1 Intervention

Wang LinLin is a musician who studied at the China Conservatory in Beijing. During her time away from Taikang County, located in the Henan province in central China, Wang LinLin spent time reflecting on her good fortune in having parents who have been able to support her throughout her education and training as both a professional musician and music therapist. Studying music full time at most of the world’s universities or conservatoires  requires privileges that are often linked to a person’s history—for example, economic means, such as financial investments that stretch back to the first private lesson; opportunity, such as having access to a quality music education and/or a music education that meets specific “standards” or expectations; and support, affirmation from family and friends who nurture and protect physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

Wang LinLin’s reason for appreciating her current situation is set against the context of where she spent her formative years. Taikang County, with its 23 townships and 700+ villages, is one of many examples of how the economic disparities between China’s rural communities and the rapid growth of urban wealth have severely affected community life. Brought about through a widening gulf between those who have and those who have not, parents are forced to leave their children while they go to the large cities for a stable income. This situation has resulted in many children being left in places where they are looked after and schooled until they are around 9 or 10 years of  age. Many rural children are sent to Taikang because, in some cases, schools can provide room and board from birth. The staff who work there are also able to take responsibility for the children’s safety; however, this can result in not allowing the children out during the days they are in attendance. During the time at the school, the children see their parents once, maybe twice a year. For many children, achieving their professional ambitions seems an impossible task. Wang LinLin evaluates her narrative against this background and feels that she has been blessed with good fortune and wishes to give back to the community she loves dearly.

Working with music in Taikang County, Wang LinLin creates environments where children can express their feelings through rhythm and song. Simple rhythmic games enable the children to add their own words and lyrics, and traditional Chinese songs provide a sense of unison. Through music making, Wang LinLin cultivates trust between herself and the children. There is an openness to the possibility of change, a sense of humanity, and a sense of the “just,” what philosopher Emmanuel Levinas might describe as a humanism of, and for, the Other. Speaking through an interpreter, she admits that there is a “numbness” among the children: “They don’t know their parents’ love,” Wang LinLin laments, “but the songs we sing provide opportunities for emotional release.” Through her interventions with the children “as individual and precious human beings,” Wang LinLin evokes friendship and gives them a particular type of permission to express their inner thoughts. Her actions reflect Jacques  Derrida’s notion that justice is a vocation, an affirmative step toward another human being (see Think Piece 4). The children will initially say, “I’m not angry that my parents are gone because I know they are making a better life for me.” After a time of music making, some of the children reveal that they miss their parents and ask, “Why did they leave me here?” A sense of the unjust drives Wang LinLin’s work: Why are these children left alone? This situation the children find themselves in does not seem fair for the parents, for the children, or for China’s society. In the future, Wang LinLin wants to make the musicians and music students studying in Beijing aware of this situation. Wang LinLin is convinced that if she can somehow showcase her work to those privileged and studying in the city, they too will be empathetically touched and inspired to head to the rural villages as community musicians.

This think piece sets out to consider the concept of intervention and its association with community music practices. Over recent years, describing community music as an “active intervention” has become a common way to articulate its distinctive nature (see “Arrival”: A Field of Practice). When distinguishing his three key contexts for the practice, music educator Huib Schippers (2018) notes that community music as an intervention “is by far the most documented type of community music,” adding that “it may also be the most elusive because of its sheer diversity and scope” (p. 26). As the field expands globally, is now the time to reassess the use of the term intervention? What are the implications when using this word, and is the notion of intervention apt for a growing global field? I begin by offering some thoughts on how the term may have initially found an association with community music. Following this, I sketch out some common daily usage of the term, then fold in some thoughts and ideas from practitioners. In flight lines, I offer some reflections and encourage those in the field to critically explore the term as an opportunity to recalibrate the language and understanding of what community music does, what it can be, and what it is.¹

