ABSTRACT
Instrumental ensemble music around the world reflects the growing and diverse ways humans collectivise and express themselves in ways that represent our cultural, social, and environmental affiliations and intricacies with others. Community music occurs in social spaces in ‘situation-specific’ ways-devised and culturally mediated by the musicians themselves. As a continuum of societal engagement, for some ensembles societal connection and interaction is a segue to musical community. For others, it is the personal, collective desire to first and foremost make music with others in a collective bi-partisan collective that only then feeds into the social, if at all. Instrumental music ensembles themselves recognise and set their own values and judgements as to what is useful to their community or can be counted as knowledge. The community has the power to create knowledge within a given context and leave that knowledge as a new node connected to the rest of the network.
