Music - Conflict - Transformation Conference, Exeter (May 9-11)

Day 1

Sometimes a negative event can have long-lasting residual effects beyond the temporal parameters of the event itself as any memory studies researcher will tell you as will anyone on the planet with pretty much any memory at all. Happily, the opposite is also true. I have had the misfortune/fortune to have experienced both of these phenomena recently. First, my house was burgled in February and my car and my laptop (with all of my PhD work on it) were taken without consent. This rather alarming setback not only threw my schedule out of the window, I have found it very difficult to get back into the swing of things ever since. That is, until the SocArts Music-Conflict-Transformation Symposium earlier this week at my spiritual home, the University of Exeter. This was to prove to be the most exciting, rewarding, stimulating and, for me, cathartic gathering of minds that I have yet to experience. More importantly, again, for me at least, I am renewed and filled with motivation; a positive memory has finally superseded a negative one.

The symposium was organised by my fellow music and conflict transformation colleague, Arild Bergh, and it turned out to be one of the first, probably the largest and definitely the best sharing of ideas on the topic ever held. Every single presentation was relevant to my own work and I believe this marked the beginning of some as yet undefined grouping of like-minded researchers, practitioners and other interested parties.

I shall go through each presentation one by one and give an overview followed by a brief comment:

First up was Catherine Pestano, a Croydon (London, UK) community music practitioner who was reporting on a social inclusion project using music in Vojvodina in what is now part of Serbia. Pestano had been invited to develop and deliver a social inclusion music project in the Vojvodina village of Tarak, whose population was actually mostly of Romanian ethnicity despite being within the political borders of Serbia. This had been an autonomous Yugoslav province before Milosović set out on his expansionist agenda. The idea was to train local musicians to facilitate creative and expressive musicking. She encountered, however, what I have elsewhere described as ‘foreigner fatigue’; the locals were ambivalent about foreigners and had become hardened to the perceived broken promises they bring. They were not interested in the playful tricks of the trade found in western community music ice breakers and games. They, like many Bosnians I have met, were very proud of their classical music traditions, especially orchestral, and viewed fun musical activities as juvenile. It is a shame I had not encountered Pestano prior to her trip as I could have forewarned her about this kind of attitude in the Balkan region. She was, however, able to find some success in a neighbouring village of Uzdin, where the locals were all too happy to engage with her practices. I think the issues she encountered all come down to a problem recognising and accessing contextual tacit knowledge.

Next up was Mia Nakamura from Tokyo University of the Arts who talked about the Living Together Lounge for people who are both HIV-positive and HIV-negative. The Living Together Lounge is a monthly live music and poetry event in Tokyo that had been set up with the intention of preventing the further spread of HIV. She reported that the project had not been successful in this aim, but it had provided a positive social environment where both groups of people could be both open and comfortable with each other and even enjoy themselves together. The layout of the club starts with fairly light “DJ music” as people arrive but the music is turned off completely during introductions. A quiet “dry drum pattern” at a “heart-rate tempo” is introduced while personal poetry about HIV experiences are read. The idea is to keep the readers, who often have no public speaking experience, focused and moving along; a form of musical-physical entrainment in other words. After the readings, a live musical group performs a set which includes at least one song based on one of the readings. According to Nakamura, music in this context reframes the narrative content originally found within the readings. How I interpreted this was the DJ music first relaxes people, the beats keep the pace of the readings from dragging, the content of the poems sets the scene in terms of emotional content, intention and making emotional and memory connections between the two art forms. Over time this is experienced by repeat attendees as ritualistic since they have expectations of layout and schedule and generally have these expectations fulfilled and experienced. Very interesting stuff and she even quotes me on my work with Pontanima and the concepts of temporary identity building and normality. I wonder what my Bosnian informants would make of this project.

Mindy Johnston is a gamelan musician and recent graduate in conflict transformation and alternative dispute resolution in Portland Oregon. She had studied many musicians involved with social activism in the northwest coastal USA. She discovered that many musicians did not like to be referred to as activists and preferred to hold on to their musician identity even if their music or musical activities were involved with social activism to some degree. Her findings echoed with some of my own in music and conflict transformation: music can provide a common goal which in turn can act as a pre-condition for conflict transformation and that any social change through musical intervention needs to be long term.

The three above presentations combined echo some of my theories about how a successful music conflict transformation project might unfold. Such a project would need to be long term, led by trusted local people, repeated and engage with memory work. Another emergent theme here is the difficulty in accessing tacit knowledge of a social group in conflict which is necessary in order to understand their contextual relationships to music and musicking.

