dc.description.abstract | This thesis examines what happens when the worlds and knowledges of war,
international development, and music education intersect. It investigates the practices
and experiences of music interventions, a term used in this thesis to describe
structured programs for music learning and participation in places that have been
unmade by war, taking shape within the structures and funding arrangements of largescale
international aid and assistance. It explores the work of three specific music
interventions—the Pavarotti Music Centre in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Hadahur Music
School in Timor-Leste, and the Afghanistan National Institute of Music in
Afghanistan—with the goal of identifying how these kinds of projects are shaped, and
their potential for sustainability in a volatile and mutable environment. These case
study sites offer interesting contrasts of timeframe (longevity of the music
intervention and retrospective distance from the wartime experiences); scale (of
ambition, funding, and external drivers); and approaches to the teaching and learning
of music, in particular their efforts to regenerate local music traditions.
The research was designed as an ethnographic, multi-sited, multi-case study project.
Semi-structured interviews and document review were the principal data sources,
offering diverse perspectives that bring both positive and critical voices of
participants and local community members to the fore, alongside those of organisers
and practitioners. Data were coded and analysed thematically, using grounded theory
methods.
As a result of this process, the thesis argues that the phenomenon of music
interventions can be understood as evolving across six critical junctures—sites of
negotiation between the various actors—that produce decisions and actions that
critically shape each project. The critical junctures—Aims and Motivations, Buildings
and Facilities, Pedagogy and Learning Materials, Organisational Culture, Internal
Engagement, and External Engagement—also have implications for sustainability, as
they represent points of active interface between contrasting constructs and ideals, and
therefore can generate instability and conflict as well as harmony and growth. The
critical junctures model offers practitioners and scholars a tool for understanding, planning, operationalising, evaluating, and handing over music interventions in waraffected
contexts. It sheds light on internal practices, and helps to reveal the influence
that the complex wider context can have on shaping and sustaining the music
activities.
The model of critical junctures for shaping and sustaining music interventions is the
central theoretical contribution of this research. In addition, the thesis makes
methodological, empirical, and practical contributions to what is a nascent subject of
inquiry, mapping three radically different music interventions in their achievements
and their missteps, and presenting empirical data from multiple perspectives. In a
world that is as much at war as ever, and an aid environment that is increasingly
recognising the importance of cultural development and creative expression to human
development, this study has deep and immediate relevance to an audience of music
and development practitioners, policy makers, and scholars in the fields of (applied) ethnomusicology, music education, community music, music sociology, music therapy, cultural development, and international development. | |