Making Music Together: The community musician’s role in music-making with participants

cross the UK, community musicians support groups and individuals to make their ‘own’ music with the belief that this holds potential for transformative and empowering experiences. Consequently, music co-creation is a regular feature of contemporary UK practice. Research is limited in this area, often presenting the prosocial or ameliorative impacts of music-making in an overtly positive or uncritical light. In this study, I ask: ‘How do we make music together?’ to explore approaches to co-creative music-making and to deepen understanding of, (1) how community musicians and participants conceptualize working together, and (2) strategies of research through music-making. Through a methodology guided by community music I undertook long-term Practice as Research in educational, community centre and adult recovery programme settings within the United Kingdom. The research explores ways in which empowerment and/or transformation correspond with the practice of facilitated music-making. This exegesis is one part of a two-part research dissemination. Using my practice as both evidence and methodology, I explore the intricacies and tensions of facilitated musicmaking, unpacking the community musician’s dual collaborator/facilitator status by zooming in on the starting points for material generation with participants. Drawing upon concepts which include hospitality, responsibility, and critical pedagogy, alongside iterative practice, I suggest the community musician and participant’s working together as collaboration through joint endeavor underpinned by a cultural democracy to come. However, operating in the context of agenda, assumption and pre-existing structures, this cyclical process can become compromised through musicmaking approaches that are one-way. In conclusion, community music is described as a performative moment made of relationships, which calls for enacting a critical practice, and togetherness is offered as a lens and a practice approach to do so