International Journal of Music

Education
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The creative music workshop: event, facilitation, gift

Lee Higgins
International Journal of Music Education 2008; 26; 326
DOI: 10.1177/0255761408096074

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The creative music workshop: event,
facilitation, gift
LEE HIGGINS
The Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, UK
Westminster Choir College of Rider University, USA

Abstract
The purpose of this article is to explore the desires and tensions inherent within the act of
facilitating creative music-making workshops. Following the introduction, the article is
divided into three sections: (1) a discussion of the workshop event as a contingent struc-
ture through which creative music-making may take place; (2) an exploration of the facili-
tation process as a mechanism of engaging participants in creative music-making; (3) as a
heuristic framework, a notion of the gift is shown as a means to think through face-to-
face musical encounters. This article concludes that the ideas and concepts presented may
assist workshop facilitators in thinking more deeply about the processes they engage in.

Key words
community music, creativity, improvisation, invention, safety-without-safety, welcome

Introduction

As a community musician, that is, a musician committed to people, participation, context,

diversity and equality of opportunity through which active music-making experiences hap-
pen, I have facilitated music-making workshops in many countries. Some of the work I do
may be best described as skills based; that is, a transaction of ideas and practical profi-
ciencies. For example, the group drumming session, in which a particular tradition is
explored through repertoire and technique. Although the participants are always encour-
aged ‘to give of themselves’, this type of session mainly resides in the realm of skills shar-
ing. I would, however, describe the majority of my work as advocating and encouraging
creativity through music; although a complex concept and beyond this article’s scope,
being creative might be understood in this instance as the generation of new ideas and
concepts from both individuals and groups, for example, those sessions that engage par-
ticipants in improvisation, song-writing and composition.
As a musician who operates within the principles of community music,1 I describe the
situations that I work through as the ‘workshop’, whilst I describe the mechanism that I
employ to encourage authentic music-making experiences as ‘facilitation’. In this article,

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MUSIC EDUCATION Copyright © 2008 International Society for Music Education
Vol 26(4) 326–338 [(200811)26:4] 10.1177/0255761408096074 http://ijm.sagepub.com
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 Higgins The creative music workshop 327

the focus is on the creative music-making workshop and as such has its emphasis on a
sense that creativity truly emanates from what the group brings to the space, and what
the group wants from the experiences. With this in mind, my attendance at the Cultural
Diversity in Music and Dance Education’s eighth symposium2 caused me to reflect deeply
on my own workshop practice. Emergent themes such as identity and learning, and cur-
riculum and organization heralded the importance of the ‘workshop’ as a modus
operandi. Throughout the conference it became apparent to me that whether one viewed
oneself as a music educator, a musician/educator or a community musician, the nature
of the workshop facilitator was an important attribute within many teaching and learn-
ing strategies designed to advance cultural and musical diversity and creativity. Through
listening to and taking part in subsequent discussions, my thoughts have turned toward
the effectiveness and authenticity within the workshop/facilitation experience for both the
participant and those that lead the process. Questions that have challenged my practice
include: how often do facilitators fool themselves and/or fool the participants that they
are working within open creative structures? How often does one start creative music-
making workshops but know full well what the musical outcome will be? Do facilitators
control and limit the participants under a smoke screen of empowerment idealism? Have
significant aspects of the workshop process been lost in well-honed expert methodolo-
gies and systems? In short, how facilitative is the facilitation?
In order to investigate some of these challenging questions, in this article I explore
some conceptual notions of the music workshop facilitator through the lens of the com-
munity musician. Although the questions above are not directly answered, they do pro-
vide the guide through which the following ideas are presented. The aim of this article
is therefore to problematize the notion of workshop and facilitation, and hope that those
of us who are involved in this business might reflect on our own practice with a deeper
sense of critique.
The article is organized in three short sections. First, I propose that the workshop is
discussed through the ‘event’ as articulated by Jean-François Lyotard. This event is seen
as a special domain marked by the music facilitator’s desire3 for an open, porous struc-
ture. As a productive and active operation, this desire is disposed towards unconditional
hospitality and as such generates constant tensions. Tensions arise because of the reali-
ties within which the workshop structure operates. These conditional limits immediately
reduce any possibility of the unconditional promise being realized. Second, I propose that
the workshop event is made active through the process of facilitation. As a method to
encourage dialogue and conversation, facilitation is considered the mechanism that acti-
vates the workshop event. Finally, the combination of both forces is considered under a
heuristic framework of the gift. This conception of gift-giving allows us to consider the
relationship between workshop leaders and the structures through which they work.
Through the relationship between gift-giving and economy, this gesture brings us face-
to-face with what can be thought and what can be achieved.

