The purpose of this essay is to review the coming together of a community in music during

the COVID-19 lockdown using the theories and knowledge learnt from various music therapy
readings and supported with concepts from community music theories. What defines the
event I analyse as part of community music are the common settings found within it, the
development of a community and the outcomes of this group’s musical event (Schippers and
Bartleet, 2009:455).

The event I have chosen to analyse is the Wits University Jerusalema Dance, posted on
YouTube on September 25th 2020 as a response to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s call to
participate in the JerusalemaChallenge on Heritage Day. The university hosted group
sessions for people to come together, learn the dance and sing together in front of the Wits
Great Hall during lunch time, which is at 1-2 in the afternoon. What made this group session
possible during the Covid-19 lockdown was the lockdown being down to level 2 since 18
August 2020, allowing students, staff and allegeable personnel to return to campus and be a
part of this event. You can see from the video posted on YouTube, participants wore masks
and social distancing guidelines were followed (retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPHnqQfv3lw). This Wits video is one of many during
the pandemic, a recorded event of people coming together, united in dance and music under
one South African song, Jerusalema by DJ Master KG and vocalist Nomcebo (retrieved from
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Africa/2020/1009/Can-you-dance-to-it-The-world-takes-
on-the-Jerusalema-challenge). Under the common goal of celebrating Heritage Day, using a
hit South African house song, citizens from all over the country connected through song and
dance and showed it through social media to express the music and day of their South African
community. Being bonded through their shared performance, the JerusalemaChallenge
created the opportunity for people to perform together as a community, learning the dance
together and singing along, people could unite in a shared new challenge. This event has
brought people together through music and dance, the results of this challenge and the Wits
University video, as I have just previously explained, fit into Lee Higgins’ three perspectives
that can define community music; “music of a community”, “communal music making” and
community music as an active intervention between a music leader or leaders and participants
(2012:3). While I can further refer to other theorists’ work on what defines community music,
from the development of a community, music and contexts, the main purpose of this essay is
to show how this community music event, created during the Covid-19 lockdown, can be
analysed using the theories from music therapy. So in order to do so it is important to
understand the applicable theories and how terms are understood in the music therapy
context.

Firstly, we must form an understanding of what we refer to when we speak of music therapy,
which comes from art therapy. Historically beginning in the movements of ‘the arts for all’
and ‘the arts for health’, developing into a legitimate field and differing from therapeutic arts,
which is art indirectly responsible for possible psychological change but may can be felt as
therapeutic, art therapy centres its goals around psychological change with the arts a medium
used to achieve this (Karkou, 2006:31). Borrowing from existing psychological concepts and
adapting whole frameworks from exisiting schools of psychotherapy that help support and
guide the art practices, art therapy proves itself to be a field with much needed training and
understanding (Karkou, 2006:44). In Karkou’s reading, he lists in a table, what music therapy
is;

“… [MT provides] a framework for the building of a mutual relationship between

client and therapist through which the music therapist will communicate with the
client, finding a musical idiom… [which]… enables change to occur, both in the
condition of the client and in the form the therapy takes…(Standing Committee for
Arts Therapies Professions 1989, Quoted by Gilroy & Lee 1995, p3)”.

From this we can understand music as a communicative tool music therapists use in allowing
their client to express and communicate their feelings, while allowing therapy to be shaped
by the client. Music is the core instrument of psychological change for music therapists but
before I analyse my chosen event using music therapy theories, we must understand the
possible relationships found in music and its influence on us as clients, practitioners,
therapists and general music lovers. Whether intentionally or indirectly, music plays a part in
our personal and collective lives and that is because it exists within different and varied
social, cultural, political and other contexts, which exists within influential moments of our
personal histories (Pavlicevic, 2003:66). It is important to understand that music’s ability to
be so influential and pivotal to moments in our lives does not exists in just a positive light.
With music being so important and constant in an individual’s life. There exists a complex
relationship where music can also serve as a reminder or trigger of stressful feelings and
negative memories, being feared and detested instead or enjoyed and sublime (Ansdell,
2014:4). Music can be felt as a personified being that you are able to interact with, it is also
seen as a space which can be entered and when experienced with the personal, social,
cultural, religious contexts we find ourselves in, music can have different defining
relationships that people can follow (Ansdell, 2014: 5-6). What allows us to share musical
experiences does not just depend on the location the music is performed, the specific song,
genre, style nor task each person is given in a musical activity, it is also how we interact with
each other while situated in that musical activity. In acknowledging the differences between
people, such as race, age, culture, social and economic quality of life, we can better
understand how the music chosen can help form a community. The JerusalemaChallenge
offered anyone with access to the song and dance the equal opportunity to learn and perform
together. The song chosen was a popular South African House song, the genre of the song,
predominantly house (adapted from a gospel song), emphasises dancing and movement, the
language, isiZulu, a South African language and performed by South African artists. The first
relationship the music shares with its participants is being South African, performed on the
Wits Main Campus, in front of the Great Hall and given that most of the participants were
students they shared a sense of comradery on familiar grounds. These are factors which can
be used in assessing the possible relationships between music and its participants, however in
understanding the relationship between music and people, there is another factor to be added,
physical space.

