This Special Issue of the International Journal of Community Music , ‘Thinking more about community music’, responds to provocations raised by Lee Higgins in his recent book, Thinking Community Music (2024). The spirit of this Special Issue is to promote individual perspectives on the future of community music as a field of practice and research. David A. Camlin’s lead article discusses the double-edged sword of the ‘academicization’ of community music, where more musicians than ever have had opportunities to learn about community music in higher education programmes, but fewer have had opportunities for fostering deep relationships in communities due to the modular, time-bound nature of coursework. Articles by Efpraxia Farmaki and Melissa Forbes focus on facilitation. Farmaki shares her experience of personal transformation based on her facilitation work in a men’s prison; Forbes takes a different approach, arguing that community music’s conception of facilitation should be expanded as leadership . Policy provides the animating focus in the fourth and fifth articles. Tenley Martin argues that community music would receive more policy recognition by focusing on ‘non-musical competencies’. Ryan Humphrey argues that, in many ways, community music already does this, having essentially rebranded as a form of top-down, ‘socially engaged music-making’, distancing itself from the ethos of cultural democracy. In marked contrast to the articles by Martin and Humphrey, the article by Sarah Goldfarb, Tina Reynaert and An De bisschop draws on French didactic theory to argue for a re-centring of music as a foundational ethos in community music facilitation. The final two articles continue the theme of facilitation, but from different vantage points. Whereas Maria Varvarigou, Andrea Creech and Susan Hallam delve into the pedagogical possibilities of the non-formal spaces endemic to many community music practices, Alexandra Sanchez, Elisa Robbe and July De Wilde examine the pedagogical possibilities of online communities connected to the practice and evolution of corridos tumbados . The issue concludes with a tribute to Don Coffman, who is retiring after nineteen years of service to the journal, the last ten as associate editor.
Roger Mantie (Mon,) studied this question.