Community music in cultural policy

Community Music presents a contested field. Cultural policy has had a hard time dealing with community music because aesthetic intentions, social objectives and economic motivations may all play a role for actors and sometimes clash. This chapter provides a scheme of the basic tensions inherent to community music in the cultural policy fields which can form the basis for ‘negotiations’ between actors. The scheme is based upon the pragmatic sociology of Boltanski and Thévenot who provide a grid of sometimes conflicting and sometimes aligning values that can be present in any social situation. Their grid will be applied to the practice of community music in an effort to provide insight into the intricacies of cultural policies regarding this particular form of music as well as into the practicalities of the practice of community musicians working in a field in which cultural policy making plays an often vital role.