How familiar are the participants with the space the session is in? The freedom of movement
that the area provides, their own physical mobility/differences, emotional and mental
capacities play an effect on the possibilities that can be created within that space (Pavlicevic,
2003:80-81). How you interact with each other as well as your surroundings plays an
effective role in a group music session being ‘special’; meaningful to the participants as well
as every moment and detail of what is called musicking being felt by the participants. As
Pavlicevic so eloquently puts, “This is a musical and a bodily, as well as a mental, tuning in”
(2003:82). For the group to successfully tune into the performance and with each other,
certain conditions should be met, firstly the group must share a collective goal and know how
to achieve that goal. Orientating such a large group and having them understand what it is
they need to do is the duty of a leader or leaders, whose role it is to guide them to perform the
group task while being allowing self-expression (Pavlicevic, 2003: 87-88). In the case of the
JerusalemaChallenge, one can see in the beginning of the video that there are at least 3
leaders, who lead the dance routine and guide the rest of the group in dance, these leaders
have been with participants who have practiced this dance routine prior to the video being
recorded (00:00-00:15, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPHnqQfv3lw). As the video
was a final performance what can be seen are the leaders guiding the group, not conducting
them like an orchestra but being a part of the performance, acting as an example for people to
follow. The music for this performance acts as the cue for when to start dancing and the
signal for everyone to follow. What I mean is instead of the leaders verbally cueing everyone
when to participate and which dance move to use, the music, its verses or parts of the song
that were agreed upon during practice acted as the cues for the group to follow. This allows
the leaders to allow the participants to learn and express themselves without needing constant
intervention at every single step but instead, opening the space for the leaders to simply
witness the participants have fun and only needing intervention when help is necessary or to
make any changes that will improve the experience. The roles of the leader and how they are
executed hold great importance in the success of the group performance and their skill in
facilitating may determine the overall flow of the group activity, but that is not all that affects
the flow. Maintaining the groove may be affected by various differences, mainly how people
interact with each other, as one person’s dominant and independent flow may negatively
influence the rest of the group (Pavlicevic, 2003:115). The varying emotional, physical and
social capabilities of the participants have great effect on group music making, from the
video there are no clear emotional or social differences that cause any asynchronies. It can be
assumed that there are no troubling differences that prevent cohesiveness among the people.
The physical differences spotted from the video such age, race and gender also do not pose
any difficulty in the group being able to work together, if there were any physical disabilities
amongst the members it could cause not only a physical but also an emotional and mental
arrhythmic flow to the group. If present, these differences would prevent them from properly
synchronizing through non-verbal communication which means a low capacity for
interactional synchrony (Pavlicevic, 2003:184-185).

“The basis of this flow is neurological, displayed through mental, physical and
emotional ‘being with’ an ‘other’. Here is innate musicality: i.e. the capacity to be
fluid, flexible in volume, tempo, rhythm, timbre, contour and intensity of facial
expression, vocal sounds, acts and gestures, in order to reach optimal attunement…”

This quote helps us understand what it means to reach affect attunement, the measure of a
person to match and complement the expressions of another person that they are interacting
with. Looking at the video of the Wits University Jerusalema Dance, a closer look at people’s
facial expressions and body language can help understand whether there is affect attunement.
What helps is that we can look at the dancing as a vitality effect, the energy of the
participants and their enthusiasm through dance helps us understand how they are feeling and
how those around them are responding to the situation.