The workshop

As a practice, one might suggest that the characteristics of community music lie less in
its techniques than in its ‘attitude’ towards the task in hand. Equality of opportunity,
social justice and diversity are paramount to the community musician’s plight, but what
of the techniques that enable the practicality of these promises? I suggest that the com-
munity musician’s chief mode of transmission lies within the notion of both the work-
shop and the facilitation. Although ideas surrounding community music have many
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328 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MUSIC EDUCATION 26(4)

orientations,4 the primary mode of its practice, if indeed it is one, takes place within what
I describe as the ‘workshop’ space.
As a term, ‘workshop’ is most often associated with experimentation, creativity and
group work.5 In music education, ideas surrounding the workshop were being utilized
during the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. Exponents of the workshop included
John Paynter, Peter Aston, George Self and Murray Schafer, all of whom contributed to
the development of ‘new’ classroom practices. In short, these music educators had wished
to transform the classroom into a ‘workshop’ space, a laboratory for invention, and thus
to provide an environment more conducive for young people to explore music and music-
making.6 With an emphasis on creativity, expression, spontaneity and cooperation – attrib-
utes synonymous with what we now may think of as community music practice – this
methodological shift was seen as radical. In resonance with those cited above and in con-
junction with Christopher Small’s (1996, p. 213) suggestion that ‘we place creative activ-
ity firmly at the centre of musical education’, community musicians pursued the workshop
as their means of achieving a democratic space favourable to creative music-making.
As a spatial and temporal domain, the contingent structure of the workshop allows
an open space to foster active and collaborative music-making. Music is an open struc-
ture that permeates and is permutated by the world.7 As such, the workshop is an ideal
site through which one can create a deterritorialized space to foster and harness human
desires for musicking. I like to think of workshops in terms of an ‘event’ as explored by
Jean-François Lyotard (1991). In this way, the workshop is a singular happening that
marks the point at which something takes place, a potential location to shatter prior ways
of making sense of the world.8
The workshop as event challenges that which is established and calls for ‘new modes
of experience and different forms of judgement’ (Malpas, 2003, p. 102). As Bill Readings
summarizes, ‘the event is the fact or case that something happens, after which nothing
will ever be the same again’ (1991, p. xxxi). The event is found in the disruption and,
like the workshop leaders desire, it is thought here in terms of ‘tension and energy’
(Bennington, 1988, p. 108). As event, the workshop becomes a singular disruptable hap-
pening that challenges with intention to transform. Although guidance is needed within
workshop events, it is imperative that the structure remains porous and open.
When I reflect on the term ‘community’ as a prefix to ‘music’, I understand its con-
notations as a welcome to the participants. In the article ‘Acts of Hospitality: The
Community in Community Music’ (2007a), I examined contemporary notions of commu-
nity and asked what does community mean for music-making within the compound ‘com-
munity music’? From my explorations, I suggest that a notion of hospitality could be used
as a foundation through which to consider the concept of community within community
music practices. As a significant mark, the word ‘community’ within ‘community music’
casts a strong light over its method of practice (one might say its attitudes also). This
proposition suggests that the hospitality found within community music becomes a wel-
come by the music leader to the participant whilst remaining master of the workshop
space.
From a perspective that understands the welcome as an intrinsic component of the
workshop event, this movement becomes a preparation for the incoming of the poten-
tial participant, generating a porous, permeable, open-ended affirmation of and for those
that wish to experience creative music-making. Philosophical tensions therefore arise
through a clash between the conditional and unconditional structures of the workshop
event. In other words, paralysis of functionality occurs because the workshop leader
wishes for unconditional openness, but the structure itself is only possible within limits,
resources, time, skill, etc. The embracing welcome attempts to resist self-closing unity
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 Higgins The creative music workshop 329

