Musical Ecologies: Instrumental Music Ensembles Around the World

Community music around the world reflects the growing and diverse ways humans collectivise and express themselves in ways that articulate our cultural, social, and environmental complexity. Revisiting, redevising, and reimagining some of the field’s approaches, ideologies, and contexts, this co-edited volume investigates beyond generalist intercultural and internationalist concepts to reveal the complexity of social ways people come together to make music and to making music be central to this sociality.

The authors explore the role community music plays out around the world and how various instrumentally based music-making communities operate as ecologies that allow notions of social, political, and cultural agency and identity/ies. Chapters cover various instrumental community music ensembles, observing how they, as social microcosms of change and stasis, provide working methods new and old, extol values, and model ethical behaviours that are fluid and dynamic, steadfast and unyielding, and that contribute to the ebb and flow of people and their agency that remains under-researched. Insights are provided on variously functioning ensembles throughout the world, showing how myriad instrumental music communities act as drivers, complex environments, and apparati for musical and social expression that accommodates the musical aspirations of their members.

Taken as a whole, this book explores community music as local, glocal, global phenomena, critically discussing the redefinition of community music and what music-making means to people in the twenty-first century.

Leon R de Bruin is an educator, performer, and researcher in music education, creativity, cognition, creative pedagogies, and improvisation. He is Lecturer in Music at the University of Melbourne, Conservatorium of Music, co-ordinating the Master of Music Performance Teaching degree (MMPT). He is a staunch advocate for quality music education in Australia and music teacher education, and is Australian Society for Music Education National President, and an executive of ISME Instrumental and Vocal Teaching Commission (IVMTC). He has published over 50 articles, chapters, and edited books, including Revolutions in Music Education: Historical and Social Implications, Creativities in Arts Education, Research and Practice: International Perspectives for the Future of Learning and Teaching, and Creativity in Education in the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Education.Jane Southcott is a professor, Faculty of Education, Monash University, Australia. Jane researches the history of the music curriculum in Australia, America, and Europe, and she is also a hermeneutic phenomenologist researching community engagement with the arts, multicultural music education, and cultural identity with a focus on lifelong education. Jane teaches in postgraduate programs and supervises many postgraduate research students. Dr Southcott is co-editor of the International Journal of Music Education, a member of the editorial boards of international and national refereed journals, and a life member of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Research in Music Education.