Making music, making musicians: exploring access and diversity in leisure-time music making

Project summary:
This partnership between the University of Sheffield and Making Music will critically evaluate historical and current models of amateur and community music-making, critiquing the existing division between the ’leisure-time music-making’ of (predominantly) white middle class amateur choirs and orchestras, and community projects designed with a more social than musical agenda. Research is needed to examine the benefits and barriers in both types of setting, and to consider how meaningful lifelong musical engagement can be made accessible to a broader sector of the population.

Project description:
Making Music (MM) is a membership organisation that provides support for amateur musical groups across the UK, from traditional choral societies and orchestras to community choirs, jazz and world music ensembles. They are active in engaging with researchers to tackle the challenges facing their membership, and two years ago worked with Stephanie Pitts on a national survey looking at the impact of their groups’ activities on their localities. That survey raised many questions that now inform this project, including concerns about sustainability and flexibility in amateur music-making in the light of an ageing constituency, many of whom have followed traditional school- and family-based routes into lifelong musical engagement.

Conversations with MM have highlighted their awareness of diversity and access debates in cultural provision, and their desire to gain understanding of the triggers to musical engagement that are most accessible to today’s young people and adults. They are key contributors, for example, to Make Music day, which would in itself offer a rich source of data collection. The student working with MM will therefore have opportunities to do long-term ethnographic research with MM’s existing membership within reach of Sheffield, and also to reach out to lapsed and potential musical participants through one-off events, including those the student might devise and implement him/herself.

MM use the term ‘points of exclusion’ to talk about the ways in which musical activities become out of reach for a large proportion of the population: these include the challenges of supporting young people to acquire high level musical skills, but also the difficulties of entering new musical worlds as an uninitiated beginner. They are interested (as are all the network supervisors in our own work) in how the aspects of musical participation that appear sociable to established members can feel cliquey to newcomers.
This project will be open to definition by the appointed student, but will address the questions of access and opportunity that present a challenge to MM’s member groups:

• What routes to lifelong musical participation have been taken by members of the amateur groups in Sheffield and its regions, and how accessible are similar routes to today’s school-leavers?
• What are the factors in creating a thriving leisure-time music scene in a city, and how are these threatened or supported by current educational and cultural policy?
• What are the opportunities for tackling ‘points of exclusion’, both within member groups and through wider community-based events?

There is scope for this project to combine quantitative and qualitative methods, but the latter will be particularly encouraged as offering the in-depth understanding of experiences of musical inclusion and exclusion that will supplement data already held by MM on the demographic profile of their members. Working initially with MM members in Sheffield, the student will first seek to understand their practices of membership, rehearsing and performing, and would then aim to work with one or two organisations to make that practice more inclusive and to document this through action research. Gaining the perspectives of currently excluded participants will also be essential to the project, and might come through working with marginalised communities who feel unable to access traditional musical groups, or with music-makers who fall outside the remit of MM’s current activities by virtue of their more informal or less visible structures (or at the overlap between these two).