within a structure that demands it. As a preparation for participants expected or unex-
pected, the unconditional hospitable workshop does not invade, occupy or colonize. Yet
the conditional hospitable workshop is the only possible solution and as such has set
boundaries, however faint they appear.
Within the possible workshop situation the music facilitator must strive for the impos-
sible.9 It is this implication that creates conducive opportunities through which to gen-
erate a creative music-making experience. Musical doing of this sort should not be
predicable; the creative experience is to come, a future event as yet unknown. One
might say that the music facilitator gives privilege to ‘dislocation’ over ‘gathering’. In
this sense, the concurrence of harmonization through collective gatherings is under-
stood as a limiting process, a reduction toward the desire for the impossible. Dislocation,
however, requires continuous negotiation, what Lyotard (1988) calls the differend.10 As
a positive action, dislocation celebrates all types of music and all types of participatory
discrepancies11 and as such resonates strongly with the pursuit of community music
practices.
As a manifestation, the workshop space becomes a site for experimentation and explo-
ration within an environment that is deterritorialized. Although the space is bounded, it
is not a tightly controlled location that fixes parameters with rigidity and barriers. Following
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1994), deterritorialized spaces produce change. Within
the workshop situation one might consider this as freeing up fixed and set relations, phys-
ically, mentally and spiritually whist seeking the opportunity to expose new relationships.
As metaphoric ‘lines of flight’, the workshop event releases criss-crossing pathways that
connect the most disparate and most similar happenings. There are no roots as such, just
a rhizomatic12 map, a process of networks with a multiple of entryways.
For example, my ‘badge of identity’ workshop has been conceived in order to chal-
lenge students’ pre-existing frames and contexts as regards to how classroom situations
can be instances of community. With its traces within a broader notion of participatory
development, as seen through the work of Robert Chambers (1983) for instance, this
workshop-as-event has its objectives located in sustainability, relevance and empower-
ment. In short, the ‘badge of identity’ workshop is designed so that the participants cre-
ate an artefact that reflects who they are. Materials for construction have been selected
beforehand and typically include fabric, photographs, natural substances (leaves, stones
and earth), paper, wood, metal and trinkets. As each individual completes her/his art-
object, they are asked to write a haiku poem to accompany their creation. Through quiet
reflection the participants reinterpret their work into a tight structure of syllables, words
and lines. The art-objects plus the haikus are then exhibited within the workshop space,
creating a gallery that can be walked through. As facilitator, I explain that the artefacts
are to be used as ‘scores’ in order to generate musical ideas.
Breaking down into smaller units such as duos, trios and quartets, the participants
interpret the art-objects through music.13 After all of the art-objects have been consid-
ered musically, each group shares their creation through musical performance. The act
of ‘performing’ somebody’s badge of identity can be a profound experience for both
the musicians and those who created the badges. The performers experience an unex-
pected responsibility in the gift-giving of the musical response. Those to whom the art
object had ‘originally’ belonged have the unusual sense of listening to an interpretation
of themselves. This can be, and often is, a moving experience as personal aspects of
one’s life – missed family, significant moments, times gone by, etc. – are relayed back
through music and lyrics. Through group and individual transformations, both musically
and personally, the workshop allows participants to experience a sense of the uncondi-
tional welcome and an open invitation to invent.14
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As we explore these ideas, we can begin to understand the workshop as a touch-

stone through which openness, diversity, freedom and tolerance flow.15 Music teacher
practitioners that work within these types of workshop structures are actively involved in
the pursuit of equality and access beyond any preconceived limited horizons.16 As an
event, the workshop is a force of the impossible future, a disruption and dissension as
well as a force of integration and consensus. I suggest that the spectre of this impossi-
bility should haunt every creative workshop. In this sense, its openness is always to come.
It is endlessly at the heart of every collaborative music-making event. Those leading work-
shops would do well to remember their responsibility to the participants through the
mark of the unconditional hospitable workshop.

