Community Music in Cultural Policy

Community Music presents a contested field. Its art status, its methods and its effects all are under scrutiny as the various actors involved in community music practices frequently have very different backgrounds and different objectives. Aesthetic intentions, social objectives and economic motivations may all play a role for actors and sometimes clash. Cultural policy has had a hard time dealing with community music, sometimes haling it in as a cure for all social ails, at other times scorning it for its supposed lack of artistic quality and delegating it to the remit of social policies, but not ‘art proper’. The discourses on community music change over time following political and societal trends. It is our conviction that such clashing fields often are most interesting, for research and practice. In our contribution to the Oxford Handbook of Community Music we will try to reconcile both worlds. We take a normative perspective here: in our view all cultural policies necessarily are instrumental. Cultural policies are just as contentious as they necessarily address public and cultural issues policies do. They are created in an ‘overlapping zone’, a social space in which agents from the art world and the world of public administration negotiate the terms under which publicly funded aesthetic practices can function. In this contribution we provide a scheme of the basic tensions inherent to community music which can form the basis for such negotiations. Rather than taking a specific empirical cultural policy context in consideration, we will take a theoretical perspective here. As a result the basic scheme can be adjusted to be applicable in all concrete situations