The field of ethnomusicology has begun to invest time into theories and applications of care (Youngblood et al. 2021, Hoesing 2021, Carrico 2023, Danielson 2022). This paper dives into the responses of a music community in Tallahassee, Florida following a series of tornados that affected the Southeast United States in May 2024. These tornados destroyed the local arts district known as Railroad Square, highlighting community anxieties around corporate buyouts and gentrification. Using a rapidly fashioned local benefit show as a case study, this paper asks how music communities support themselves during moments crisis. Due to the increase in ecological disasters, this paper adds to the field’s understanding of how musicians and people organize and make sense of an ever-changing ecology. Drawing upon care ethics (Noddings 1984, Tronto 1993), I examine this concert through the lens of mutual aid and communal interaction (Spade 2020). The benefit show, titled “Band Together,” was put forward by a collection of local bands, artists, small businesses, and vendors on May 24, 2024. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with organizing members, I analyze how musicians and organizers were affected by the creation and collecting of relief funds, giving a deeper look into the challenges and nuance of contemporary mutual aid. I do so not to condemn this moment or the notion of mutual aid, but to show the limits of what communities can do under a government which does not always work in the best interests of said communities.

The Nova electronic trance music festival, held in southern Israel and envisioned as a celebration of “friends, love, and infinite freedom,” was intended to culminate in a joyful sunrise on the morning of October 7, 2023. Instead, it became a symbol of darkness, chaos, and trauma—not only for the 3,400 attendees, but for all Israelis and psytrance communities worldwide. In a brutal attack by Hamas, 378 festivalgoers were killed and 44 were abducted to Gaza, marking it the deadliest assault on a music event in modern history, as reported by Rolling Stone in an article titled, “They Wanted to Dance in Peace. And They Got Slaughtered.” This paper draws on survivor and medical professional testimonies, alongside theoretical frameworks including biopower, necropower, and electronic dance music culture (EDMC) studies, to examine the unprecedented convergence of music and horror at the Nova festival. It explores the psychological and emotional trauma experienced by survivors and investigates how music has functioned as a tool for healing and recovery in the aftermath. Furthermore, drawing on the author’s experience as a radio editor and broadcaster, the paper examines the impact of the event on the Israeli music scene and media, offering insights into how the cultural landscape has responded to this profound collective trauma.

Frameworks for the application of the arts in community settings tend to focus on the development of individuals’ empathy or social bonds. A commensurate level of consideration tends not to be given to the socio-economic, political, and institutional forces that shape such development and to how the arts might help build capacities to manage the impact of such forces. Especially in clinical or social interventions, unrecognized institutional dynamics may introduce or maintain imbalances of power in community and professional practice.

Through fieldwork, interviews, questionnaires, and theoretical analyses of collaborative songwriting projects in community and clinical sites in NYC (2018 – 2020) and San Mateo County (2023 – 2024), I examine how the locus of inquiry shifts from an individual level of development of empathy as a skill—an area of focus in the medical humanities and other arts programming reflecting a liberal conception of empathy—to the institutional level of social interactions that shape an environment for empathy.

The application of an ethnomusicological and performance studies orientation to the medical humanities expands the potential of the arts and humanities to address justice-oriented approaches to the culture of healthcare and the social determinants of health. Participatory music from a performance studies orientation also situates the activity within the community clinical space rather than solely the University or classroom space, defamiliarizing social relations and power hierarchies as co-creation in community praxis. Such praxis with local communities positions art- and music-making themselves as constructivist methodology for participatory action research.