Musical Ecologies

Community music around the world reflects the growing and diverse ways humans collectivise and express themselves in ways that articulate our cultural, social, and environmental complexity. Revisiting, redevising, and reimagining some of the field’s approaches, ideologies, and contexts, this co-edited volume investigates beyond generalist intercultural and internationalist concepts to reveal the complexity of social ways people come together to make music and to making music be central to this sociality. The authors explore the role community music plays out around the world and how various instrumentally based music-making communities operate as ecologies that allow notions of social, political, and cultural agency and identity/ies. Chapters cover various instrumental community music ensembles, observing how they, as social microcosms of change and stasis, provide working methods new and old, extol values, and model ethical behaviours that are fluid and dynamic, steadfast and unyielding, and that contribute to the ebb and flow of people and their agency that remains under-researched. Insights are provided on variously functioning ensembles throughout the world, showing how myriad instrumental music communities act as drivers, complex environments, and apparati for musical and social expression that accommodates the musical aspirations of their members. Taken as a whole, this book explores community music as local, glocal, global phenomena, critically discussing the redefinition of community music and what music-making means to people in the twenty-first century.

Sounds, Ecologies, Musics poses exciting challenges and provides fresh opportunities for scholars, scientists, environmental activists, musicians, and listeners to consider music and sound from ecological standpoints. Authors in Part I examine the natural and built environment and how music and sound are woven into it, how the environment enables music and sound, and how the natural and cultural production of music and sound in turn impact the environment. In Part II, contributors consider music and sound in relation to ecological knowledges that appear to conflict with, yet may be viewed as complementary to, Western science: traditional and Indigenous ecological and environmental knowledges. Part III features multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches by scholars, scientists, and practitioners who probe the ecological imaginary regarding the complex ideas and contested keywords that characterize ecomusicology: sound, music, culture, society, environment, and nature. A common theme across the book is the idea of diverse ecologies. Once confined to the natural sciences, the word "ecology" is common today in the social sciences, humanities, and arts - yet its diverse uses have become imprecise and confusing. Engaging the conflicting and complementary meanings of "ecology" requires embracing a both/and approach. Diverse ecologies are illustrated in the methodological, terminological, and topical variety of the chapters as well as the contributors' choice of sources and their disciplinary backgrounds. In times of mounting human and planetary crises, Sounds, Ecologies, Musics challenges disciplinarity and broadens the interdisciplinary field of ecomusicologies. These theoretical and practical studies expand sonic, scholarly, and political activism from the diversity-equity-inclusion agenda of social justice to embrace the more diverse and inclusive agenda of ecocentric ecojustice.

Makis Solomos explores the ecologies of music and sound, inspired by Felix Guattari, for whom environmental destruction caused by capitalism goes hand in hand with deteriorating ways of living and feeling, and for whom an ecosophical stance, combining various ecological registers, offers a glimpse of emancipation, a position strengthened today by intersectional approaches. Solomos explores environmental, mental and social ecologies through the lens of the history of music and current artivisms – especially in the fields of acoustic ecology, contemporary music and sound art. Several theoretical and analytical debates are put forward, including a theory of sound milieus and the biopolitics of sound; the relationships between music and the living world; soundscape compositions, field recording, ecomusicology, and the creation of sound biotopes; the use of sound and music to violent ends as well as considering the social and political functions of music and the autonomy of art, sonic ecofeminism, degrowth in music, and much more.

Why is music so important to most of us? How does music help us both in our everyday lives, and in the more specialist context of music therapy? This book suggests a new way of approaching these topical questions, drawing from Ansdell's long experience as a music therapist, and from the latest thinking on music in everyday life. Vibrant and moving examples from music therapy situations are twinned with the stories of 'ordinary' people who describe how music helps them within their everyday lives. Together this complementary material leads Ansdell to present a new interdisciplinary framework showing how musical experiences can help all of us build and negotiate identities, make intimate non-verbal relationships, belong together in community, and find moments of transcendence and meaning. How Music Helps is not just a book about music therapy. It has the more ambitious aim to promote (from a music therapist's perspective) a better understanding of 'music and change' in our personal and social life. Ansdell's theoretical synthesis links the tradition of Nordoff-Robbins music therapy and its recent developments in Community Music Therapy to contemporary music sociology and music studies. This book will be relevant to practitioners, academics, and researchers looking for a broad-based theoretical perspective to guide further study and policy in music, well-being, and health.

"Music triggered a healing process from within me. I started singing for the joy of singing myself and it helped me carry my recovery beyond the state I was in before I fell ill nine years ago to a level of well-being that I haven't had perhaps for thirty years." This book explores the experiences of people who took part in a vibrant musical community for people experiencing mental health difficulties, SMART (St Mary Abbotts Rehabilitation and Training). Ansdell (a music therapist/researcher) and DeNora (a music sociologist) describe their long-term ethnographic work with this group, charting the creation and development of a unique music project that won the 2008 Royal Society for Public Health Arts and Health Award. Ansdell and DeNora track the 'musical pathways' of a series of key people within SMART, focusing on changes in health and social status over time in relation to their musical activity. The book includes the voices and perspectives of project members and develops with them a new understanding of how music promotes their health and wellbeing. A contemporary ecological understanding of 'music and change' is outlined, drawing on and further developing theory from music sociology and Community Music Therapy. This innovative book will be of interest to anyone working in the mental health field, but also music therapists, sociologists, musicologists, music educators and ethnomusicologists. This volume completes a three part 'triptych', alongside the other volumes, Music Asylums: Wellbeing Through Music in Everyday Life, and How Music Helps: In Music Therapy and Everyday Life.

"Volume editors: Chelcy L. Bowles, David J. Elliott, David E. Myers, & Adam Ockelford"--Page 4 of cover.

Music education takes place in many contexts, both formal and informal. Be it in a school or music studio, while making music with friends or family, or even while travelling in a car, walking through a shopping mall or watching television, our myriad sonic experiences accumulate from the earliest months of life to foster our facility for making sense of the sound worlds in which we live. The Oxford Handbook of Music Education offers a comprehensive overview of the many facets of musical experience, behavior and development in relation to this diverse variety of contexts. While the first volume primarily focuses on children during school-age years, this second collects an international list of contributors to explore how music learning takes place outside of the traditional classroom environment. Discussing a range of issues such as music education for the special needs population, music learning in adulthood, and music learning through media and technology these chapters help to broaden conceptions of music and musical involvement. Whether they are used individually or in tandem, the two volumes of The Oxford Handbook of Music Education update and redefine the discipline, and show how individuals across the world learn, enjoy and share the power and uniqueness of music.

Musical imagination and creativity are amongst the most abstract and complex aspects of musical behaviour. This book is a wide ranging, multidisciplinary review of the latest theory and research on musical creativity, performance and perception by some of the most eminent scholars in their respective disciplines.