In the United Kingdom, the interventionist approach to community music is linked to the community arts scene that flourished during the counterculture era of the 1960s and 1970s. Within this era, a time of considerable social upheaval in the form of anti-government and anti-establishment protests, social issues became the subject of art making. As a distinctive strand from that movement, community music shared the goals of community arts through activism, challenging repressive and hierarchical social norms, and commitment to personal growth and notions of empowerment. Following those working during this time, there were desires to address issues of access and inclusion in social and musical-cultural contexts by asking questions such as: Who in society has access to music? Who makes and plays music? Who decides what is “good” music and what is not? Community music activity also grew in response to shifts in government policy concerning education curriculum, to changes in expectations and delivery requirements of publicly funded arts organizations, and to the needs and agendas of formal service providers such as government agencies and nongovernmental organizations in areas of health, education, and social services (Brown et al., 2014; Doeser, 2014). It is this latter set of relationships in particular that inform the contemporary activities of community musicians (Bartleet & Higgins, 2018b; Veblen et al., 2013; Willingham, 2021).

The contention that music-making experiences have the potential to influence and/or bring about positive and beneficial change in both individual and collective terms has its roots in antiquity (Horden, 2000). It is today widely supported by scholars working across multiple disciplines, including music therapy (Ansdell & Denora, 2016; Stige, 2012; Stige et al., 2010), music psychology (MacDonald et al., 2012), music education (McFerran et al., 282019; Váradi, 2022), and ethnomusicology (Barz & Cohen, 2011; Koen, 2008; Pettan & Titon, 2015), that music has a positive impact concerning health and well-being and can be an enhancement of individual capacities. Music as a social outcome and its relationship with creating a positive social environment and helping with the maintenance of traditional cultures have been of scholarly interest in areas such as community development (DeQuadros & Dorstewitz, 2011), international development (Bolger, 2012), and peacebuilding alongside conflict resolution (Bergh, 2010; Sweers, 2015). This array of intentions and goals can also be observed in music programs initiated in places of extreme human needs, such as communities at war or in recovery from violent conflict (Howell, 2015, 2018), and in the range of ways that many of the world’s cultures employ music as a tool for healing (Gouk, 2000). Similarly, there are notable historical antecedents for using shared music to create a sense of empowered communal spirit, social bonds, and cohesion. These include employing music to mobilize large numbers of people to a common political cause or ideal (Hebert & Kertz-Welzel, 2016). Ethnomusicologist Thomas Turino (2008) cites the role of mass singing in the youth rallies of Nazi Germany and the U.S. civil rights movement as two examples of music used for the mobilization of the masses. While the ideologies underpinning those two movements were strongly contrasting, both effectively utilized the sense of shared unity, purpose, and courage that mass singing could generate toward their respective political aims.

The notion of music making as an intervention can be understood as an instrumentalization of music’s potential to transform lives for the “better.” This might be understood as music making is “good” and enriches your overall life experience. This sentiment has a history that can be traced back to several key moments; for example, the Industrial Revolution saw not only the advent of large-scale changes to employment and emphasis on small family units but also the introduction of industry-sponsored workers’ choirs and musical groups, precursors to many of today’s community choirs and brass bands. Ensembles such as these were understood as providing productive, pleasurable, and self-improving pastimes for workers, who might otherwise spend too much time drinking in local public houses and potentially getting caught up in revolutionary action. Furthermore, there was a belief that music could improve the morals of both singers and listeners (McGuire, 2009). This idea also informed the work of many religious missionaries, traveling into new territories as part of colonial expansion and using shared music making to facilitate union with God, to inspire feelings of unity and community cohesion, and as a mechanism through which the colonized or proselytized could be “improved” and “civilized” (Willson, 2011).

Contemporary community music practices are strongly informed by a history of social action, as well as by a set of beliefs and a growing evidence base about the potential of shared music making to bring about positive and beneficial individual and collective change. This is why, as community artist François Matarasso (2019) explains, the notion of instrumentalization does not reflect the intent of those engaged in community arts: “the accusation of instrumentalizing art has been flung at community artists, as a way of discrediting their work and its challenge to dominant practice” (n.p.). I would concur that instrumentalization does not reflect the intent of those engaged in community music. As musicians who choose to work creatively alongside people, the notion of instrumentalization is rooted in an aesthetic ideal that objectifies music as having a possibility of existing independently (Bowman, 1998). The growth of what has become known as an interventionist approach to community music may partly be because its history has collided with the contemporary needs of social service provision. Consequently, the growth of the intervention model, if that is what it is, has driven the subsequent rise in importance and professionalization of the role of the community musician. However, in some cases, it may have compromised it politically.

