We Can All Make Music.
Community Music
The foundation of strengthening community and the
starting point for unleashing community creativity
By Jon
Hawkes, September 9, 2003.
Description
of community music as perceived by Community Music
We have a dream: we imagine a
society in which everyone makes music, where music making is an utterly normal
and constant activity of all.
We don't chase this dream just
because we think that a culture without music is not worth living in. After
all, there's plenty of music around already - symphony orchestras, advertising
jingles, venues of all complexions, CD shops galore, music radio and even lots
of music teachers.
We chase this dream because we
believe that making
music is a fundamental human right and essential to becoming a fulfilled and
healthy human being. We can all make music and a society that does
not actively encourage, facilitate and promote this capacity in its citizens
and their children is deeply flawed and probably doomed.
Yes, music making is essential
for survival, or to put it in the words of the public policy makers, communities
making music is a fundamental ingredient of wellbeing and sustainability.
This is because making music
together creates a crucible in which the synergy that comes from collaborative
effort is directly experienced and productively channelled. There is no other
activity that provides such an immediate and tangible manifestation of the
power and joy of co-operation. It is the creative manifestation of community.
It transforms the metaphor of harmony into a real life experience.
Healthy and creative communities
depend upon there being regular opportunities for citizens and their children
to come together in safe and supportive environments in which mutual respect
and validation, co-operative interaction, and joyful outcomes are the normal
result of engagement.
Community music making offers the
most productive context in which these conditions can be realised.
With these experiences as a base,
community vitality, capacity, confidence and energy will flourish.
Not only is community music
making the foundation of community strengthening, it is also the best starting
point for unleashing the creativity that is bubbling in all of us.
Exercising this creativity is not
simply something to which every individual has a right,
it is also a survival necessity. Unless a society's creative capacities
flourish, it will lose the ability to effectively face the challenges of
existence, of change, of positively solving the problems that life on this
planet presents us with every day.
We're convinced that it is
through making music (and possibly the combination of music and movement) that
communities can most effectively discover (or re-discover) the joy and value of
community creativity.
Through the utilisation of just
the body and the voice, with no external tools, no difficult-to-learn skills,
people can discover, explore and celebrate their creative capacities in ways
that no other activity can offer so easily, accessibly, inclusively, and
possibly most important, so immediately gratifyingly.
Experienced facilitators can
guide groups through experiences where their abilities to make their own music
are made real, quite literally, within minutes. And this is not just their capacity
to sing a 'given' piece, but to improvise and to compose.
This is not mere theory. At CMV
we have personally witnessed this apparent miracle so many times that we are
beginning to forget that we live in a society in which so many, perhaps most,
people have been convinced that they can't sing, that they are 'tone deaf',
that making music is best left to the experts.
This tragic manifestation of
cultural cringe might not matter so much if it wasn't for the fact that making
music together is such a basic part of living a fulfilled life. We owe it to
ourselves and to our children to do all we can to rediscover our musicality.
There are, of course, already
infinite manifestations of music in communities. They range from families
singing together around the fireplace, hymn singing in the local church, cheer
squads singing their club song, through amateur choirs aspiring to performances
of the highest quality and garage bands dreaming of winning the
At CMV, we recognise and respect
all these forms, but the focus we have chosen is the most basic, the most
fundamental.
What we aspire to is, to edit
Abraham Lincoln, music that is made by and of the people. It is this belief in
the innate musicality of all humans, and of the need to unleash and valorise
this musicality, this need to democratise and demystify music-making, that
informs our conception of community music.
Building directly out of
these ideas, we think of community music as:
Our sense of community music is
that it is, or at least has the potential to be, totally inclusive. While
community music is always made by specific groups (real sounds coming from real
bodies), we believe that ALL people have the right, and the capacity, to make
their own music.
We certainly don't see community
music as being all music, nor even all music in a community. For us, the key
issue is that it is music being made together by 'ordinary',
'everyday', 'regular' people.
This belief in the innate
musicality of human beings has profound ramifications: not least, in putting
music on the same level as language. Contemporary linguistic theory affirms
that the capacity to communicate using sounds is innate, or, to use
contemporary jargon, 'hard-wired'; we believe the same goes for music.
In which case, the development of
musicality is not learnt but uncovered. Just as a child discovers how to speak,
so the capacity to make music is discovered rather than acquired. Development
in this usage is the exact opposite of envelopment: unwrapping the potential that is in all of us.
And just as formal grammatical
rules and extended vocabulary can be taught to children who already understand
the essential dynamics of speech, so it is with music. The facility to make
music, just as with the facility to speak and to understand speech, comes before
the facility to read, to write, to appreciate the symbolic frameworks we have
invented to surround these innate human qualities.
And the ramifications continue:
children are creative with language from the moment they start using it: so can,
and should, they be with music. Yes, hearing and learning the stories and songs
of one's culture is an essential part of growing up, but it should not be at
the expense of developing one's own stories and songs.
And more: children learn language
through using
language - as much, if not more, through testing their own expressiveness as
through listening to the intense beauty of those that have transformed the
mundane into the sublime.
And even more: the facility to
converse develops through making conversation, through exchange, through doing
it together.
So can, and should, it be with music.
If we are to survive and be happy
- to maximise sustainability and wellbeing - we must make music
together. It's as simple as that.
CMV - making a
sound world together.
©
Community Music Victoria Inc.