There is a rising critique of the process and position of decision-making across music interventions, which has been evidenced through the MUSOC research network debates that we, as doctoral students, have participated in. In this article, we specifically discuss ‘intervention’ as ‘deliberate strategies that seek to enable people to find self-expression through musical means’ (Bartleet and Higgins 2018: 3). We offer three perspectives from three different intervention contexts: community music in schools, organizational settings and music-making workshops. Through this article, we share and reflect on our experience with intervention and decision making within our practice. We give specific focus to: how intentions and motivations underpinning interventionist practice manifest in different contexts; how this is currently informed by the decision-making structures through which community music is practised in each context; and, the extent to which dominant modes of practice have potential to disempower participants, including how they are reinforced and re-enacted through this process. Finally, we suggest that how we talk about intervention across peers, and how we enact it through our practice as practitioners and researchers is possibly misaligned. This warrants further consideration if explorations of the term ‘intervention’ are to feed into discussion and action for responsible practice.
This paper stems from cross-disciplinary dialogue and collaboration between community music and human geography which sought to interrogate and understand claims of social sustainability and social change often cited in evaluation reports of community music projects. The lead authors (Parks and Cassidy) took this dialogue forward by organising a geography conference session which incorporated an instant choir workshop to test how we might ‘do’ social sustainability through practice. Drawing upon ideas from both disciplines, the paper synthesises the reflections of nine participants in the session to explore the capacity of creative, embodied, geographical practice to transform hegemonic experiences of academic conferences, and to create a sustainable and inclusive community of practice.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.