With its origin set around the 1580s, the etymology of the word intervene derives from the Latin intervenire, meaning “to come between”: inter, a prefix meaning between, among, in the midst of, together, coupled with the word venire, meaning “to come.”² Commonly used to describe a mediation, a coming between disputing people or groups, the term intervention evokes taking part in something to prevent or alter a result or course of events. Often associated with a sense of force, such as intervening in the affairs of another country, the term is used to describe someone or something intentionally becoming involved in a problematic situation to improve it or prevent it from worsening. Intervention is then the act of intervening.

Many examples of intervention have a negative connotation. Wars in, for example, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan all attract significant criticism surrounding the idea of intervention (Bhatia, 2003; Smith, 1996; Yoon, 1997). The American intervention in Korea has frequently sparked protests, especially over how it is portrayed in film (Goldstein, 2014). Other quotes attributed to various leading figures demonstrate this. Consider Vladimir Putin’s suggestion that “it’s alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States.”³ Samantha Powers, an Irish-born American diplomat, notes, “Historical hypocrites have themselves carried out the very human rights abuses that they suddenly decide warrant intervention elsewhere.”⁴ Pointing toward colonialism, a course of action closely connected to notions of intervention, Haile Selassie, an Ethiopian statesman and former emperor, reminded fellow Ethiopians, “Above all, we must avoid the pitfalls of tribalism. If we are divided among ourselves on tribal lines, we open our doors to foreign intervention and its potentially harmful consequences.”⁵ Along similar lines, political activist Noam Chomsky states, “The former colonies, in Latin America in particular, have a better chance than ever before to overcome centuries of subjugation, violence and foreign intervention, which they have so far survived as dependencies with islands of luxury in a sea of misery.”⁶ Certainly, the actions made under the term have had damaging consequences to many peoples and is particularly associated with colonization in countries such as Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Canada, where the idea of intervention has many complex undertones.⁷

The concept of intervention does, however, have positive connotations, for example, its usage in descriptions surrounding preventative approaches in both health and education; COVID-19 is a standout example of modern times.⁸ American democratic politician Lucille Roybal-Allard highlights this, noting, “Newborn screening is a public health intervention that involves a simple blood test used to identify many life-threatening genetic illnesses before any symptoms begin.” As a champion for young families, she describes the Head Start program,⁹ a service that provides early childhood education, health, and nutrition to low-income children and their families, in the following way: “I have long been a supporter of the Head Start program because each and every year I witness the dramatic positive impact that early intervention services have on children’s lives in my congressional district.”¹⁰ Autism spokeswoman and scientist Temple Grandin underlines this sentiment: “A treatment method or an educational method that will work for one child may not work for another child. The one common denominator for all of the young children is that early intervention does work, and it seems to improve the prognosis.”¹¹ As a final example, Maajid Nawaz, British politician and founder of Quilliam,¹² a counterextremism think tank, says, “The British state already invests in early intervention campaigns in drug abuse and sexual health. Challenging extremism should be no less of a priority.”¹³ As is clear from these examples, the word intervention and the actions that have been carried out under its banner have a complex and diverse history which requires an understanding of the context to gauge whether it can be deemed as a good thing or not. The next section locates the word within community music practice and theory.

As part of a discussion thread, Kirstin Anderson,¹⁴ a musician working within the criminal justice system, asks, What are the implications for using the word intervention? She says within a collaborative research group chat, “The word [intervention] implies that one group has power over another, there is someone intervening in another’s affairs. If organizations and/or individuals see themselves as working in collaboration with a community, then I think the word is limiting.” Kirstin suggests that the term may restrict the ability to engage different types of groups, especially, she says, “those groups who have started to disrupt the (sometimes) elitist grip on access to the arts for themselves.” From this standpoint, community agency would be diminished. Following criminologist Yvonne Jewkes,¹⁵ Kirstin states, “Change the language and it will change the culture.” There is a sense here that people have a strong connection to words. How, for example, do people in prisons, communities, and schools feel about taking part in an “intervention”? What does that term make them think of? Have “we” asked them?’