Facilitation

As mentioned above, the tension between conditional and unconditional hospitality mark
each creative workshop event. From this perspective the workshop leader has the poten-
tial to host participants, so that neither the individual or collective, nor the power of the
workshop leader, is diminished in any way. It therefore stands to reason that to gener-
ate creative music-making activity, the tensions within this aporia need manoeuvring.
I describe the mechanism for this action as facilitation.
Derived from the French facile, meaning ‘easy’, and the Latin facilis, meaning ‘easy to
do’, facilitation is concerned with encouraging open dialogue among different individuals
with differing perspectives. Exploration of diverse assumptions and options is often one
of the significant aims. Christine Hogan (2002, p. 57) usefully describes a facilitator as ‘[a]
self-reflective, process-person who has a variety of human, process, technical skills and
knowledge, together with a variety of experiences to assist groups of people to journey
together to reach their goals’.
As a complex practice, facilitation has grown throughout the second half of the 20th
century in areas such as business, education and development. Its evolution extends from
educators such as John Dewey,17 Maria Montessori,18 Alexander Sutherland Neill,19 Kurt
Hahn20 and Malcolm Knowles.21 It also includes Edgar Schein’s22 ‘process consultancy’,
the radical developments within action research discourse from practitioners such as Jean
McNiff and Jack Whitehead23 plus person-centred counselling, the approach pioneered
by Carl Rodgers.24 Robert Chambers25 has also been influential in developing participa-
tory methodologies for use in the developing worlds. One should also mention the work
of Paulo Freire26 who attacked the ‘banking’ concept of education27 whilst championing
concepts of reflexive life-long learning not governed by set curricula. As a result of these
efforts, there are now many good writings that offer methodological approaches and
strategies. For example, texts such as those by Frances and Roland Bee (1998), Jarlath
Benson (1987), Allan Brown (1995), Tom Douglas (2000), Christine Hogan (2003) and
Dorothy Whitaker (2000) all underline the current importance of facilitation as a struc-
ture for creative group work.
As a musical process, creativity is the ability to invent through the development of
imagination. Invention has traditionally meant the coming of something new; something
to come that is different from what has come before.28 It is a future desire that resists
any sense of a fixed and static presence. Facilitation is employed in order to evoke this
imaginative and inventive atmosphere. In cracking open the spatial-temporal domain
of the workshop event, the music practitioner encourages and nurtures a rapport with
fellow human beings. This action requires that the working space be a ‘safe space’
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 Higgins The creative music workshop 331

through which the music facilitator attempts to create an atmosphere that is mindful of
the participants’ range of abilities, but challenging enough to stimulate all concerned.
The music facilitator must insist that the working space is deterritorialized so that open
opportunities are created enabling the workshop event to become a place of tolerance
and play. Drawing from the concepts outlined, I suggest that workshop facilitators should
aim for a state of mind that I have begun to phrase ‘safety without safety’. In this
instance, boundaries are marked to provide enough structural energy for the session to
begin, but care is then taken to ensure that not too many restraints are employed that
might delimit the flow or the becoming of any music-making.
For example, as part of my teaching with students in the Masters in Community Music
at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance,29 I have run a regular three-day improv-
isation workshop. At the beginning of these sessions, improvisation is treated as ‘free’,
the structures are loose and the emphasis is on ‘play’ rather than performance. Through
open-ended musical structure and a promise towards the welcome, students from a
range of musical traditions are able to liberate their playing from past parameters that
have restricted this sense of free-play. Music-making in this way is non-hierarchal, ‘a
process of lateral connections between sounds, genres and musicians’ (Gilbert, 2004).
This puts ‘danger’ into the heart of my music-making workshops. The security of the
familiar is replaced with the safety of the workshop environment. This type of danger
accompanies efforts to transcend the mundane and the predicable. The musical results
demand ‘new ears’ and the players are always left with the challenge of how to critique
the music that has been made. I often reintroduce familiar musical structures as the ses-
sion proceeds. The reintroduction of comfortable frameworks after the mindset of safety
without safety leads the students back into their familiar worlds. The consequence of
experiencing musical play through deterritorialized improvisation often results in more
interesting and unpredictable musical content and form.
Safety without safety permits community musicians to operate within a code of good
facilitation practice, but also allows for excesses beyond the workshop’s spatial-temporal
realm. In this formulation, the ‘without’ does not just separate the particular from the
general but reminds us of our responsibility to a deterritorialized environment through
the mark of unconditional hospitality and gift-giving. As a positive, flexible and playful
delineation, the workshop environment can give rise to a structural network of support.
Like the rhizome metaphor, the workshop event can be interrupted, cracked or fractured,
but will always re-emerge to follow an alternative line of flight.
If we combine the ideas presented so far – the workshop event and facilitation – we
find both a structural imperative and a process of engagement for the music facilitator.
The next section of the article attempts to bind these ideas together by suggesting that
the music facilitator encounters the participant face to face30 through the act of gift-giv-
ing. That is the giving of time and space, but also the giving of quality experiences and
skills.

