Marching off the map

At a sermon at my church in Arusha, a Lutheran pastor told us this story: When a battalion of Roman soldiers were about to march into territory that hadn’t been recorded yet, they sent a messenger back to Rome to report that they were about to march off the map. At the moment, in the midst of planning, conceptualising and researching, I feel a lot like these soldiers - and I’m also looking out for a battalion to join me!

A lot of what I aim to do has definitely already been charted, or is in the early sketches; a music project using traditional music, an El Sistema-inspired program, cross-cultural and interdisciplinary performances, community engagement across cultural and linguistic boundaries. However, there is a long way to go for these landscapes to be fully explored.

For example, Sistema-inspired programs are mostly using classical and western folk music and without much consideration of the students’ and community’s cultural background. The traditional ensemble set-ups of the orchestra and choir are used as paradigms for teamwork, co-operation and the cultivation of empathy – Daniel Barenboim’s “template for democracy”. There are few models of using other genres of music in intensive programming for social outcomes. Likewise, they all offer free music instruction and so rely on tempting donors with easy-on-the-eye statistics about the grade improvements of students involved in their programs. There is a desperate need for these programs to develop some sort of self-sustainability and to advocate for more community responsibility for the program, and especially for the programs in the context of developing countries.

In the West, we have an obsession with specialisation, becoming an expert in one skill or field. This has resulted in the delineation of a myriad of genres and styles of art, and an ensuing hierarchy, so that ‘crossover’ between different genres of music is generally not encouraged. In the world of education, examination boards create qualifications that put up barriers between rigidly defined artistic expressions, although this is starting to change with newer multi-disciplinary qualifications such as BTEC gaining as much credibility as the A-Level. If cross-pollination between different genres of one art-form is rare, consider how infrequently cross-arts exhibits or performances are supported in schools. By contrast, in Kiswahili there is one word for a community performance of various musical expressions ‘ngoma’, and one word for the arts ‘sanaa’.

Another landscape that I really get excited about exploring is that of the artistic performance experience. Being trained in the world of classical music, I have a set of rituals and etiquette wired into my performing system. In our contemporary urban societies, however, we consume culture and the arts at a fast pace with multi-sensory experiences and interactions that are incompatible with the concert hall culture. So what can these new culturally and community relevant performances look like?  

One landscape that gives me a headache thinking about is that of how to evaluate artistic quality. For many in the mainstream music world, quality means a high level of individual proficiency on an instrument, such as a prodigious display on the violin or piano, or an ensemble executing a complex technical piece. For others it means a close imitation of recorded artists; their sound and style of musical expression, their arrangement of a known song. These criteria for quality reflect the individual and isolated life of a musician seeking a place in a competitive performance world. This lens would not be appropriate for assessing the quality of a master drummer leading a drumming workshop at a community venue, or the performance of a traditional dance troupe.

Lastly, there is the balance and synergy of artistic and social aims in community music programs. Social change through music can be interpreted in a myriad of ways. Two versions that I have been considering involve using music as a support for educational attainment or learning outcomes, and for community-building or strengthening social cohesion. For the first version, Sistema-inspired programs are beginning to accumulate data about how intensive music programs affect achievement at school and there is a growing pile of awesome brain science as to how the process of learning music supports other learning. The field of community music and El Sistema in Venezuela answers to the second version, but where does the artist focus on the quality of the artistic product and where do they focus on the quality of community engagement and social impact?

Peter Renshaw has this to say about one music program in the UK: “But the work of Music in Prisons also has a social aim – basically, to stop people re-offending. Music is then seen as a vehicle for achieving social ends – but the music leader is not an artistic ‘social worker’ or therapist”. In other words, musicians can and should find a place for themselves in community contexts but remember that they are first and foremost musicians. At a workshop the Fellows attended at Dreamyard in the Bronx, NYC, one teaching artist talked about how the arts succeeds in bringing the community together and strengthening bonds so there is more potential for community support. This view sees the arts as establishing and supporting bridges between community members.

So not only should we march off the map and explore new territory, but we should use our artistic expertise to build foundations and use the materials available in the community to construct bridges. What this will look like is waiting to be discovered.