose of this study was to examine the well-being of older adults who participated in New Horizons ensembles and their perceptions of benefits from participation. The positive psychology framework, PERMA, was selected as a lens through which to explore participant well-being. Florida New Horizons members (N = 112) completed a survey that included the PERMA-profiler measure of well-being and researcher-designed questions that explored perceived benefits of participating. Benefits reported were consistent with past research on well-being supports from participation in community music groups. Participants received normal or high-functioning mean scores in all sub-domains of well-being. Participants in the 65+ age group (n = 95) also demonstrated significantly higher scores than the general population for overall well-being and for positive emotion, relationships and meaning sub-domains. Scores for negative emotion were significantly lower than the general population. Results suggest that participation in community music ensembles like New Horizons may have a positive impact on overall well-being for older adults.