**Encounters with Participatory Music**

**David A. Camlin**

#### **1. Introduction**

It is increasingly the case that students training for a professional career in music will have some encounter with either formal music education, more socially-engaged musical practices or both as part of their studies (Bennett 2012). Historically, such encounters may have been perceived as a distraction from or, at worse, a negation of students' emerging identity as performing musicians (Freer and Bennett 2012). Accordingly, such encounters may not have been considered an important part of a student's development as a performing artist. However, when student musicians encounter participatory music, what they discover is a more complex, less familiar, often exciting and sometimes uncomfortable experience of the performance of human relationships through music, which may inspire them to pursue participatory music or music education as an important dimension of their future careers. In a less direct way, such encounters may also prepare them for the collaborative and relational world of chamber music, by involving them in more dialogic musical exchanges where there is an emphasis on mutual "subjectification" (Biesta 2014, p. 18) through music, i.e., *showing up* for each other, each party finding their own voice within a "simultaneous dialogue" (Barenboim 2009, p. 20) of polyphony. Such encounters may also help with students' musical confidence by giving them opportunities to be musical outside of the perfectionist culture of the conservatoire. Above all, being able to accommodate some of these paradigmatic shifts in thinking about and experiencing music's quality and value is what lies at the ehart of the benefits of the encounters described in this chapter.

#### *Aesthetic and Participatory Traditions*

Undergraduate conservatoire students will have spent years in dedicated individual/solo practice in order to realise their aspirations as professional performers within the performance traditions of the concert hall. In general terms, one might characterise their professional development as falling within a Kantian paradigm of aesthetics involving "an exceptional instinctive talent enabling true artists to produce outstanding objects of beauty that express vital ideas for aesthetic perception and appreciation among those with cultivated aesthetic tastes" (Väkevä 2012, p. 93). An attendant perfectionist attitude manifests itself in the conservatoire in the form of "musical hierarchies and vocational position taking" (Perkins 2013) within an atmosphere of intense competition. While this may be a necessary element of students' preparation for the competitive world of professional practice, it can also impact negatively on their health and wellbeing (Perkins et al. 2017).

Such immersion in aesthetic traditions may also render participatory music practices as more unfamiliar musical contexts for undergraduate conservatoire students. In participatory settings, there is a stronger emphasis on the realisation of social relations through collective musical performance (Turino 2008, p. 36; Camlin 2018), where a more "relational" aesthetic centred around "the sphere of human relations" (Bourriaud 1998, p. 44) is emphasised, and where notions of musical "quality" are inextricably connected to the social context of participation (Chernoff 1979, p. 153). In this "construction of a shared habitat" (Bourriaud 1998, p. 56), music becomes "a social praxis that springs from people's shared musical actions, understandings, and values" (Silverman et al. 2013, p. 4). In other words, it is fundamentally a relational practice:

The act of musicking establishes in the place where it is happening a set of relationships, and it is in those relationships that the meaning of the act lies. They are to be found not only between those organised sounds which are conventionally thought of as being the stuff of musical meaning but also between the people who are taking part, in whatever capacity, in the performance; and they model, or stand as metaphor for, ideal relationships as the participants in the performance imagine them to be: relationships between person and person, between individual and society, between humanity and the natural world and even perhaps the supernatural world. (Small 1998, p. 13)

Of course, we should not think of these different emphases as belonging exclusively to any particular musical practice. Indeed, the "performance" of both works and relationships might be seen to be integral to all kinds of musical performance.

Some of the apparent tensions between performing traditions—the aesthetic tradition of performing "works", on the one hand, and the participatory tradition of performing "relationships", on the other—can be at least partially resolved when one considers the "paramusical" (Stige et al. 2013, p. 298) benefits which arise from within both aesthetic and participatory dimensions of music (Camlin et al. 2020, p. 2). For example, the impact on the wellbeing and mood of all those participating is valued equally highly in both traditions, as are the affordances for social cohesion and social bonding, which appear to attend all instances of musical endeavour in one way or another.

Similarly, we might recognise the notion of entrainment (Clayton et al. 2005)—both musical and neurobiological (Camlin 2021)—as underpinning all kinds of musical performance. While we might view Small's idea of the performance

of relationships as a metaphor for how musicking might unite its performers and participants, a neurobiological understanding of the musical process enables us to make a stronger claim: that the performance of relationships through music may be literal as well as metaphorical. The phenomenon of "self-other merging as a consequence of inter-personal synchrony" (Tarr et al. 2014, p. 1) highlights how the neurobiology of those engaged in musical activities may come to attune to and resonate with that of their co-participants, through the sympathetic entanglement of neurobiological, musical and neurohormonal mechanisms (Camlin et al. 2020, p. 12). Understood in this way, we can see how musicking might contribute to the phenomenon of "limbic resonance" (Lewis et al. 2001, pp. 169–70), an interpersonal neurobiological connection which underpins the experience of a healthy relationship. In other words, musicking might provide the conditions of "safe danger" where people can experience relational intimacy, even love (Camlin et al. 2020, p. 12). This capacity of music to forge a deep sense of interpersonal connection is recognisable across the whole spectrum of aesthetic and participatory traditions and is an essential basis for claiming music as a unified, pluralistic and diverse human experience.

