Cultural Humility
For some background on music as possibility and its role in helping us confront the toxic state of our politics in contemporary society see this introductory post.
Seeking out collective possibility in artistic experiences is intrinsically connected with another movement that we are seeing in our field right now: the push for more Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) in our work. As I mentioned in the post before this one about storytelling, to truly unlock the potential for people to come together through art and create new narratives about the way they want to live in the world, our interest in DEIB must go beyond simply satisfying a checklist. It is not an additional requirement that we fulfill along our pursuit of artistry. Its values are fundamental to becoming better, more engaged artists.
Just prior to the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd in May of 2020, I finished my dissertation on Creative Placemaking and Musical Study in Higher Education. Creative placemaking is a term created to describe the work of artists that build experiences and installations that improve community outcomes in the places they live and work, such as murals, teaching programs, and youth development art programs just to name a few examples. My research specifically was looking at what elements of creative placemaking were missing in the typical curriculum for musical study in higher ed and one particular element that I discussed was the concept of cultural humility. I had little idea at the time just how relevant that concept would become not only in my life, or in musician’s lives, but in the lives of every person in American society.
Cultural humility is often misconstrued with cultural competence, but it is a fundamentally different understanding of the way we are in relationship with people. Cultural competence implies a knowledge threshold or a skill that is learned, something that can be achieved or completed. Cultural humility understands that the best way to approach new communities is a constantly evolving process, one that we accept to always practice with no end goal in sight. It is a mindset and approach to situations where we acknowledge what we don’t know, we resist stereotyping, and we seek to build collective understanding. In music, cultural humility is letting go of our sole proprietorship of the art and affirming the idea that each person is an expert in their own lived experience, and inviting them to bring that expertise to the creative work. We must seek to come alongside communities, and build artistic experiences that empower from within, rather than lead from the front. We need to listen louder than we play and understand how the music we make fits into the larger picture of a community that is already creative in their own right.
We must seek to come alongside communities, and build artistic experiences that empower from within, rather than lead from the front.
I practice cultural humility everyday in my role at the New England Conservatory in the Community Performances and Partnerships program. We tell students interested in working with us that we are “partner facing.” Students often have great ideas about projects they’d like to run, they are asking the right questions, and they are seeking to make a difference in the world through their art. However, we tell them that our priority always starts with what our partners need from the musicians we work with. It’s an inversion of how the question typically gets framed in community engagement circles: “We have this music, where can we go with it?” Taking the alternative approach and starting with community needs as the foundation grounds us in a practice of learning what our partners are working on and how we can support that work through music performance and teaching. In this approach, music is a conveyance to a greater sense of belonging and mutual understanding; it’s an invitation to a place that is co-created, not a product hung on a wall or displayed behind glass.
Our pursuit of this goal often means that our programming and our students’ work change significantly from year to year. It also means that occasionally, we have an amazing student and no partner that is a natural fit for the experience they are looking to have. In those cases, we encourage students to adjust their expectations for what their fellowship may look like and adapt to serve the needs of a new community partner. While it certainly requires more flexibility to work this way, we find that the relationships we develop with our partners have so much more trust because of our willingness to ask questions that center them and their work in the creative experience we are building. Applying cultural humility in this way is essential to operating in an adaptive ecosystem where strategy is emergent and intention is always shared.
How might cultural humility show up in the creative work of a student? Typically they aren’t making institutional partnerships and their artistic practice is more prescribed by their course of study. I’d argue though that cultural humility is fundamentally important to our time as students, because so often we are transient members of a community. We live in a new place for only a few years and then leave. Cultural humility is the antidote to the “town and gown” divide that is so pervasive amongst institutions of higher ed in America. I was told so often as a student how important it was to “get off campus” and I know current students are still given these words of wisdom. Yet those words should be accompanied by knowledge and training for how to make that time off campus have real impact, both on ourselves and the community. Belonging isn’t something that is found but it is created and practiced.
Music is a conveyance to a greater sense of belonging and mutual understanding; it’s an invitation to a place that is co-created, not a product hung on a wall or displayed behind glass
Let’s look at just one way students can get off campus: the community recital. This performance is scheduled on their own in a venue outside the school of music and not regulated by the requirements of their degree. The purpose of “getting off campus” is to share unfamiliar music and the resources that accompany it with a new audience, and to do so with cultural humility. What does that look like? Well for starters rather than just transplanting a degree recital format to a community setting we can ask an audience in the programming stage for their input on details of the concert experience. While not an exhaustive list, the questions below are enough to get us started:
Do they have a preference for specific types of venues? Are there places that would be uncomfortable?
How should the audience be arranged around the performer?
Would a normal evening time performance work well or are there certain social/cultural considerations that might make that not a great time for a performance?
Are there musicians in that community that could be involved in the performance?
Is artistic work often associated with communal gatherings and food in the community?
Should there be tickets and what price? Would ticketing be a barrier to access?
Can this be recorded and who has access to those recordings?
And most importantly:
What kind of music do you (the community) love and why do you love it? How does that align with the music I (the musician) play and why I love it? As human beings, we love music and art often for similar reasons, and finding those intersection points across genres and traditions is a key way to open up belonging and possibility in creative work.
The questions above are an essential practice that we can begin to apply when we think about incorporating cultural humility into our performing, teaching, and creative work. Cultural humility always starts from a place of genuine inquiry, and there is no such thing as too many questions. Communities are experts in their own experience and it’s on us as artists to be curious, ask questions while we plan, and then act on the knowledge shared with us.
