Community music is dead: Long live community music!

In the United Kingdom, the professionalization of community music within the academy has changed it as a practice, from a dispersed and dissensual field consisting of diverse communities of musical relationships to a more homogenous set of practices reified in curriculum and standardized through assessment. There are both gains and losses arising from this professionalization, but what is most at risk is the diversity of situated approaches to music in community contexts which gave rise to the term ‘community music’ in the first place. Through personal reflection on a career in participatory settings, mainly in the United Kingdom, and philosophical discussion, an argument is developed to champion the idiosyncratic and highly situated nature of community music in the face of homogenizing academic influence.