Irene Gallego from the Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona gave a very interesting talk about a study of how Barcelona policy makers have embarked on a social control programme through regulating public music throughout the city. Since Barcelona hosted the Olympics in 1992, city officials wished to present a cohesive cosmopolitan front and one part of how they accomplished this was through the promotion of and appropriation of certain forms of musical busking. This was formalised into a system whereby certain buskers qualified through an accreditation programme to busk in certain pre-defined spots throughout the city. Spontaneous public musiciking was banned. This has had the effect of preserving ethnic minority stereotypes as this culture is no longer visible publicly as they wish to present themselves. Only the groups that adhere to the city’s idea of that culture became accredited. Furthermore, this encouraged individual competition within the minority communities instead of working together to improve their collective visibility. In the end this has resulted in the standardisation, simplification and domestication of the immigrant musician in Barcelona. It was very good to see some empirical data on this subject and it illustrates how musical social policies directly affect large social groups and why it is so important to not only to understand this process, but to educate and advise policy makers.

Martin Winter presented the results of a study he had conducted with Richard Parncutt at the Centre for Systematic Musicology at the University of Graz in Austria that examined how music was used by migrants in Graz for identity work. The frame for the study was a local population that viewed migrant integration as the goal for conflict resolution in communities and cultural differences were seen as somehow threatening. This attitude in turn threatened the very cultural identity of the migrants. The findings showed that migrants used music to help them through initial culture shock upon arrival in Graz but it also strengthened in-out group boundaries and therefore strengthened stereotypes. Authentic music from the migrants’ place of origin was deemed important in the early stages of their arrival but this same authentic music also locked them into stereotypes later on which hindered their integration into wider society. This was a nice presentation with lots of solid data but I had to worry about a society that could only feel integrated if it had a homogenous culture. I think it would be interesting and useful to study any joint musicking that might occur in Graz between the indigenous population and the migrant one.

My friend and colleague Pinar Gϋran, from the University of Exeter, was up next with her latest research on the Turkish migrant communities in Berlin and their relationships to Turkish music. In particular she examined conflicting identities in what she coined RnBesk, a hybrid of the arabesque music of Turkey in the 1960s and 1970s with modern western hip hop and RnB. Gϋran’s study has shown that Turkish youth in Berlin connect to hip hop and RnB as a protest against racism they experience and to a sense of global disenchantment while the use of arabesque music connects them to a sense of belonging to Turkey. In addition, it has been observed that those youth who become involved with active musicking in this fashion are less likely to be involved with crime and other destructive behaviour. This work has illustrated again how social groups can engage with memory work through music, even if it a memory mediated through their parents and other older community members. It also shows how tacit knowledge of a culture can be learned via music at great distances through the use of hip hop and RnB.

Barbara Dunn is a busy multi-disciplinarian based in Seattle who is a qualified psychotherapist, music therapist, clinical social worker, mediator and musician. The core of her presentation was firstly an observation that music therapy practices, at least where she works, tends to be ethnocentric and she sensibly makes a call to learn from the communities in which such people work. Secondly, she explained some of her work that attempted to engage community mediators with music therapy practice. While I agree with and applaud her attempts to share approaches between different disciplines that address the same types of conflicts, I was less convinced by the particularity of her style, which was demonstrated by a sing-song both at the start and end of her presentation. I also agree that it is odd and quite simply wrong that at conferences about music very little music is engaged with, but I did not think that the gospel-inflected sing-song that we did on this occasion was wisely chosen. If anything, it very much highlighted the need to understand a social group’s musical relationships prior to any musical intervention. There were a few participants who happily engaged with this experiment but it seemed that most did so begrudgingly and there was a prevailing sense of unease in the room. It was another case of good intentions combined without tacit knowledge resulting in more harm than help, albeit in a relatively safe environment. Finally, it has highlighted a conflict within the growing music and conflict transformation community between some practical approaches and some research-based approaches. It is important to continue dialogue, discussion and debate between all areas of this field, however, no matter divergent our philosophies might be.

The last presentation of the first day was by Maria Elisa Pinto Garcia from the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies which reported on her study of reconciliation attempts using song-writing by victims and ex-combatants in the Columbian civil war. This was an excellent and fascinating study that ultimately showed how music can seem to help a situation when in fact it has not done what it has been reported to do. Pinto Garcia’s study showed that music in this case reinforced latent conflict and continued mistrust and stereotypes. Victims generally did not feel reconciliation was possible without a perceived sense of justice of some sort; musicking together was simply not enough. The Columbian government set up a Sing With Me initiative which claimed to put these two groups together in song-writing projects and that reconciliation had occurred between them, yet an investigation revealed that there had actually been no encounters between victims and ex-combatants and the songs used as examples of collaboration had in fact pre-existed prior to the project. In the end, Pinto Garcia concluded that there was evidence that song-writing provided both groups with a common ground and a sense of catharsis which are both pre-conditions for future conflict transformation, but this had not been followed through as such and instead had been manipulated for governmental propaganda. Furthermore, it is important to understand the particular context of any encounter.

Oh, I seem to have forgotten my own presentation! I presented before Maria and my topic was Musicking as a Means of Accessing Tacit Cultural Understanding in Conflict Transformation Settings. Rather than go on about it much here, I will post it up separately along with the other presentations that followed on subsequent days.