Music Downtown Eastside

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klisala Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Social Deprivation ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Urban Neighborhoods ◽  
Community Centers ◽  
Human Capabilities ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Downtown Eastside ◽  
Therapy Sessions

Music Downtown Eastside explores how human rights are at play in the popular music practices of homeless and street-involved people who feel that music is one of the rare things that cannot be taken away of them. It draws on two decades of ethnographic research in one of Canada’s poorest urban neighborhoods, Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Klisala Harrison takes the reader into popular music jams and therapy sessions offered to the poorest of the poor in churches, community centers and health organizations. There she analyzes the capabilities music-making develops, and how human rights are respected, promoted, threatened, or violated in those musical moments. When doing so, she also offers new and detailed insights on the relationships between music and poverty, a type of social deprivation that diminishes people’s human capabilities and rights. The book contributes to the human rights literature by examining critically how human rights can be strengthened in cultural practices. Harrison’s study demonstrates that capabilities and human rights are interrelated. Developing capabilities can be a way to strengthen human rights.

The power to do something

2020 ◽  
pp. 189-198
Author(s):  
Klisala Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Causal Relationship ◽  
Socioeconomic Inequality ◽  
Human Capabilities ◽  
Music Making ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Musical Practices

This book has examined human rights, and the development of capability—the “power to do something”—in musical practices. It has explored if (popular) music-making can enhance human rights and capabilities of the poorest of the poor, such as homeless and street-involved people, who feel that music is a “thing” that can never be taken away from them. This conclusion points out how the book defined capabilities in a novel and useful way. When synthesizing the book’s main findings, it describes a causal relationship between developing human capabilities, and strengthening human rights which operate in complex ways musical and cultural moments. Specific human capabilities can be nurtured so as to develop specific human rights. The chapter reflects and elaborates on critiques of human rights pertinent to music in and as culture. With attention to socioeconomic inequality, it offers inspiration for making, and thinking about, musical and cultural efforts to promote human rights and capabilities.

Music in urban poverty

2020 ◽  
pp. 6-30
Author(s):  
Klisala Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Human Development ◽  
Urban Poor ◽  
Urban Poverty ◽  
Field Research ◽  
Urban Neighborhoods ◽  
Capability Development ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Downtown Eastside ◽  
Broad Array

In urban contexts internationally, organizations, administrators, culture workers, artists and academics put vast effort into facilitating music and other arts in attempt to alleviate “poverty.” Poverty, according to recent definitions, refers to a broad array of social deprivations. These include deprivations of entitlements, which are widely understood as rights, and deprivations of human development, of which capability development is an example. Drawing on two decades of ethnographic field research in one of Canada’s poorest urban neighborhoods, Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, this book asks: Which kinds of capabilities are developed via music initiatives in the Downtown Eastside, and, particularly, what is their relationship with human rights? Are specific human rights promoted, strengthened, threatened, violated, and respected in music-making by urban poor?

The human right to health: Autonomy

2020 ◽  
pp. 73-91
Author(s):  
Klisala Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Urban Poor ◽  
Urban Poverty ◽  
Right To Health ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Human Capabilities ◽  
Downtown Eastside ◽  
Rights Discourse ◽  
Human Rights Discourse ◽  
Therapy Sessions

Taking its cue from how human rights activists frame human rights in cultural moments, this chapter begins to map how human capabilities are instrumentalized to develop human rights in the Downtown Eastside, and how human rights circulate in music. The music jams and music therapy sessions promote the human right to health of urban poor in different ways, including through enabling their capability to connect socially through music-making; facilitating their capability to psychologically process stress using music; promoting these participants’ senses of autonomy (i.e., control over life situations); and encouraging their use music to grieve early deaths in urban poverty. According to the medical literature and building on human rights discourse of the health equity movement, such capabilities potentially enhance their health and arguably strengthen their human right to health.

Organizations hosting music-making for urban poor

2020 ◽  
pp. 49-70
Author(s):  
Klisala Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Music Therapy ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Urban Poor ◽  
Urban Redevelopment ◽  
Music Programs ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Downtown Eastside ◽  
Institutional Contexts

This chapter examines how human rights and capabilities emerge within organizations hosting music initiatives and targeting Downtown Eastside urban poor. It observes that music facilitators having considerable freedom about how to engage human rights, which are rarely specified in organizational frameworks—aims, missions, and mandates—of aid organizations that host participatory musical events, and of organizations that facilitate public music performances, for instance, performing arts companies and music academies. The chapter notes a susceptibility of jams and music therapy in aid organizations to closure. The popular music initiatives for urban poor unfold within institutional contexts of financial inequity where some music facilitators are paid very little or nothing, and certain administrators are handsomely rewarded. During the contentious urban redevelopment process of gentrification, the vulnerability of the aid organizations and their music programs, as well as the financial inequities across all organizations intensify.

Women’s rights

2020 ◽  
pp. 117-145
Author(s):  
Klisala Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Music Performance ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Music Program ◽  
Downtown Eastside ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Over Time

What is the relationship between the human rights deficits contexts that activist music initiatives emerge in and react to, and the human rights promoted through new musical actions? This chapter considers this question through the case studies of two women-centered projects: a once-weekly music program called Women Rock and an annual protest called the Women’s Memorial March. While Women Rock develops capabilities of women in popular music performance and songwriting, the memorial march uses music to protest missing and murdered women of the Downtown Eastside. Both events address women’s rights deficits. These ethnographic accounts reveal that one needs to be careful in assuming that the human rights actually promoted within cultural practices are precisely the same rights as those drawn attention to in activist discourses or observations used to motivate those actions, and with the same intensity, for the same reasons or for the same people. Any of these factors may be different and change over time. Importantly, musical and cultural formats can themselves shape human rights outcomes.