However, these contrasting traditions have historically given rise to more dichotomous positions, perhaps especially so in response to educational and cultural policy developments over the last 40 years (Wright 2013, p. 15). Discourse has often reduced discussion of the complexity of musical experience to more binary arguments concerning "product vs. process" or "excellence vs. access/inclusion" (Camlin 2015a, 2017). Especially in institutions such as conservatoires—charged with the preservation of aesthetic traditions—an attendant culture of perfectionism has often occluded a more critical appraisal of participatory musical traditions. While these debates have ultimately stagnated, involvement in participatory music activities—or music education more broadly—can be "sometimes viewed as a less prestigious alternative to performance" (Hallam and Gaunt 2012, p. 140) for aspiring musicians:

Coupled with dominant discourses placing performance as the pinnacle of success for a musician (Bennett 2008), it is not uncommon for students to feel 'second-rate' if they redefine their career aims to include activities beyond performance. (Perkins 2012, p. 11)

Encounters with participatory music for some conservatoire students might even be taken as a "negation" of one's primary identity as a performing musician. Using the psychological model of "possible selves",<sup>1</sup> Freer and Bennett (2012), for example, studied the attitudes of student musicians toward an emerging

<sup>1</sup> In other words, "the selves that we would very much like to become. They are also the selves we could become, and the selves we are afraid of becoming" (Markus and Nurius 1986, p. 954).

musical identity, which included that of music educator. What they discovered was that for many music students, identifying as a music educator was perceived as "a negative outcome that follow[s] from an unrealised or unattainable performance goal" (Freer and Bennett 2012, p. 275).

Recent studies suggest that these historical tensions between performer and teacher identity may have become less pronounced in recent years (Pellegrino 2019), with some reports suggesting that for professional musicians, these kinds of encounters provide "an opportunity to see the power of music more directly and to gain a stronger perception of what it means to be a musician" (Ascenso 2016, p. 4).

Nevertheless, the developmental challenges facing "those musicians who think of themselves also as teachers" (Swanwick 1999, p. i) is very much bound up in the sheer complexity of the musical activities in which they may be involved. This complexity is compounded not just by the different kinds of music which students may encounter in participatory music settings, but also by the diversity of people who populate those practices and the many different kinds of human relationships implicated within such participation. Small's philosophy emphasises the way in which the music itself can become a way of experiencing those relationships:

The relationships of a musical performance are enormously complex, too complex, ultimately, to be expressed in words. But that does not mean that they are too complex for our minds to encompass. The act of musicking, in its totality, itself provides us with a language by means of which we can come to understand and articulate those relationships and through them to understand the relationships of our lives. (Small 1998, p. 14)

In truth, the encounters described in this chapter might be seen to be encounters with community music (CM), but within the conservatoire, there remains some resistance to the term, connoting, as it does, a set of practices which may be perceived as heterodoxical to the aims and values of the institution. Philosophically, there are no grounds for limiting discourse about music in this way, but the prejudice remains. CM itself is a contested term, a diverse and pluralistic set of situated practices which evade a definition and consensus (Higgins 2012, p. 3; Brown et al. 2014; Camlin 2016), often hinging on ideas of music both as an "intervention" and as a series of "acts of hospitality" in the Derridaean tradition:

Community music may be understood as an approach to active music-making and musical knowing outside of formal teaching and learning situations. Community music is an intentional intervention, involving skilled music leaders, who facilitate group music-making experiences in environments that do not have set curricula. Here, there is an emphasis on people, participation, context, equality of opportunity, and diversity. Musicians who work in this way seek to create relevant and accessible music-making experiences that integrate activities such as listening, improvising, musical invention, and performing. (Higgins 2012, p. 3)

While the terms "community music" and "participatory music" remain closely related, they are not synonymous. For the purposes of this chapter, I will refer mainly to the latter insofar as it emphasises more relational as distinct from more presentational forms of music making (Turino 2008). What sense, therefore, do contemporary music students make of their encounters with participatory music, and what insights into their emerging identity as musicians do these encounters afford?

#### **2. Methodology**

#### *2.1. Justification of Approach*

The experience of participatory music is highly individualised and also "situated" in socio-cultural contexts that are as diverse as the practices contained within them (Camlin and Zeserson 2018). Therefore, a general understanding of what it may mean to engage in participatory musical practices can only go so far—for each individual so involved, a personal perspective of what such engagement means to them may be taken as a more valuable indicator of significance. This study, therefore, did not set out to make general inferences about universal experiences of participatory music; rather, it attempted to understand the practical and epistemological complexities and challenges faced by individual students from a conservatoire background as they developed their agency within participatory music settings and explored, through dialogue with more experienced practitioners, how some of these complexities and challenges might be addressed.

#### *2.2. Participants*

Half (*n* = 5) of the participants involved in the study were undergraduates at the Royal College of Music, London (henceforth, RCM), who had undertaken an elective module in participatory musical practices, where they were required to co-lead music workshop activities across a range of settings, including with groups of children, young people and adults, in early years and in health and wellbeing settings, as well as with groups of participants experiencing some kind of disadvantage, e.g., disabilities or forced migration. The remainder (*n* = 5) were musicians with more established practice in participatory settings, purposively selected to represent a breadth of experience from music/theatre performance, music health and wellbeing, music education and socially engaged music contexts outside of the RCM. Ethical approval for the study was given by Conservatoires UK (CUK) via the RCM Ethics Committee on 5 December 2019, and informed consent was obtained from all participants as

a pre-condition of participation. There were not considered to be any significant ethical issues associated with the study.
