Collective music-making as ‘asset-based social policy’: a pilot study

This paper examines the role of music teaching and music-making as not just a way of boosting current household well-being but as a social asset, i.e. as a means of boosting the capital, especially the human and social capital, of lower income groups. This idea is of particular interest to social policy globally because, having in many places moved on to an ‘asset-based’ footing in the 1990s and 2000s, it has more recently, and unfortunately in our view, retreated from that approach in recent times, at least in the global North. We compare here the approach of two organisations operating different models of music-making and teaching – Sound Lincs of Lincoln, England, which practises a community-music model, and Musica in Crescendo and the Orchestra Diego Valeri within the Italian national system of youth orchestras, which adapt a model originally derived from El Sistema of Venezuela. From a preliminary regression analysis, we find that participation in collective musical activities, in both institutions, has raised the aspirations of students and thereby enhanced both their individual capacities (resilience and locus of control) and their social capacities (extroversion and ability to defuse conflict). Our qualitative evidence illustrates the causal processes underlying these impacts, and in particular explores how collective music-making activities could be better focussed on low-income groups. We conclude that the idea of ‘music as social asset’ would be of potential benefit to both practitioners and social security systems, and discuss what policies and institutions might be able to increase the return to this asset.