The power to do something

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

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?

Introduction

This introduction considers the author’s position to the subject matter and book, including its insistence that people who experience poverty should enjoy human rights all of the time, even at the time of music-making. A critical ethnography of human rights in artistic practice, it introduces what musicking, or the social processes of engaging music, does and does not do for urban poor from the perspective of capability development and human rights. Developing capabilities is a key element of struggling toward human rights, but these capabilities may not be human rights in themselves. The prelude describes the author’s roles as a violinist, arts organizer and researcher in urban poverty as well as how she overcame methodological challenges faced during the study.

The human right to health: Autonomy

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

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

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.

Jams and music therapy sessions

This chapter describes the Downtown Eastside’s popular music scene, particularly music-making practices in popular music jams and music therapy sessions for the poorest of the poor. These formally organized events happen at nonprofit organizations, such as community and health centers, as well as churches that offer aid and services to the poor such as free showers, food and clothing. The chapter discusses the format and repertoire of the music sessions, revealing their central value of inclusivity. It considers how the events reflect neighborhood demographics, especially the roles of middle-aged people and immigrants in this central value. Participants’ memories of youth, capability poverty in musical performance, musical familiarity and experiences of exclusion generate an inclusive music culture that is dominated by classic rock, pop and country music—this last genre being most popular among street-involved and homeless people. Besides jams and music therapy, the neighborhood’s popular music scene includes protests, music theater, and special popular music programs that address gaps in other initiatives.

The right to the city during gentrification

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

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.

Harm reduction

Throughout the Downtown Eastside, popular music facilitators use song in a number of ways to promote the capabilities of addicted people in ways that arguably support their human right to health. They use music to shift emotions and promote self-esteem that could minimize certain negative effects of substance misuse (e.g., stigma). Regarding people with depression and at the point of suicidality, they focus on the capability to use music to feel less depressed and even less suicidal. Facilitators often interpret such uses of music as furthering harm reduction whose human rights-suffused aims seek to improve quality of life for individuals, communities, and populations negatively affected by substance misuse. This chapter presents a case study of how a music therapist uses harm reduction with mothers with backgrounds of addiction and babies under 18 months. The example illustrates music being used to promote various capabilities through different approaches applied simultaneously, and to enhance the mothers’ right to health. The chapter reveals the simultaneous use of multiple capability approaches to pursue a single human right and that multiple human rights can circulate in single musical moments. Among other capabilities and related rights, the therapy practice strengthens the mothers’ capabilities of self-expression, parenting (through parenting education) and creating a safe space, in turn promoting their rights to freedom of expression, education and security of the person.