Community MusicWorks: A Case Study

Authors: Sarah Howard (Canada), Raquel Serrano (Ecuador), Megan Sesma (USA), Judith Sweet (USA), Julia Weldon (USA)

BACKGROUND

Community MusicWorks (CMW) is a nonprofit in Providence, Rhode Island, founded in 1997 by MacArthur Fellow Sebastian Ruth to build cohesive urban communities through music education and performance. The organization centers its work in the Southside and West End neighborhoods, where social and geographic segregation limit access to resources and cross-cultural connection. Participation is targeted to students eligible for subsidized lunch in the local school district. The participant community is predominantly Latinx with significant African American, White, and Southeast Asian representation. CMW’s activities include free instrument loans, lessons, large-ensemble rehearsals, and no-cost concerts in neighborhood venues. After twenty-five years, the organization is planning a permanent facility with a concert hall, teaching studios, instrument repair, and a café, signaling a long-term commitment to place.

CMW’s mission is to transform the lives of students, families, and musicians. Teaching artistry is the mechanism. Eighty-one percent of expenses support performance, education, and mentoring delivered by resident musicians. Competitive salaries with benefits, flexible schedules, and varied creative opportunities have produced a stable workforce and long tenures. Associate Director and Senior Resident Musician Jesse Holstein has served for more than two decades and attributes strong relationships with families and the city to the sustainability of his role. CMW’s influence now extends beyond Providence through alumni fellowships, convenings, and the MusicWorks Network.

BUSINESS AND ORGANIZATIONAL MODEL

CMW operates a resident-musician model that aligns artistic excellence, pedagogy, and community engagement. Resident musicians are salaried educators and performers who deliver instruction, mentor youth, and produce concerts embedded in neighborhood life. Governance and program design incorporate community voice through student, parent, and alumni representation on the board. CMW participates in the Providence Youth Arts Collaborative, using a collective-impact approach to coordinate with peer organizations rather than compete with them. The organization’s approach to concerts is community-centric: programs are shaped by a deep understanding of local strengths, invite participation from audiences with varying levels of familiarity with classical music, and aim to strengthen social cohesion across lines of difference.

STRATEGIC CHALLENGE

CMW’s 2020–2025 strategy identifies four priorities. The first is to cultivate belonging as the organization transitions into a permanent home. The second is to advance anti-racist practice and racial equity in both pedagogy and programming. The third is to strengthen reciprocal learning among students, families, and teaching artists. The fourth is to amplify creative voice through performance and curriculum. The central strategic question is how to operationalize these aims so that community voice is not only represented in governance and outreach but is also embedded in the daily musical practices of teaching and performance.

VALUE-ADDED CONCEPT

Collective Composition (CC) is proposed as a programmatic through-line that integrates community voice directly into music-making. CC is a facilitated process through which groups create original works by contributing melodies, rhythms, lyrics, or other musical elements that are then synthesized into a cohesive piece. The approach can function in a single workshop or as a recurring classroom practice. Prompts often connect to community concerns or social-justice themes, allowing students to link personal identity and local context to artistic creation. In CMW’s environment, CC is a natural extension of the community-centric concert model and an opportunity to align day-to-day pedagogy with organizational values.

IMPLEMENTATION CONSIDERATIONS

Implementation would require coherent design across settings. In workshops, facilitators would introduce a community-relevant prompt, form small groups to generate material, and guide a synthesis process that results in an original composition. In weekly lessons, CC can extend repertoire study by inviting students to add sections, vary themes, or translate concepts into their own musical language. Teaching artists would need training in facilitation methods that emphasize deep listening, equitable participation, and culturally responsive practice. Assessment could combine reflective journals, recordings of works in progress, peer feedback protocols, and performance outcomes integrated into the community-centric concert season.

The model also has implications for space planning and the new facility. Flexible rooms configured for collaboration, recording capability to document works in progress, and presentation formats that make space for premieres alongside canonical repertoire will reinforce CC as a core practice. Partnerships within the Providence Youth Arts Collaborative can expand prompts beyond music to interdisciplinary projects that connect to local history, language, and civic life.

IMPACT ANALYSIS

CC maps directly to CMW’s strategic aims. Belonging is strengthened when students and families hear their ideas embedded in public performances and in the repertoire students practice each week. Anti-racist practice is advanced by decentering a narrow Eurocentric canon and by validating diverse musical traditions and ways of knowing. Reciprocal learning is formalized when students co-author content with peers and teachers and when teaching artists adopt facilitative rather than directive stances. Creative voice is amplified because students not only interpret existing works but also produce new ones that reflect community narratives.

Evidence from music-education research suggests that voice and choice in repertoire selection and creation increase participation among secondary students, including those from racialized communities, and support equity in learning by integrating differentiation into activity design. Over time, a sustained CC pathway can feed CMW’s Phase II youth leadership program. Teen participants already select social-justice themes for end-of-year concerts; CC provides a method to translate those themes into original works. With guidance, projects can evolve toward youth participatory action research, where students investigate community issues and present findings through composed pieces, program notes, and public dialogue linked to performances.

The approach carries operational trade-offs. Facilitator training requires investment, and rehearsal time allocated to CC may reduce time for technical repertoire. Quality assurance must balance authenticity of voice with standards of musical excellence. Documentation, rights management, and archiving will need policies that honor student ownership while enabling performance and dissemination.

DECISION POINT

As CMW finalizes plans for a permanent facility and advances its 2020–2025 strategy, leadership must decide whether to institutionalize Collective Composition as a core pedagogical pillar across workshops, lessons, and concerts, or to maintain CC as an occasional tool while focusing resources on resident-musician performance and traditional instruction. The choice will determine how deeply community voice is embedded in daily practice, how teaching artists are trained and evaluated, and how the organization measures progress on belonging, racial equity, reciprocal learning, and creative voice.