The broader goals of community musicking include providing access to music as a fundamental human right, encouraging lifelong musical participation, promoting health and wellbeing, and extending hospitable welcome (Higgins 2007a, 2007b, 2008, 2009, 2012, 2024; Small 1998; Veblen 2007, 2013). These ideals also emphasize societal betterment, democratic learning, inclusivity, and belonging. Navigating current educational and political climates—where divisive rhetoric increasingly defines policy, curricula, and representation while also limiting access, inclusion, and diversity—can seem like a complex exercise in counterpoint.
In my various roles as an active professional performer, Suzuki instructor, university professor, public school music educator, and in my aspirations to practice community music facilitation democratically, I encounter inherent tensions stemming from differences in training, expectations, and hierarchies. Increasingly, I turn to ideals of community musicking to guide my practices in each context. I believe many of these ideals seamlessly integrate with National Association for Music Education (NAfME) standards, Suzuki principles, and classical performing norms.
This essay is an extension of my doctoral research, in which reciprocity emerged as a phenomenon within a community music ensemble, with participants and the facilitator willingly shifting roles, sharing pedagogical authority, and embracing contradictions (Catron, 2023). How could reciprocity resonate as a framework for care and compassionate connection? Examples of reciprocity as resonance might include (a) listening and being open to hearing what the student and teacher want, their agendas, and what matters to them; (b) showing appreciation for contributions; (c) communicating openly; and (d) demonstrating respect.
Hendricks (2018) outlined six qualities of compassionate music teaching: trust, empathy, patience, inclusion, community, and authentic connection. By maintaining awareness of these six qualities, educators and learners may experience new feelings of vulnerability that could challenge convictions, beliefs, and pedagogical practices, such as master-apprentice models.
Trust is necessary for vulnerability, yet reciprocally, trust is present if and when we feel safe enough to be open and vulnerable with another person. Consider the shared risk and vulnerability of shared performance spaces, a common occurrence in ensemble classes and community music spaces. Such shared experiences can reinforce bonds and trust, foster authentic connections, and increase creativity and belonging by modeling a community music spirit of boundary-walking, deterritorializing roles, and perforating margins (Higgins, 2012).
Higgins (2007a, 2008, 2009, 2024) defined three concepts in community music. First, “the welcome” is an ethical act of care and hospitality, unconditionally inviting participation. Higgins (2007b, 2008, 2009) also considered creative exploration through the concept of “safety without safety.” This concept implies that, while students feel safe in the presence of trusted others, they also experience a lack of safety when being vulnerable and taking artistic risks in creating new or unexpected musical results. Safety without safety leaves room for a nurtured by love approach (Suzuki, 1983), demonstrating a duty to care while expanding the limits (real or perceived) of the participants’ creativity and excellence. With hospitality and safety without safety, community musicians may welcome the impossible future in which the unexpected, unpredictable, unconditional, and unforeseeable allow for creative ventures and explorations. Thus, hospitality is a necessary condition with the potential to transcend limitations and boundaries, while unconditional outcomes and impossibilities invite community as an organic and pluralistic phenomenon.
One of the underpinnings of community music pedagogy is a focus on attitude, people, community, and collaboration rather than method and outcome. By modeling caring, competence, and character, educators can establish a tone of safety, welcoming creative exploration and fostering safer spaces for mistakes and experimentation as students learn new techniques and apply different strategies while exploring musical expression. Everyone makes mistakes—mistakes are universal and provide growth opportunities. By creating supportive spaces for students to learn from their mistakes and succeed, we can help them develop a sense of responsibility for their learning while solidifying their place and role in musical spaces. This approach does not compromise excellence. High standards and compassion can coexist, potentially countering performance anxiety, power dynamics, and relational precarity.
In our musical spaces, we can model community music ideals by:
- demonstrating personal integrity and care;
- celebrating experimentation and supporting risk;
- being accessible and welcoming;
- facilitating and modeling effective communication;
- involving students in decision-making;
- expressing value in opposing viewpoints;
- empowering students with musical competence;
- holding each other accountable for meeting obligations;
- inviting dialogical exploration;
- empowering students as leaders, practicing teaching and expanding possibilities; and
- understanding growth and rest: not every moment is a learning moment.
Revisiting Goals
Considering connection as a how, rather than a what or where, led me to consider compassionate teaching from the perspective of belonging. Currently, there is much emphasis on 21st-century entrepreneurship, including marketing, production, and prioritizing efficiency, profit, and performance. For whom are these goals? How do these goals foster compassion, curiosity, and authentic connection? What are the values we carry into our spaces?
