How can community-based music activities be deployed to facilitate active citizenship, shared identities, cohesion, and sense of belonging? This paper explores how English locales can increase active citizenship, drawing on examples from a curated programme of interventions and collaborations, co-created with non-academic organisations under the aegis of the ‘Cohesive Harmonies’ project. Over the past 15 years, England has undergone a gradual but deliberate devaluation of music through drastic reductions of school music provision, slashed funding, and aggressive government-led anti-arts narratives. Devaluation processes run alongside economic downturn, widening wealth gap, government service reduction, and increases in anti-immigrant rhetoric. These factors contributed to a decline in community engagement and cohesion. Active citizenship describes the engaged participation of a person in their local community, be that politically, socially, or economically. Cohesive Harmonies challenges the trend of devaluing the arts by demonstrating how music can reinvigorate local communities through its place-based interventions and collaborations. Two key frameworks are explored: Researcher-Driven interventions, such as the Bradford Dhol Project, which uses dhol workshops to bridge community divisions through shared sonic experiences, and Organisation-Driven initiatives, like the collaboration with Dorset Music Hub, which highlights how music in schools can foster well-being and non-musical competencies. Through these case studies, this paper exemplifies how music activities can aid in developing different citizenship attributes. Ultimately, the paper argues that music interventions, designed with local input, can contribute significantly to active citizenship by strengthening community bonds and improving social cohesion.

Christopher Small (1998) views musicking not just as musical work but as a social act and human activity where everyone has a natural involvement, and he posits, through this action, better relationships can be developed between individuals, societies, and humanity. Michael Frishkopf (2021) believes participatory and flexible music-making can create socio-sonic resonance within a communicatively connected social network and that resonance “transmutes social network into social fabric” (49). Like Small and Frishkopf, Thomas Turino (2008) argues participatory performances contribute to social interactions where a participant equally engages with the act of their performance and with other participants “for the processes of personal and social integration that make us whole” (1). Building on ideas of “musicking” from Small, Frishkopf, and Turino, this paper examines how a Community Collaborative Participatory (CCP) Musicking can contribute to stimulating community empowerment, community well-being, and cultural sustainability. In reflecting on results from a CCP Musicking initiative with minority Nepalese immigrant musicians in Alberta, Canada, this paper argues that CCP Musicking can foster community empowerment through enhancing capabilities and reinforcing confidence and self-esteem (Harrison 2020; Lewin 1946); community well-being through positive mental, emotional, psychological, social, and physical advantages (Acquah 2016; Armstrong 2016); and cultural sustainability (in a diasporic context) through tracing roots, evoking history and collective memory (Bohlman 2002; Cohen 2008; Safran 1991), and linking one to their homeland’s culture, tradition, and heritage (Bohlman 2002; Naroditskaya 2019; Stokes 1997). Further, the paper underscores how the CCP model can be a viable tool in community-based research in ethnomusicology.

As the academic landscape shifts—marked by budget cuts, the shrinking of humanities programs, and the precariousness of tenure-track jobs—many ethnomusicologists are rethinking their role within and beyond the university. Historically positioned as collectors and archivists, ethnomusicologists have long worked within institutional frameworks that prioritize preservation and scholarly publications. Yet, in an era where communities increasingly document, share, and write about their own music, there is a growing need to reconsider how scholars engage in their research. Rather than reinforcing institutional hierarchies, how might ethnomusicologists work in ways that center community priorities, redistribute institutional resources, and foster long-term relationships of accountability?

This paper explores these questions through two Seattle-based projects: Carangolo, an album of Capoeira music recorded in collaboration with Mestre Silvinho and the Seattle chapter of the International Capoeira Angola Foundation (ICAF), and the on-going revitalization of the Northwest Folklife archive, which houses recordings spanning five decades of community music-making in the Pacific Northwest. Inspired by Carolyn Landau, Janet Topp Fargion, Michelle Caswell, Jade Power-Sotomayor, and John Vallier’s work on collaborative archiving and equitable scholarship, this paper contributes to ongoing discussions in ethnomusicology about how scholars can engage meaningfully in cultural sustainability efforts while navigating the changing realities of academic and public scholarship.