The right to the city during gentrification

2020 ◽  
pp. 166-186
Author(s):  
Klisala Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Urban Poor ◽  
Urban Neighborhoods ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Music Theater ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Downtown Eastside ◽  
Complete Obliteration ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

As important and sometimes troubling as the previously described music projects can be, they are threatened with complete obliteration during gentrification in such socioeconomically depressed urban neighborhoods as the Downtown Eastside. Gentrification transforms a socioeconomically depressed urban area for middle- and upper-class use. As urban poor are displaced, this threatens their right to the city, which refers to their abilities to exercise the human rights involved in living in their chosen city area. At the same time, funding becomes more available for capability building through the arts and for professional arts. Resultantly, popular music theater has flourished during the gentrification of the Downtown Eastside. What has been the role of urban poor, and particularly participants in jams and music therapy, in the music theater productions? Which human rights regarding the right to the city have those performances supported for urban poor?

Self-determination

2020 ◽  
pp. 146-165
Author(s):  
Klisala Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Small Groups ◽  
Urban Poor ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Music Therapists ◽  
Popular Songs ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Downtown Eastside ◽  
And Performance

Self-determination is at issue for urban poor participating in jams and music therapy using popular songs in the Downtown Eastside. Self-determination, in one meaning, refers to an individual’s capability to determine his or her own actions. The human right to self-determination refers to legally defined peoples that (seek to) determine their own governance. A people cannot emerge, though, if individuals and small groups cannot self-determine to form a larger social unit. The popular music scene of the Downtown Eastside is a social setting that may block the capability of urban poor to determine their own actions as individuals and in small groups. Some music therapists limit and erode the self-determination of urban poor, coopting the poor’s self-determination of their own music-making and music-learning. Suppression of self-determination also emerged when music jam participants excluded original popular songs composed by other participants. Rejecting original songs suppressed the capabilities involved in creating new music, and human rights included in song creation and performance. Other music facilitators respond to various self-determination tensions among music initiative organizers and participants with the social work method of noninterference adapted to music-making. Many of these examples result in human rights conflicts and violations.

Diversifying Musical Experiences in Schools and Music Teacher Preparation Programs

2019 ◽  
pp. 891-901
Author(s):  
Robert H. Woody ◽  
Mark C. Adams
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Music Education ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Music Teacher ◽  
Education Programs ◽  
Preparation Programs ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Large Ensembles ◽  
Classical Traditions

This chapter discusses the innate differences between vernacular music-making cultures and those oriented in Western classical traditions, and suggests students in traditional school music education programs in the United States are not typically afforded opportunities to learn skills used in vernacular and popular music-making cultures. The chapter emphasizes a need to diversify music-making experiences in schools and describes how vernacular musicianship may benefit students’ musical development. It suggests that, in order for substantive change to occur in music education in the United States, teachers will need to advance beyond simply considering how to integrate popular music into their traditional large ensembles—and how preservice music teacher education programs may be the key to help better prepare teachers to be more versatile and philosophically open to teaching a more musically diverse experience in their future classrooms.

scholarly journals From classic to rap: Airborne transmission of different singing styles, with respect to risk assessment of a SARS-CoV-2 infection

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernhard Richter ◽  
Anna Maria Hipp ◽  
Bernd Schubert ◽  
Marcus Rudolf Axt ◽  
Markus Stratmann ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Risk Assessment ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Air Velocity ◽  
Airborne Transmission ◽  
Concert Hall ◽  
Professional Singers ◽  
Wind Instrument ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Classical Style ◽  
Music Activities

Since the Covid-19 virus spreads through airborne transmission, questions concerning the risk of spreading infectious droplets during singing and music making arose. To contribute to this question and to help clarify the possible risks, we analyzed 15 singing scenarios (1) qualitative, by making airflows visible, while singing, and (2) quantitative, by measuring air velocities in three distances (1m, 1.5m and 2m). Air movements were considered positive, when lying above 0.1 m/s, which is the usual room air velocity in venue, such as the concert hall of the Bamberg Symphony, where our measurements with three professional singers (female classical style, male classic style, female popular music styles) took place. Our findings highlight, that high measurements for respiratory air velocity while singing, are comparable to measurements of speaking and, by far, less than coughing. All measurements for singing stayed within a reach of 1.5m, only direct voiceless blowing achieved measurements at the 2m sensor. Singing styles, which use plosive sounds i.e. consonants more often, such as rap, produced the highest air velocities of 0.17 m/s at the 1m sensor. Also, singing, while wearing a facemask, produces no air movements over 0.1 m/s. On the basis of, our recent studies on measurements of airflows and air velocities of professional singers and wind instrument players, as well as further studies on CO2; measurements in room settings of music activities, we publish our results, in consideration of further up-to-date research, in our frequently updated risk assessment (first published in April 2020). On this behalf, we suggest 2m radial distances for singers, especially in choirs.

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