The workshop and the gift

The general attribute of generosity is a characteristic of good facilitatory practice. The

giving of oneself and encouragement for others to give also is illustrated through the
practical examples above, and is of course familiar with all those who facilitate music-
making experiences. Gift theory acknowledges this type of generosity as well as comple-
mentary attributes such as empathy and care. However, the gesture of the gift also
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reminds us of less positive characteristics that lurk within such human transactions; these
include self-interest, systems of debts and social obligations. These exchanges are to be
understood within the character of the circle. The circle is a significant feature in com-
munity music as music facilitators organize participants within its democratic geometry.
As such, the continual exchange between facilitator and participant, plus the spatial loca-
tion of the group and their environment makes the circle a significant metaphor.31
Marcel Mauss’s The Gift (1990/1924) is often regarded as the starting point for con-
temporary discussion surrounding the gift. Mauss notes that a gift is never free, entail-
ing as it does a triple obligation – to give, to receive and to reciprocate. Within
anthropology, Mauss’s book has been critiqued and reinterpreted many times (Bataille,
1991; Firth, 1963; Gregory, 1982; Hyde, 1979; Lévi-Strauss, 1969; Sahlins, 1974) but as
Alan Schrift (1997) suggests, it is only recently, over the past two decades, that the theme
of the gifts and gift-giving has emerged as a central issue for a wider range of fields and
practices.32 The emergent interest of gift and gift-giving may be, in part, traced back to
the publication of Jacques Derrida’s Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money (1992). Challenging
Mauss’s circle of obligation, Derrida examines the economy implied in the idea of
exchange and explores the circularity inherent within gift exchanges.
Derrida notes that circular economies are understood to bind the gift-receiver (the
donee) to a debt of gratitude, while the giver (the donor) receives gratitude either from
the gift-receiver or from her-/himself (consciously or unconsciously). The aporetic result of
these exchanges is that the donor, instead of giving something, has received, and the
donee is in debt. One might say that gifts are given to enhance the social role of the
giver and to impose an obligation on the receiver. Gifts therefore bind others to grati-
tude and consequently lead to reciprocation. In this way, expressions of thanks never find
rest; a gift is something you can never be truly thankful for. As a circular economy, both
theoretically and practically, the music workshop operates through reciprocity and may
create binds and debt. Any belief the music facilitator holds regarding altruistic desires is
also brought under question through this analysis.
Like the tensions implicit within notions of hospitality,33 the gift too carries conflict
within itself, potentially evoking a poisoned present: ‘to give a gift’ as to ‘give a blow’,
‘to give life’ as ‘to give death’. For a gift to be an unconditional gift there must be no
reciprocity, no return, no exchange, no counter-gift and no debt (this can only be thought
of as existing in the realm of the impossible).34 Derrida (1992, p. 12) insists that ‘if the
other gives me back or owes me or has to give me back what I give to him or her, there
will not have been a gift’. Gifts are exchanged and are therefore a self-limiting concept
forming circular economies caught within trading networks. In one sense, it is this logic
of exchange that annuls any gifts we care to give. If one applies this line of thought to
the music workshop event, one concludes that it too carries its own opposition: the work-
shop as both a poison and a present. As a poison,35 the workshop is a disappointment
and a negative experience making false claims, raising hopes; an experience that rein-
forces the musical lack the participant may have brought into the workshop space. On
the other hand, as a present it becomes a springboard for positive creativity, exploration
and future happenings, generating a safety without safety space in which to nurture par-
ticipants’ potential, an atmosphere where possibilities appear limitless.
Through a presentation of this paradox, the impossibility of the workshop as uncon-
ditional gift does not mean the end of thinking about its gesture. On the contrary, the
aporia becomes the basis of thinking about its actions more clearly. We become alerted
to its structure, our antenna sensitive to its laws of operation enabling a greater sensi-
tivity within its many movements. A conscious awareness to the circles of gift-giving may
make the music facilitator more effective through a process of self-reflective practice.
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In short, Derrida (1992) reinscribes the gift in terms of greater openness, a call to an
ethical generosity of responsibilities. Through this gesture the workshop leader’s ‘duty’ is
to create situations that are beyond debt, or at least to be thought in this way. As a
music facilitator, one might aim for group togetherness, respectful collaboration and open
negotiation. These may be partly met but can never be truly fulfilled unconditionally; the
economic cycle will always close down these desires. As I have discussed, and all too
often experienced, any workshop event will always carry imposed conditions and struc-
tures that limit any creative music-making activity. However, within the circle of exchange
between facilitator and participant and between participant and participant, the desire to
give something without getting anything back ignites the economy of exchange and
pushes the workshop into motion. In other words, actions of conditional gift-giving are
marked by the ‘pure’ unconditional gift. The pure impossibility of the unconditional gift
does not require that we leave the economic circle behind: the gift’s impossible ‘some-
thing’ exceeds and makes possible the structure that allows both giving and receiving. In
this way, the workshop leader has responsibilities beyond what is possible; ‘responsibility
is excessive or it is not a responsibility’ (Derrida, 1995a, p. 286).
The excesses found in acts of gift-giving are therefore in advance of any calculated
pre-determined decision.36 With a group of participants about to engage in a collective
improvisation, methodological approaches that immediately re-route ideas towards a
pre-destined outcome have placed calculation prior to a responsible embrace of the
impossible. One might say that if something is a ‘dead cert’ then there is no need to
attribute responsibility. Following this, any foregone conclusions as regards the music-
making outcome is without a deep understanding of the responsibilities of the work-
shop leader. Actions marked by the impossible are unknown futures to come and as
such should drive creative music-making events. Both of the illustrations above, the
badge of identity and the free improvisation workshops, capitalize on the danger inher-
ent in the notion of safety without safety, and therefore celebrate the uncertainties of
community music-making.
Although impressed upon by the unconditional, I have suggested that as a limited gift,
the condition of the workshop event must reside in the circle of the exchange system:
facilitator to participant, participant to participant, participant to facilitator. As a practi-
cal happening, the workshop presents itself as a democratic event, namely that the power
is not vested in a single individual (the workshop leader), but lies with everybody. The
democratic circle of exchange thus enables accessible points of entry. This can be seen
at the beginning of any workshop, as the most common starting point for any facilita-
tory process is that of the circle itself, a condition of space that reduces hierarchical struc-
tures. The reduction of a dominant force provides fertile ground for ‘future-producing’
moments that can be transformative, evoking possibilities of change immanent to any
given territory, physical, mental and/or spiritual. Self-aware exchanges within a gift sys-
tem have the potential to transcend its given limits and, in turn, may sharpen up a facil-
itator’s emphasis on a ‘bottom-up’ rather than ‘top-down’ approach to creative
music-making.
The workshop event is a practical framework for participation, equality of opportunity,
access and development. It has the potential to be a formidable tool of engagement, but
its potential as a poisonous present is often overlooked. As a mode of operation, the
workshop leader should strive to ensure her/his workshops do not create debt: the cir-
cularity inherent within the method of facilitation might bind the participant to a debt
of gratitude. Through a greater understanding of the gift, we can also see why the work-
shop is a vital pedagogic approach to the general business of cultural diversity in music
education. As an inseparable gesture to the call of justice, the workshop event negotiates
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‘community’ through responsibility. If those who facilitate could understand that their
workshops are not ‘gifts’ to be returned, perhaps this would limit those structures that
generate predictable musical and procedure outcomes.