I have always acknowledged that my articulation that community music is an active intervention between music facilitators and participants is (1) grounded in my history as a U.K. practitioner and (2) the expression of practice that interests me most. As a fulcrum, the notion of intervention has helped focus my arguments and conceptual propositions. However, with the exponential growth of community music as a field of practice and scholarship, it now seems responsible to interrogate this idea more fully. In the introduction of the Oxford Handbook of Community Music, Brydie Leigh Bartleet and I reflected upon this point:

We have been asking ourselves deeply critical questions about this definition and the impact it has had on the field. . . . [W]‌e have questioned whether the prevailing notion of community music as an active intervention still accurately reflects the contemporary manifestations of the field. We have asked ourselves whether there is a better term to use, and if so, what it would be. (Bartleet & Higgins, 2018a, p. 15)

At the time, Brydie and I thought that the term intervention potentially still encapsulated many community music practices worldwide and reflected the intentions to “interrupt” particular situations, such as socially inequitable and unjust systems or politically repressive contexts, and bring about positive social change. As Schippers explains:

Based on an expressed or perceived need, one or more music practices are developed with or for the community to restore existing practices or to introduce new ones. These initiatives usually have a short to medium-term lifespan due to their brief availability of personnel, organizational structure, and (mostly external) funding sources. (Schippers, 2018, p. 24)

In conversation with practitioners, one respondent candidly said:

It’s a word I use when I am speaking to people, describing what we do and it’s a word we use a lot when we fill in funding applications. I’ve never really thought about its meaning in any great depth, it’s just a word I know, it seems to fit what I mean however that might be because everyone else is using it too, and that we all think we mean the same thing. In doing so now, I’ve come to the conclusion that it needs much more thought and interrogation, as in its current understanding, it means something that doesn’t sit too well with what I aim to do in my practice. . . . I’m now not sure how I feel about it, bearing in mind the things we proclaim our practice to be built on.

This statement speaks to a growing need to reflect on the intentions behind the term and critically examine where power, agency, and self-determination reside.

Other practitioners I talked with were concerned that the term reflected a deficit-based perspective. A deficit-based perspective attributes failures such as lack of achievement, learning, or success in gaining employment to a personal lack of effort or deficiency in the individual rather than to failures or limitations of the education and training system or to prevalent socioeconomic trends (Wallace, 2009). One musician admitted that:

In my early practice, I equated it [interventions] with people (usually privileged/with power) deciding what other people (usually disadvantaged/subjugated) need. And reflecting on my role as a community music facilitator, I question the extent to which I may be the former in this equation and what that might mean for approaches to practice.

Those working within an intercultural context could enable a rethinking of the idea from the standpoint of decolonization. Talking from an Australian context, Bartleet and Carfoot (2016) state, “[It is] important to avoid discourses of social justice that privilege outsider perceptions of need over the demands of the communities themselves” (p. 346). Aotearoa New Zealand music educator Te Oti Rakena identifies tension in intervention through consideration of “Western models of community music” with non-Western communities. Rakena (2018) states, “To participate in community music-making for Māori and Pacific Island students is to participate in the traditions of the [European settlers’] culture of power” (p. 82). Musician and educator Dave Camlin (2020) suggests that because intervention is an active verb, somebody has to be the person doing the intervening; consequently, there is always a risk of objectifying the participants you are working with and, as such, becoming part of the very problem community musicians say they wish to overcome. Responding to public education scholar Gert Biesta 34(2004, 2006), Camlin draws upon the notion of the “rational community,” rational agents who speak an everyday discourse as representatives of the community. Although community music interventions are taken from good intentions, the actions might be understood as complicit in maintaining the cultural dominance of those in power—more often than not, the “rational community.” Camlin worries that even if it is born out of good intention, “this process of ‘othering’ is one of the ways in which ‘rational community’ maintains its hegemonic grip on the means of cultural production” (Camlin, 2023, p. 117). From Biesta’s perspective, the rational community can maintain their influence, which can result in exclusionary practices. This is problematic if we consider the central tenets of community music and their historic location; it is the very thing community music has sought to address, a practice rooted in the concept of cultural democracy.

