ABSTRACT

This chapter seeks to justify the continued descriptive and explanatory value of the concept of "community" for thinking about aspects of Community Music Therapy. It explores how the case of Musical Minds highlights some of the complex relationships between individuality and community; identity and belonging; communication, collaboration and negotiation – especially when crossing social, cultural and health barriers. The chapter draws on a variety of interdisciplinary theory to suggest various possible ways of understanding a group such as Musical Minds, with its characteristic features and processes, challenges and achievements. To characterize Musical Minds as a "communication community" is therefore to show how particular modes of communication serve to actively construct, sustain and develop particular modes of community, and its accompanying experience of belonging. One possible model for Musical Minds is a "community of practice," a concept developed by the social learning theorist Etienne Wenger.