Community Music Today

Community Music Today highlights community music workers who constantly improvise and reinvent to lead through music and other expressive media. It answers the perennial question “What is community music?” through a broad, international palette of contextual shades, hues, tones, and colors. With over fifty musician/educators participating, the book explores community music in global contexts, interconnections, and marginalized communities, as well as artistry and social justice in performing ensembles.

This book is both a response to and a testimony of what music is and can do, music’s place in people’s lives, and the many ways it unites and marks communities. As documented in case studies, community music workers may be musicians, teachers, researchers, and activists, responding to the particular situations in which they find themselves. Their voices are the threads of the multifaceted tapestry of musical practices at play in formal, informal, nonformal, incidental, and accidental happenings of community music.

Kari K. Veblen (Canada, USA) is Assistant Dean of Research and Associate Professor of Music Education at the Don Wright Faculty of Music at University of Western Ontario, Canada. A musician and educator, Dr. Veblen studies international trends in Community Music and writes on the intersections of music, education, the arts, and society and pursues a twenty-five year fascination with transmission of traditional Irish/Celtic/diasporic musics. An international representative to the NAfME Adult and Community Special Research Interest Group, she has served on many professional boards, including the ISME board. She is associate editor of the International Journal of Community Music.

Stephen James Messenger (USA) is a public school teacher who works with a diverse student body at the secondary level (his training includes special education, the teaching of Reading, and English as a Second Language) and is a visiting instructor in English Composition at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, the public honors college of the University of Maryland system, where he teaches English composition focused on the students’ musical lives. An active musician, Dr. Messenger plays guitar, mandolin, octave mandolin, and bass guitar and participates in a variety of on-line musical communities. His research interests include popular culture, poetry and imagistic interdisciplinary work, Blues and American roots music, Mexican folk art, and British motorcycles.

Marissa Silverman (USA) is Assistant Professor and Coordinator of Undergraduate Music Education at the John J. Cali School of Music of Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey and active professional flutist in New York City. Previously she taught secondary school band, general music, and English literature in New York City. A Fulbright Scholar, her research interests include urban music education, music and social justice, interdisciplinary education, community music, secondary general music, curriculum development, and topics in the philosophy of music and music education. In addition to articles in peer-reviewed journals, Dr. Silverman has published invited book chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Music Education Philosophy, Music, Health and Wellbeing, and The Oxford Handbook of Music Education.

David J. Elliott (Canada, USA) is Professor of Music Education at New York University. Author of Music Matters: A New Philosophy of Music Education (Oxford 1995) and Praxial Music Education: Reflections, and Dialogues (Oxford: 2005), Dr. Elliott lectures and presents worldwide. He is currently Chief Editor of Action, Criticism and Theory for Music Education and serves on several other editorial boards. As an award-winning composer and arranger, Dr. Elliott has published many choral and instrumental works (Boosey and Hawkes, New York). His primary interests are music education philosophy, curriculum, creativity, composition, and community music.