MUSOC - Building Sustainable Working Practices for Musicians

The idea for the Music and Social Intervention Network (MUSOC) emerged following a research seminar at the Royal College of Music that saw Jennie Henley, as a music educator, go head-to-head with Lee Higgins, as a community musician, to unpick our perceived divides between the research fields of music education and community music. The seminar was entitled ‘Music education and community music: Natural bedfellows or merely exchanging pleasantries?’. The debate was well attended by a wide variety of different musicians, practitioners, researchers and the interested public. Several interesting questions were generated as a result of the debate and helped us craft a proposal that led towards this larger project. A bedfellow is described as ‘a person or thing allied or closely connected with another’. What is important to note with our provocative title is that bedfellows do not necessarily have to agree with each other, and can coexist in dissensus as well as consensus. We felt that our debate demonstrated the two fields of study are vital to each other and a wider discussion was needed to establish how they align and where they diverge.