Artists care: how to structure care and supervision for community musicians working in challenging and complex settings

Community music encompasses a variety of different practices with practitioners working in myriad settings. For musicians who work in the domain of socially engaged practice, practitioner identity is critical in understanding and differentiating between the approaches of musicians who identify themselves as activists, with activism a driving force of their work, and that of other music educators (Hess, 2019). Socially engaged arts practitioners require a wide skills set, with competencies nested within artistic, social, pedagogical, ethical, research, development, entrepreneurial and contextual domains (Lehikoinen & Siljamäki 2023). The work of community musicians is then both holistic and multidimensional. Many freelance community musicians in the UK lean toward an identity as artist rather than musician. There are many reasons for this, some pragmatic as they are multi-artists, and others lie deeply within the notion of socially engaged arts as a reaction against the formal educational structures of music. Explorations of the relationship between community music and music-making in prisons have shown both parallels and contrasts between the two areas of practice, however they are intimately entwined by their focus on seeking to support the personal growth and social strengths of participants (Cohen & Henley 2017). Therefore, given the complexity around community musicians’ identity (Phelan 2008), and the focus on socially engaged arts as a field of praxis with many dimensions, we use the terminology of the three community music organisations that we work with and refer to community musicians as artists throughout the paper.

Citation

Henley, J., Caulfield, L., Cole, S. (in press) Artists care: how to structure care and supervision for community musicians working in challenging and complex settings. International Journal of Community Music.

Type

Journal article

Language

en

Description

This is an author's accepted manuscript of an article that has been published by Intellect on [date TBC] available online: [link TBC]. The accepted manuscript may differ from the final published version.

ISSN

1752-6299

EISSN

1752-6302

Collections

Institute for Community Research and Development