Central to the concept of community music as an intervention has been the concept of cultural democracy, a process by which the power to decide cultural creativity lies within each person¹⁶ and thus cocreates multiple versions of what culture is (Graves, 2005; Jeffers & Moriarty, 2017; Kelly, 2023). Cultural democracy contrasts the democratization of culture, which is far more in tune with the deficit model—in short, “taking great art to the people” (Wilson et al., 2017, p. 23). There has been plenty of work to address the inequalities of cultural participation (Elliott et al., 2017; Hunter et al., 2016; Wilson et al., 2017), and Camlin, for one, welcomes these initiatives but alerts us to the possibility that the ideas can be highjacked by those in control of cultural policy, which in turn might lead to furthering culture inequalities. Despite these concerns, Camlin (2020) concludes that “paradoxically, and despite my misgivings about the term, music as an intervention might provide one such means of emancipation from the deadlock of cultural orthodoxy, providing an alternative social reality to the one experienced in the everyday lives of citizens” (n.p.).¹⁷ In a personal communication, Camlin fine-tunes this thought, saying that intervention can potentially be positive when it disrupts people’s relationship with the orthodoxy of the neoliberal consensus by providing people with different ways of being in relationship with fellow human beings.

In previous work, I rethought cultural democracy by placing the idea within the structure of the unpredictable future and the promise of the unforeseeable, “a structure of openness to the future,” readjusting each day in relation to the flux of daily living (Higgins, 2012b, p. 169). As a “dream” toward that which will never fully arrive, the figure of a “cultural democracy to-come” would be, as U.K. community musician Jo Gibson (2020) describes, something to work toward within any interventionist music practice. Acknowledging the problematics, Gibson reconciles these within the “cultural democracy to-come” figure, noting that when participants and community musicians “invent new music together, there is the coming of something new, something different from before. To work towards this is to engage in dialogue, listening to the other through presence in the encounter” (p. 29).¹⁸ Gibson further outlines how, as a practitioner, she attempts to reconcile such dilemmas by asking more questions from the funder alongside the participants to cultivate togetherness and enact critical practice through listening and reflection.

Nelson Mandela was reported to say that “intervention only works when the people concerned seem to be keen for peace.”¹⁹ This suggestion has at its heart a call for dialogue and open conversation between any two parties where intervention is a possibility. From this departure point, where an agreement or knowledge of the intervening process is understood, the word intervention is operationalized in the work of community musicians. That said, does this reflect the situation on the ground, or is this an ideal, a story of an imagined narrative community musicians tell themselves and those who fund their projects?

The above examples highlight how intervening is commonly understood as a “coming between.” From the perspective of community music, I would like to advocate for a far more reciprocal understanding, one that is closer to what I perceive as being at the heart of Mandela’s declaration that places both parties as being in consultation with a recognition of the power imbalances. This speaks to the theoretical character of community music as an act of hospitality, a way to describe the relationship between music facilitator and participant that is structured through an ethical experience where the aim is that the first move is always through the participants’ call to attend a music-making event (see Think Piece 2). This cyclical structure of call and welcome, evoking both decision and responsibility, offers a far more complex and nuanced understanding of the term that allows for considerations of power, control, and privilege to be critiqued and unpacked within the musical exchange. Of course, in practice, who gets to attend, how, and why are complicated matters. Coercive participation can also be at play, so understanding the complexity helps harness a nuanced understanding.

As part of the community music lexicon, the noun intervention can sit quite comfortably alongside others often associated with its practice—each having roots with the Latin venire, “to come.” For example, the notion of invention is vital for the practice of improvisation, a significant approach to music making used by community music facilitators. Invention is the coming of something new, something to come that is different from what has come before. Invention speaks to discovery, exploring, and finding out, setting a course for adventurous journeys. Community music happenings are often phrased in terms of events, which is related to venire. French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard describes events as occurrences of something important that call for new modes of experience and different forms of judgment (Malpas, 2003). They are occurrences that disrupt preexisting frames or contexts, giving an opportunity to the possible emergence of new voices (Lyotard, 1991). From Lyotard’s perspective, art and literature are exemplary locations through which events happen, potentially generating circumstances after which nothing will be the same again (Readings, 1991).