Conclusions

This article has considered the workshop within the Lyotardian notion of ‘event’. In this
sense, the event is a caesura, an interruption in time that disrupts and shatters prior
ways of making sense of the world; it is a calling for new modes of experience and dif-
ferent forms of judgement. The spatial domain of the workshop as event has been prag-
matically understood as a conditional environment that evokes hospitality. It is, however,
hospitality’s double bind, understood as both guest and hostile, that alerts us to the
necessity and presence of the unconditional. The unconditional is not impossible but the
impossible. It is this desire for the impossible that haunts any real decision the music
facilitators may make. Music facilitators are therefore encouraged to think within their
practical limits and restrictions but have a conscious mind’s eye towards the uncondi-
tional possibilities of the workshop event. This act might ensure greater openness and
help a creative boundless flow that pushes against preconceived borders.
I proposed that the workshop event is made ‘live’ by the methodologies and strate-
gies generally known as facilitation, a self-reflective process that assists groups of peo-
ple in a journey together to reach their goals. Safety without safety reinforces a drive
toward dynamic music-making experiences that embrace risk and undecidability.
In the final part of the article, the face-to-face interactions between music facilitator
and participant were considered through the act of gift-giving. In the same way as the
conditional/unconditional paradox is inherent within notions of hospitality, the gift car-
ries its own aporetic tensions; it can be presented as a negative and/or positive force.
Focusing on the logic of exchange, I highlighted the gift’s circularity and suggested that
music facilitators should play closer attention to its operation. Using these ideas as a
conceptual base, those that lead music workshops may begin to think more deeply about
the processes they engage in. The idea of safety without safety reminds us of our respon-
sibilities, but alerts us to our desires for full, breathing and creative interactions.

