The Oxford Handbook of Music Making and Leisure

Music has been a vital part of leisure activity across time and cultures. Contemporary commodification, commercialization, and consumerism, however, have created a chasm between conceptualizations of music making and numerous realities in our world. From a broad range of perspectives and approaches, this handbook explores avocational involvement with music (i.e., amateur, recreation) as an integral part of the human condition. The chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Music Making and Leisure present a myriad of ways for reconsidering—refocusing attention on—the rich, exciting, and emotionally charged ways in which people of all ages make time for making music through music learning and participation. The contexts discussed are broadly Western, including a diversity of voices from scholars across fields and disciplines, framing complex and multifaceted phenomena that may be helpfully, enlighteningly, and perhaps provocatively framed as music making and leisure. The book is structured in four parts: (I) Relationships to and with Music; (II) Involvement and Meaning; (III) Scenes, Spaces, and Places; and (IV) On the Diversity of Music Making and Leisure. This volume may be viewed as an attempt to reclaim music making and leisure as a serious concern for, among others, policy makers, scholars, and educators, who perhaps risk eliding some or even most of the ways in which music, so central to community and belonging, is integrated into the everyday lives of people. As such, this handbook looks beyond the obvious (of course music making is leisure!), asking readers to consider anew, “What might we see when we think of music making as leisure?”