Good intentions are not enough. The golden rule of treating others as one would want to be treated may be a dangerous assumption because people have different perspectives, aims, and desires. Reflexively engaging, questioning, and analyzing practices are essential. Perhaps authenticity is one of the keys to integrity and vulnerability. Being anything but genuine is exhausting; admitting “I don’t know” is being vulnerable. Such actions show the ability to put one’s ego aside and demonstrate a curiosity and thirst for learning.
Bylica (2023) posited the idea that listening could be a radical act of care. Individuals often make meaning from what they hear without consciously considering that multiple beliefs could be influencing the interpretation (Kallio, 2021). Often, the goal of listening is to influence or control another person’s understanding, imposing one’s goals and desires on another. In music education, listening may be a means to master a skill or acquire a correct answer. Lipari (2014) noted that “understanding without misunderstanding does not exist” (183) and considered listening to be a requisite process for ethical response. However, compassion does not insist on rational understandings of vulnerability or subjectivity. Music educators should embrace this impossible future, encouraging dialogical interactions that elicit multiple narratives within a climate of trust and resonance that promotes reflexive and personal authorial agency, risk-taking, and safety without safety.
The dialectics of contradiction encourage acknowledging individuality while recognizing connection with others. Similarly, contradictions and open-ended definitions of community create opportunities for not-yet-imagined futures with pedagogic possibilities for belongingness and connection. Readily accepting shifting roles, micro and macro influences on identity formation and disruption, and sometimes dissonant and overlapping positionalities can transform relationships. Encouraging connection through acts of hospitality, the community music welcome, and safety without safety, we invite the impossible future through spaces that foster change and cultivate an attitude of playfulness and discovery. Compassionate musical communities could counter relational precarity and meet 21st-century educational challenges, such as serving marginalized populations, inviting improvisation as knowledge co-creation, challenging conventions, and furthering social justice initiatives. Reciprocally striving for improvement by focusing on relationships, people, and inclusion may create processes, products, and outcomes of excellence and belonging. Thus, it is important to continue exploring difficult questions about values, which could shift the emphasis from personal ambitions to the needs of others, promoting collaboration to create powerful learning opportunities that welcome and invite a sense of belonging and meaning for every person.
References
- 2023. “Critical Listening and Authorial Agency as Radical Practices of Care.” In Oxford Handbook of Care in Music Education, edited by Karin S. Hendricks. Oxford University Press.
- 2023. “Reciprocal Relationships in an Intergenerational Community Music Ensemble.” DMA diss., Boston University. ProQuest (30638046).
- 2018. Compassionate Music Teaching: A Framework for Motivation and Engagement in the 21st Century. Oxford University Press.
- 2007a. “Acts of Hospitality: The Community in Community Music.” Music Education Research 9 (2): 281–292. 10.1080/14613800701384441.
- 2007b. “The Impossible Future.” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 6 (3): 74–96. http://act.maydaygroup.org/articles/Higgins6_3.pdf.
- 2008. “The Creative Music Workshop: Event, Facilitation, Gift.” International Journal of Music Education 26 (4): 326–338. 10.1177/0255761408096074.
- 2009. “Community Music and the Welcome.” International Journal of Community Music 1 (3): 391–400. 10.1386/ijcm.1.3.391_1.
- 2012. Community Music: In Theory and in Practice. Oxford University Press. 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199777839.001.0001.
- 2024. Thinking Community Music. Oxford University Press. 10.1093/9780190247027.001.0001.
- 2021. “Towards Solidarity Through Conflict: Listening for the Morally Irreconcilable in Music Education.” In Difference and Division in Music Education, edited by Alexis A. Kallio. Routledge.
- 2014. Listening, Thinking, Being: Towards an Ethics of Attunement. Pennsylvania State University Press.
- 1998. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England.
- 1983. Nurtured by Love: The Classic Approach to Talent Education. 2nd ed. Ability Development.
- 2007. “The Many Ways of Community Music.” International Journal of Community Music 1 (1): 5–21. 10.1386/ijcm.1.1.5_1.
- 2013. “The Tapestry: Introducing Community Music.” In Community Music Today, edited by Kari K. Veblen, Stephen J. Messenger, Marissa Silverman, and David J. Elliot. Rowman & Littlefield Education.
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