Place, Space, and Landscape: Discovering Queens through Community Music and Performing Arts

CUNY Academic Works (City University of New York) · 2025-11-20

Place, Space, and Landscape: Discovering Queens through Community Music and Performing Arts is a graduate-level course designed to explore how music, dance, and theater can engage, reflect, and transform local communities through a critical pedagogy of place (Gruenewald, 2003) and service-learning experiences (Mitchell, 2008). Intended for graduate students in music, visual, and performing arts, this interdisciplinary course blends theory and practice to help students: (1) gain awareness of the spatial dimensions of their artistic experience; (2) build meaningful connections and relationships of care with local communities; and (3) engage with the concept of reinhabitation (Gruenewald, 2003), situating learning within specific socio-cultural, political, and geographical contexts in the borough of Queens. The goal is to facilitate a multidisciplinary constructivist learning experience through which their collective artistic use of each place—through art-making activities, the development of relationships with community members through the arts—turns their experience of each place into a meaningful lived musical space. During the first part of the semester, students will spend time in communities in different neighborhood of Queens (e.g. Pomonok center)— observing, listening, learning about the unique stories and cultural layers that shape each place, and developing culturally responsive artistic activities to be shared with the community members. In the second half of the semester, students will be asked to reflect and make sense of their collaborative artistic experience through creative writing assignments and narrative accounts, transforming their experience of each a musical space into a musical landscape.

Editorial

Journal of Popular Music Education · 2022-03-01

Popular music in family contexts: Broadening the definition through a review of literature

Journal of Popular Music Education · 2022 · 3 citations

• Sociology
• Sociology
• Psychology

In this article, we review literature documenting the presence and use of popular music within family contexts. After providing a definition of family from a psychological perspective, we present studies that explore popular music in traditionally structured families across the lifespan. We continue by exploring bands with members who share blood ties and progress to analyse contexts in which popular music provides space for sharing meaningful interactions and for developing feelings of family identity, such as nursing homes, homeless shelters and prisons. Considerations for the use of popular music in everyday life and implications for music education are provided.

Teaching artists in flow: policy implications of a responsive and communal pedagogy

Arts Education Policy Review · 2022 · 1 citations

• Sociology
• Pedagogy
• Sociology

Teaching artists typically work as solo agents, without the comradery of a like-minded community. After a year of focus groups, teaching observations, and conversations with school and arts administrators, we identified a need for experienced teaching artists to have a chance to reflect upon, renew, and reconsider their teaching practices with others. We designed a 10-month professional development program delivered on-line (framed by in-person introductory and concluding sessions). For curriculum design, we drew upon several perspectives and practices including flow experience, responsive pedagogy, community, and self-study. Honoring the importance of seeing ourselves in others and the power of being seen, we describe specific experiences that contributed to the outcomes of the program. Questions around how, what, who, and where we teach are addressed vis-à-vis examples of student artistry. Implications for policy include attending to the symbiosis of theory and practice, the consideration of local needs, and the use of meaningful assessments.

Adult Perspectives on Children and Music in Early Childhood, Aleksandra Acker and Berenice Nyland (2020)

International Journal of Music in Early Childhood · 2021-09-01

Review of: Adult Perspectives on Children and Music in Early Childhood , Aleksandra Acker and Berenice Nyland (2020) Cham: Springer Nature, 163 pp., ISBN 978-3-03057-698-1, e-book, USD 89.00

Role of corneal epithelial thickness mapping in the evaluation of keratoconus

Contact Lens and Anterior Eye · 2019-05-08 · 37 citations

Creating ties of intimacy through music: The case study of a family as a community music experience

International Journal of Community Music · 2017-11-19 · 14 citations

Abstract This article examines and documents the musical life of a family with an 8-year-old child as resembling the concept, the intentions and practices of community music. Through the analysis of semi-structured interviews, sharing of musical artefacts, and written documentations of their daily musical encounters, I seek to provide insights into the functions of music as a means for building community, affective bonding and a sense of shared identity, drawing from Higgins the three broad perspectives through which community music is conceptualized. For the Beckett-Limas, an ethnically diverse family living in New York, music represented an adaptation tool in their living in various countries around the world, and sustained their transitions to different cultures, jobs, climates and communities, strengthening their relationships through moments of informal, spontaneous and communal musical interactions. Looking at family through the lens of community music reveals the extent to which music draws people together and promotes individual and collective well-being.

Music as transitional object and practice: Children’s spontaneous musical behaviors in the subway

Research Studies in Music Education · 2016-02-07 · 44 citations

This study looks at children’s music making in a public setting designed for society writ large. Although known to most children in the city, the subway presents a unique environment, both structurally predictable yet sonically dynamic; it is in continuous transition. Adopting Winnicott’s psychoanalytical perspective, we make a case for viewing children’s spontaneous music making as a tool for comfort and engagement, specifically through the use of musical material as transitional objects and musical behaviors as transitional practices. Data were collected over three weekends on two subway lines in New York City. Seven to 10 field observers traveled in groups of two or three; each filled out a protocol form for every episode of children’s music making observed, indicating musical qualities, sources, and contexts. These categorical descriptors and accompanying field notes were later used to construct more detailed qualitative narratives. With a total of 69 episodes, the authors found that music making was present in children from infancy to middle childhood (approximately age 10). Findings showed musical behaviors were influenced by adult interaction, and generated by resources in the environment. Over 81% of observed episodes contained vocal behaviors; movement occurred in almost half (48%). Musical materials were mostly invented. The most frequent function was “to comfort and entertain self,” comprising over 50% of those observed, and was linked to solitary interaction. Communicating with others accounted for another third of the reports.