Intervention,

    Invention,

        Adventure,

            Event

are all concepts that signal the arrival of the unexpected. As a cluster, they all have semantic associations with the word welcome, an idea connected to the facilitation process. Welcome is a word derived from the Old English wilcuma, a kindly greeting,²⁰ one whose coming is in accord with another’s will, from willa, meaning pleasure, desire, or choice, and cuma, meaning “guest,” related to cumin, “to come.”²¹

Community music from within the United Kingdom grew through the community arts movement in the 1970s, a politicized, socially engaged movement that looked to disrupt the elitist grip on access to art. With cultural democracy as a conceptual driver, music interventions were employed as means of creating openings for active musical doing and, in so doing, to provoke debates surrounding access, inclusion, and participation; challenging repressive and hierarchical social norms; and a commitment to personal growth and empowerment. The strongest work took place through invitation, where artists stepped into communities and worked alongside people to produce new music that expressed local identity. As a consequencet these types of collborative experiences offered the possibility of deep community connectionsns that enabled participants to amplify their collective thoughts on issues affecting them such as poverty, crime, education and environment, among many other things. Following Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1970/2002), community musicians like Wang LinLin sought to “empower” those they worked with and provide opportunities for transformative educational moments.²² As a form of thoughtful disruption, intervention denotes an encounter with “newness,” a perspective that seeks to create situations where new events innovate and interrupt the present toward moments of futural transformation (Bhabha, 1994). Put this way, maybe the issue is not so much the process of intervention but rather the structures behind it.

Although there might be a danger that those who intervene are seen as an all-knowing other, community music as an intervention includes leading workshops, facilitating discussions, and supporting groups in their musical endeavors. These conscious and deliberate strategies seek to enable people to find self-expression through musical means. Using procedural concepts rooted in nonformal learning (see Think Piece 3), community musicians emphasize negotiation through collaboration, and thus, learning takes place through a “bottom-up” rather than “top-down” approach. When I described community music as an active intervention, I did so from this inheritance. The use of the word was as an intention to “interrupt” particular situations, such as social and political disadvantage, and bring about social change. It was not used in terms of “helping” someone, nor from a deficit perspective. However, my thoughts flow from a position both European and of privilege. Since the global growth of community music, subsequent analysis, mainly from Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand, has alerted the field to the problematics of the term and that it needs to undergo adequate interrogation. In Australia, for example, the term intervention is associated with a highly controversial and problematic political package of changes to welfare provisions, law enforcement, land tenure, and other measures such as allegations of child sexual abuse and neglect (Bartleet & Higgins, 2018a). Many may argue that musical interventions are needed more than ever in such circumstances, while others suggest that the work that changes people’s lives is not an intervention as much as an “awakening,” drawing out something that is already latent within. However, community music facilitators are challenged to ask themselves (1) on whose terms this musical activity is happening, (2) whether those are appropriate to the cultural context in which they are operating, and (3) whether the intervention is acting as another colonizing endeavor or promoting a more positive sense of self-determination for participants (Ashley & Lines, 2016; Rakena, 2018). In a personal communication, one community musician mentioned: “If we are the right people to ‘intervene,’ what qualifies us to be able to do this? Is it because we think we can? Is it because we’ve been trained to do so? Are we imposing what ‘we’ want to do and the way ‘we’ want to do it?” If the meaning of intervention denotes an action or process that interferes with a situation or scenario, does the word limit a broader understanding of the work community musicians do? We might also reflect upon the idea of an intervention as a catalyst for change, and as such, are catalyzing agents open for change also?

As a global phenomenon, community music has now become more nuanced. The questions arising from this think piece, which are complex and many, prompt community musicians to take a reflexive view of their own cultural legacy and their current work. Exploring the term intervention provides those in the field an opportunity to recalibrate the language and understanding of what community music does, what it can be, and what it is. It is a good time to determine what intervention does, and what the intentions behind it are, and critically examine where the power, agency, and self-determination reside.