Embracing a community narrative

The following is a script for the documentary Embracing a Community Narrative which is yet to be made. Through interviews with myself as a community musician and myself as a researcher specialised in community relations this documentary teases out how the community dialogue encouraged through my community music work enhances the participants’ sense of community.

A LARGE ROOM

Two museum staff are in a conversation with an older men who holds a tool in his hands.

Narrator (voiceover)

This is a memory-sharing weekend at Verdant Works, Dundee’s museum about the town’s jute industry, housed in a former mill. John Duncan, now in his nineties, tells the museum’s education and community outreach officer Brian Kelly and his colleague about his experiences as a millworker.

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AN OFFICE

A woman sits at a desk writing a text with notes from the memory-sharing weekend scattered around her.

Narrator (voiceover)

And this is the office of community musician Petra Vergunst, who carries out the community music project at Verdant Works of which the memory-sharing event is but the start. I’m here to ask her how she thinks her community music projects influence communities. First, though, we need to find out how she develops her projects.

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CLOSE-UP OF THE TOP OF A TABLE IN THE LARGE ROOM

A copy of an A4-sized songbooklet lies open on the table and an anonymous hand turns to pages to reveal a series of songs.

Community musician Petra Vergunst (voiceover)

Songs play a central role in my community music projects. I compose the words and music for these songs myself and try to capture the memories, experiences and reflections of participants in them. Here at Verdant Works, for example, we’re looking at the experiences of people who’ve worked in Dundee’s jute industry.

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CLOSE-UP OF PETRA VERGUNST IN THE MACHINE HALL AT VERDANT WORKS

Researcher Petra Vergunst

You can think of this music, based on the memories and experiences of people who have worked on the mill floor, as capturing a community narrative, a popular discourse that tells the story of the jute mills in Dundee and that many Dundonians feel describes their heritage and determines who they are now.

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THE LARGE ROOM

Petra Vergunst is leading a choir of twenty to thirty people who sing from the songbooklet.

Investigator (voiceover)

You rehearse the music you’ve written in public workshops. Who are your participants and how do they react to your music?

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CLOSE-UP OF PETRA VERGUNST IN FRONT OF THE CHOIR

Community musician Petra Vergunst

The participants for this public workshop at Verdant Works were recruited through press releases, emails to community organisations and word of mouth. I won’t say that recruitment isn’t hard work, but those people who do come forward tend to be very enthusiastic about being part of the project.

Investigator (voiceover)

What impact do you feel your projects have on communities?

CLOSE-UP OF THE PETRA VERGUNST IN FRONT OF THE CHOIR (CONT.)

Community musician Petra Vergunst

It is hard to lay your finger on how exactly community music projects influence communities, as the number of people participating is low as compared to the number of inhabitants of Dundee. But projects are important to those people who participate. In this project at Verdant Works, for example, The Dundee Free Voice Singers, led by Margaret Mathers, asked whether they could round off the public workshop by singing a few traditional Dundee mill songs. Such initiatives can really bring a project to life, and are an example of how this project was embraced by participants.

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THE LARGE ROOM (CONT.)

A brief continuation of Petra Vergunst leading the choir who are singing the songs written specifically for the project.

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CLOSE-UP OF PETRA VERGUNST IN THE MACHINE HALL AT VERDANT WORKS (CONT.)

Researcher Petra Vergunst

This community music project revives the popular story of Dundee’s jute industry. To continue to be meaningful a narrative needs to be reinforced regularly so that people reconnect to it and re-evaluate the meaning of it to them personally. The community dialogue created through this community music project helps people to do so. This narrative, together with the experience of participating in a project that reinforces this discourse, heightens the sense of community participants experience.

Copyright text and images Petra Vergunst

A tale of intervention

As an artist and community musician with a background in rural community  development I regularly reflect on the impact of my work on communities. Last June I rounded up some of those reflections in a paper that I presenred at the seminar meaning(less)meanings at Gray's School of Art, Robert Gordon University, in Aberdeen. Here is slightly shortened version of the paper. The full paper will be published online some time this autumn.

Community music, and community arts in general, has been on the scene since the 1960s (Lacy, 1995; Crehan, 2011; Rooke and Garrido Sanchez, 2011). Artists may add some form of community engagement to their projects to justify their work and/or to respond to calls from funding organisations to include an element of outreach work in project applications (Kester, 1999). Others do so because they want to contribute to social change. This raises questions as to what is understood to be a community, the communities that are engaged, the objectives of such community engagement, and the extent to which such engagement is meaningful. Here, I’ll use the example of my own community music work to discuss how one can intervene in, and influence, communities through the arts. 


Community music 
Rather than defining community music I tend to describe my own approach through a number of characteristics. To me, community music is based on the premise that music is a means to intervene in communities and bring them together. This is grounded in ideas of social activism in which projects are relevant to communities, and audiences are seen as active participants rather than passive receivers (Lacy, 1995). My projects emphasise process rather than outcome, and the experience of participation rather than quality of performance (cf. Small, 1999). To allow people with varying musical backgrounds to participate, all projects include an element of song, whilst many are stratified to provide opportunities for people with more musical experience to shine as well. Many of my projects use folksong or folksong-inspired music as participants are likely to be familiar with this. To offer participants with limited singing and instrumental experience a chance to participate I often include unison choruses and an element of creative writing.

Community music projects often last three to five months. Though each project is different, they usually start with a phase in which I engage with communities to gather their memories and reflections. On basis of this, I tend to compose a piece of music which is subsequently rehearsed in one or more community workshops. In some projects I work with pre-formed groups like schools and community groups, in other projects I recruit participants from the wider public who participate in one or more events.
 

The themes of my projects usually relate to the everyday life experiences of participants (Lacy, 1995) and deal with heritage or social history (rather than national history) or social issues like migration and gender. In doing so, the projects aim to reinvigorate the bond participants feel with community, place and time, in turn strengthening their sense of identity (Lacy, 1995). My musical compositions tell stories based on the memories and reflections shared by the participants in the first phase of the project. To do so, words play a central role in my musical compositions, and are usually included as song lyrics or poetry.

What distinguishes my work from that of many other community musicians is the kind of people I engage and my objectives for doing so. Community music organisations like Sistema Scotland train musicians, and aim at enhancing their participants’ musicianship skills. Their focus thus is on the personal development of participants. Community objectives may be achieved through this, but they are achieved through personal development in first instance. In contrast, my projects place the community objectives at the centre, aiming at a degree of transformation or socio-cultural change as a result of my projects (Lacy, 1995; Crehan, 2011). The focus hence is on the quality of participation rather than music-making. As a result, my emphasis in community music projects is in many ways closer to the ethos and ways of working of community artists (Lacy, 1995; Crehan, 2011) rather than other community musicians.