Migration and multiculturalism are defining elements of contemporary Australian society. Australia has a long history as a destination for humanitarian resettlement, leading to the establishment of diverse diasporic communities, especially in metropolitan centres like Melbourne (population 5 million). In the 1990s, refugee resettlement extended to new African communities with little prior connection to Australia. For these communities, music participation emerged as an important vehicle for navigating post-migratory diasporic experiences. The purpose of this paper is to map the ecosystem that supports music participation by Australian African diaspora musicians in Melbourne to better understand the role of music in cultural continuity, especially how opportunities and barriers to different types of musical participation affect the musical choices and identity formation of African diaspora musicians. We draw on the ecological model proposed by Schippers (2010) which offers ‘systems of learning’, ‘communities’, ‘contexts and constructs’, ‘regulations and infrastructure’, and ‘media and the music industry’ as five perspectives through which to understand music sustainability. In doing so, we extend the theoretical scope of the music ecosystems model to a diaspora context comprising musicians from multiple ethnicities and cultural backgrounds, where the notion of ‘tradition’ is disrupted by the presence of multiple overlapping and divergent practices. The musical ecosystem is also impacted by commercial and cultural forces extrinsic to the diaspora community, and this has specific implications for the musical choices made by African-Australian musicians and their collaborators.

Schippers, H (2010) Facing the Music: Global Perspectives on Learning and Teaching Music. New York: Oxford University Press.

Music as a means of memory practices is an important function of music. Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley (2015) describe music and photography as the two most essential technologies of memory in everyday life. Tia DeNora (2000) writes about reliving experiences through music as a reconstitution of past experience. Thus, the presentation asks about the relationship between memory practices and music in the context of forced migration. For the discussion of musical memory practices of refugees in Berlin, I am guided by the following questions: How are musical practices in the context of forced migration connected to memories on an individual and social level? What is remembered through music and how does that happen? What is the relationship between these forms of memory and musical practices? The case examples are taken from extensive fieldwork in Berlin between 2017 and 2022, in which grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss 2010) and ethnography (Sweers 2019) provided a methodological framework. In the research process, I primarily used participatory observation (Myers 1992) and narrative guided interviews (Rice 2014) as methods for exploring my field of research. My research highlights music as a mobile cultural technique and social as well as individual mnemonics in a disruptive environment characterized by displacement and crises. My findings on music and memory provide significant access to a better understanding of memory practices of refugees in order to promote cultural encounters and intercultural exchange in European migration societies.