Notes
1. Community music has a wide range of connotations and as such no definition should be sought. Its
principles of operation can, however, be found within the following three essays, all of which appear
in the same issue of the International Journal of Community Music: Higgins, 2007b; McCarthy, 2007;
Veblen, 2007.
2. Eighth International Conference on Cultural Diversity in Music and Dance Education, Rotterdam, the
Netherlands, 13–18 December 2006.
3. In this article, desire is to be understood as positive and productive rather than a conception of desire
as premised on a sense of ‘lack’. The concept of desire is then drawn from the philosophical lexicon
of Gilles Deleuze rather than Sigmund Freud.
4. See note 1. Also Veblen and Olsson (2002).
5. For example, see Benson (1987), Brown (1995), Doel and Sawdon (1999), and Johnson and Johnson
(2000).
6. Lucy Green (2008, pp. 11–12) describes this era as the creative movement.
7. One might think of music, as Patrick Schmidt does, as a verb rather than a noun, a verb to power
(Schmidt, 2005).
8. Lyotard understands these instances as taking place in excess of any referential frame. In this way, the
instance of the workshop is not known until it is over.
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 Higgins The creative music workshop 335

9. The impossible means here something whose possibility we did not and could not foresee. As an
open-ended, ongoing and futural idea, the impossible is ‘to come’ and exemplifies hope and expec-
tation. This notion can also be applied to the gift. I explore these ideas in detail in the article ‘The
Impossible Future’ (Higgins, 2007c).
10. A differend occurs when one language game imposes its rules and values on another and prevents
its own, autonomous way of speaking. In these situations new rules and idioms must be found on
which to phrase disputes.
11. Charles Kiel and Steven Feld (1994) explore the idea of the participatory discrepancy in Music Grooves.
See also the special edition of Ethnomusicology, Winter, 1995 and follow Kiel and Feld’s ongoing dia-
logue at http://musicgrooves.org/.
12. From the Greek rhiza, meaning root, a ‘rhizome’ is an underground root-like stem bearing both roots
and shoots. For an exposition of this idea see Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘Introduction: Rhizome’ in
A Thousand Plateaus (1988).
13. As facilitator, I placed only one restriction on group selection; you cannot compose alongside the art-
object associated with you.
14. For a fuller analysis of this workshop see Higgins (2007d).
15. Peter Renshaw (2004) describes some of these moments as a commitment to conversation through
connections and context.
16. It is here that I would agree with many of the points made by Constantijn Koopman (2007) as regards
the community musician/teacher, although I might still generally resist the term teacher, as it can
carry many negative connotations for the sorts of participants that engage in community music
experiences.
17. John Dewey (1859–1952) advocated that teachers should create conditions for learning that guide
rather than direct or impose. He emphasized cooperative power and valued individual experiences.
See Dewey (1997).
18. Maria Montessori (1870–1952) developed child-centred, experiential, multi-sensory learning and
encouraged children to have self-discipline and responsibility for learning. See Montessori (1912).
19. Alexander Sutherland Neill (1883–1973) advocated a libertarian approach to schooling and founded
Summerhill in England in 1924. See Summerhill (2004).
20. Kurt Hahn (1902–87), a German-Jewish educator who founded the Outward Bound movement as an
antithesis of the authoritarian schools in Germany during the inter-war period. See Kurthahn.org.
21. Malcolm Knowles worked extensively within adult learning and coined the term ‘andragogy’ (as
opposed to ‘pedagogy’: child learner). According to Knowles, this phrase best described the charac-
teristics of the adult learner who flourish more successfully with a facilitative approach. See Smith
(2002b).
22. Edger Schein removed the idea of ‘expert consultancy’ within the doctor-patient model. See Official
Ed Schein Website (2006).
23. See McNiff and Whithead (2002).
24. Carl Rodgers (1902–87) popularized the term ‘facilitator’ in the 1970s and 1980s. He proposed that
education should maximize the freedom of the individual to learn by removing threats, boosting
self-esteem, involving students in learning planning and decision making, and using self-evaluation
techniques. See Smith (2002a) and Rogers (1951).
25. Robert Chambers championed a developmental methodologies approach called Participatory Rural
Appraisal (PRA). PRA is defined as a family of approaches and methods to enable rural people to
share, enhance and analyse their knowledge of life and conditions, to plan and act. See Chambers
(1983).
26. Paulo Freire (1921–97) developed the influential idea of conscientization, that is the ongoing process
by which a learner moves towards critical consciousness. See Freire (2002).
27. Freire (2002, p. 72) says that in the banking concept of education, ‘knowledge is a gift bestowed by
those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to be know nothing’.
28. Jacques Derrida (1989) explores the notion of invention in ‘Psyche: Inventions of the Other’.
29. See Irish World Academy of Music and Dance Website (2008).
30. Although beyond the scope of this article, the notion of ‘face-to-face’ is being understood through
the ideas of Emmanuel Levinas. For Levinas (1969), the presence of the face is the possibility of under-
standing one another, its signification has an ethical imperative to those we communicate with.
31. It is interesting to note the word cadeau, gift, comes from catena, meaning chain.
32. In the complementary field of community drama and theatre, Helen Nicholson’s (2005) book offers
a fine example of this.
33. Etymologically the word hospitality is derived from the Latin hospes (from hostis), which means both
‘guest’ and (paradoxically) ‘enemy’ or ‘hostile’.
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336 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MUSIC EDUCATION 26(4)

