Music Making Community

Making music offers enormous possibilities--and faces significant limitations--in its power to generate belonging and advance social justice. Tony Perman and Stefan Fiol edit essays focused on the forms of interplay between music-making and community-making as mutually creative processes. Contributors in the first section look at cases where music arrived in settings with little or no sense of community and formed social bonds that lasted beyond its departure. In the sections that follow, the essayists turn to stable communities that used musical forms to address social needs and both forged new social groups and, in some cases, splintered established communities. By centering the value of difference in productive feedback dynamics of music and community while asserting the need for mutual moral indebtedness, they foreground music’s potential to transform community for the better.

Contributors: Stephen Blum, Joanna Bosse, Sylvia Bruinders, Donna A. Buchanan, Rick Deja, Veit Erlmann, Stefan Fiol, Eduardo Herrera, David A. McDonald, Tony Perman, Thomas Solomon, and Ioannis Tsekouras

Tony Perman is an associate professor of ethnomusicology and the department chair of music at Grinnell College. He is the author of Signs of the Spirit: Music and the Experience of Meaning in Ndau Ceremonial Life. Stefan Fiol is a professor of ethnomusicology and affiliated faculty in Asian Studies at the University of Cincinnati. He is the author of Recasting Folk in the Himalayas: Indian Music, Media, and Social Mobility.