Through analysis of my selected video, I have laid out the different things to take into
consideration. The main topic now is how music therapy fits in with community music.
Music therapists are musicians who are trained professionally in music therapy and as a result
may work in a variety of settings such as education, social care, medical/health care for those
in need, team building or individual consultations (Anja, 2020). What this mainly focuses on
is Brynjulf Stige’s health musicking:

“…this new field is advocating a more ecological conception of health and wellbeing
in relation to musical involvement – giving equal attention to individuals, groups and
communities, and to the social, cultural and musical specifics of their local situations.
Music’s help is being seen not just as treatment or therapy, but also as a natural part of
health prevention and promotion, conflict resolution, and social development work”.
In understanding what music therapy is one must also understand the core concepts that are
dealth within music therapy, these concepts being what is a method, variation, procedure,
technique and model. In Tony Wigram, Inge Nygaard Pedersen and Lars Ole Bonde’s A
Comprehensive Guide to Music Therapy, they use Bruscia’s definitions to help us understand
these concepts (Blonde, Pederson, Wigram, 2002:113);

“A method is here defined as a particular type of music experience that the client
engages in for therapeutic purposes; a variation is the particular way in which that
music experience is designed; a procedure is everything that the therapist has to do to
engage the client in that experience; a technique is one step within any procedure that
a therapist uses to shape the client’s immediate experience; and a model is a
systematic and unique approach to method, procedure and technique based on certain
principles.”

Bruscia’s definitions provides us with a general idea of how a music therapy session can be
done and the various components within it. Looking at it in a broader sense, music in music
therapy is the medium used for the client to self-reflect, engage and communicate their
feelings and experiences with the music therapist. Where music is the main instrument used
to achieve the bonding of a community through personal, social/socio-economic or political
goals in community music, we see music therapy as more of a medical health focused
practice (Ansdell, 2014:17). What links them is the belief in musicking being used as a means
to connect and communicate with people (Ansdell, 2014:18). I will not speak more on what
music therapy means because I have already touched on it earlier and what I have already
mentioned has provided enough of a basis of what this means for community music. What
this means is we find ourselves dealing with a combined approach, community music
therapy. Community music therapy is an approach to musically working with people while
taking into consideration their own personal, social, cultural contexts as well as factors such
as their physical and mental health, relationships they have formed and music (Ansdell,
2014:21). This expands from what music therapists already do in their practice, taking into
consideration the practices within community music to help their client across a wide range
of social settings through music and therapy.

Applying this is a different and complicated story however I will create a music activity for a
community music group. The music activity that I would choose would be a sound circle,
within this sound circle participants are welcome to create their own musical phrase that is
sung against the other musical phrases that the other participants will sing. While all standing
in a circle, with everyone singing their own phrases, the initial aim is to simply listen to their
own musical actions against others; are they similar? Does everyone’s part heavily or light
clash against the other? What are the notifiable musical responses? What are the responses of
the participants? Following from this I will appoint one person to lead the group with their
own musical leading, the rest of the group may respond by adjusting their already created
phrases to the lead or creating a whole new musical line to accompany the lead. I will change
who will lead during this exercise and the rest will accompany the lead as they see fit. This
activity allows for the participants to musically communicate with each other, first by having
no clear lead and openly expressing themselves musically against each other and viewing
their responses to no clear musical structure, shifting to a specific response to an individual
leading their musical experience and how well they are attuned to each other and themselves.

From an initial understanding of community music theories and an event that unites people
during the Covid-19 pandemic, the analyse of the Wits University Jerusalema Dance using
theories learned in music therapy lectures and readings provides an understanding of the
nature and impact of each factor involved in the event. Music therapy is a practice showing
the great benefits of music within the medical domain, and that it is not completely separate
from community music but rather finds commons links between the two, enough that it may
overlap and work together. In conclusion, music therapy and community music are both
aimed at using music for the benefit of the community and the individual and as a medium
music finds itself being a powerful tool in understanding and/or building relationships as well
as communicating and binding the individual with others or their inner self.
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