34. See note 9. See also Derrida (1992, p. 7).

35. The word for poison in German is Gift.
36. Following Derrida, calculable decisions are not considered genuine. For a decision to be such it must
invoke that which is outside the facilitator’s control. Derrida (1995b, p. 65) draws upon Søren
Kierkegaard when he suggests that a decision requires a leap of faith summarizing that ‘the instant
of decision is madness’.

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Lee Higgins is Programme Leader for the Integrated MA and Community Arts at the
Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, UK. He is currently a visiting Associate Professor
for Music Education at the Westminster Choir College of Rider University, Princeton,
New Jersey. Lee is the past chair of ISME’s commission of Community Music Activity
(2006–08) and joint editor of the International Journal of Community Music. As a
community musician Lee has worked across the education sector as well as in health
settings, prisons and the probation service, youth and community, and orchestra out-
reach. Lee has run projects and lectured in Europe, South Africa, South-East Asia, New
Zealand, and the USA.
Address: The Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, Mount Street, Liverpool, L1 9HF,
UK. [email: l.higgins@lipa.ac.uk] or Westminster Choir College of Rider University, 101
Walnut Lane, Princeton, NJ 08540. [email: lhiggins@rider.edu]

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338 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MUSIC EDUCATION 26(4)

Abstracts

L'atelier de création musicale: évènement, facilitation, don

Cet article explore les désirs et les tensions inhérents à l’acte de faciliter les ateliers de
création musicale. Après l’introduction, l’article est divisé en trois sections: (1) un examen
de l’événement d’atelier comme structure contingente par laquelle la création musicale
peut avoir lieu; (2) une exploration du procédé de facilitation comme mécanisme d’en-
gager des participants dans une création musicale; (3) comme cadre heuristique, une
notion du don est montrée comme moyen conceptuel pour des rencontres musicales face
à face. Cet article conclut que les idées et les concepts présentés peuvent aider des facil-
itateurs d’atelier en pensant plus profondément aux processus qu’ils engagent à l’intérieur.

Der kreative Musikworkshop: Durchführung, Vermittlung, Talent

Dieser Bericht untersucht Wünsche und Spannungen, die in der Durchführung eines auf-
bauenden, kreativen Musizierworkshops enthalten sind. Nach der Einführung ist der Bericht
in drei Teile gegliedert: 1) Diskussion über den Workshop und wie ein zufälliger Aufbau
beim kreativen Musizieren zustande kommt. 2) Das Erforschen des Vermittlung als
Möglichkeit Teilnehmer in das kreative Musizieren einzubinden. 3) Im heuristische Rahmen
bekommen mögliche Begabungen Bedeutung in der direkten musikalischen Begegnung.
Der Artikel zeigt auf, wie die dargelegten Ideen und Konzepte den Seminarvermittlern
helfen, sich gedanklich mit den Vorgängen besser auseinanderzusetzen, mit welchen sie
sich befassen.

El taller de creatividad musical: Evento, facilitación, talento

Este artículo explora los deseos y tensiones inherentes a la facilitación de la creatividad
musical en talleres. Está dividido en tres secciones: (1) un análisis del evento del taller
como estructura eventual en la que tienen lugar actividades de creatividad musical; (2)
una exploración del proceso de facilitación como un mecanismo de atraer a los partici-
pantes hacia la creación de música; (3) como un marco heurístico, una noción del tal-
ento es mostrada como medio para pensar en los encuentros musicales cara-a-cara. El
artículo sugiere que las ideas y conceptos presentados pueden ayudar a los facilitadores
de los talleres a pensar más profundamente en los procesos en que toman parte.

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