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Charting new roots: exploring musical opportunities within Northern Dutch villages

Amidst evolving landscapes and contemporary pressures affecting both the arts and rural living, policymakers and artists alike are directing more attention to rural and non-urban cultural practices. Participatory art forms, such as music, offer a unique potential to (re)connect people with each other and their surroundings by fostering reflection and reshaping societal perspectives. However, developing or attempting to integrate existing and new practices into rural communities can pose challenges for artists, especially when coming from outside these locales. Moreover, there is a notable absence of clear and sustainable pathways for artists to engage in participatory practices within rural settings, and research on this subject is limited.This report discusses the results of a case study which took place as part of the broader Sound Soils research project – a practice-oriented initiative aimed at exploring opportunities, roles and approaches for professional musicians to contribute to rural life in the northern Netherlands. In this case study, we aimed to understand the unique qualities and cultural lives of villages in the North-Netherlands region. To do so, we conducted immersive visits to three villages and spoke to locals about the existing cultural fabric of their village, as well as the current concerns and wishes of their inhabitants, both in general and in relation to music activities.Alongside providing other valuable insights into village life in our region more generally, our findings help identify potential ways for musicians to develop (new) collaborative music practices in rural communities, with a focus on forms that are in dialogue with existing local interests and community life. In this way, we seek approaches that have a higher potential for sustainability by being embedded into existing community structures and cultural practices. In this report, we explain the purpose, methodologies, and main findings of the three villages case study and discuss how these results may lead to follow-up research-in-practice projects in the villages studied and others like them.

The same but differently

This book seeks to communicate what we learned, what I learned, in the hope that readers (particularly musicians in training) can find ways to learn for themselves as they challenge themselves to try new, and different, things.

Stories of Recovery and Participation. Experiences and challenges.

This publication is a result of an international research project which took place from 2012-2014. Among the participators were four universities, number of service providers, NGOs and people with psychiatric and learning disabilities from Amersfoort and Maastricht in the Netherlands, Budapest in Hungary and Tallinn in Estonia. The aim of the project was to explore the wishes and needs of persons with psychiatric or learning difficulties with regard to community participation, and how services could be (more) supportive in order to meet these needs. We also looked at local policies, especially from the perspective of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). From the research we learn that regardless of the country where people live, persons with disabilities have similar struggles to cope with vulnerability and deprivation. They also share the same desires as any other human being: the wish to live a good and valued life, to have meaningful activities and to belong to a social community. The stories in this book were selected from the interviews which were conducted by researchers during the project. The portraits illustrate experiences of illness, disability and recovery. They also reflect experiences of using social- and mental health services, exclusion and inclusion. By reading these stories we see, how multifaceted life can be, and what are the challenges towards the real participation in community

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Higher Music Education

With this “invitation for action”, the Diversity, Inclusion & Gender Equality (DIGE) Working Group of the AEC - Empowering Artists as Makers in Society project (hereafter, ARTEMIS) welcomes all the AEC member institutions to explore, discuss and implement practices fostering Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in Higher Music Education (HME). We invite our colleagues to collectively dream up possible futures for HME through DEI work, which responds to the need to accommodate the plurality of backgrounds, artistic paradigms, access capabilities, identities and aspirations amongst current as well as future students and staff. Through this publication we wish to encourage the AEC memberinstitutions to grasp this simultaneously evident and complex task and to explore what diversity, equity and inclusion could mean if musicians are seen as “makers in, for and of society” (Gaunt et al. 2021). For us as a Working Group, this proactive view has been central to our work from the beginning, as we asked ourselves whether HME institutions find themselves predominantly adapting (or not) to inevitable local and global changes and pressures, and whether the HMEinstitutions could see themselves as part of a network of change makers in society. Focusing on the latter, we see DEI work as being directly connected to the core artistic practices of the institutions. As reflections from many of our colleagues in various AEC member institutions illustrate, the commitment to DEI work nurtures artistic imagination, widens pedagogical approaches, and expands the scope of professional practice.

IknowWhatThisIs.

This publication gives an account of the Public Annotation of Cultural Heritage research project (PACE) conducted at the Crossmedialab. The project was carried out between 1 January 2008 and 31 December 2009, and was funded by the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science. Three members of the Dutch Association of Science Centres (Vereniging Science Centra) actively participated in the execution of the project: the Utrecht University Museum, the National Museum of Natural History (Naturalis), and Museon. In addition, two more knowledge institutes participated: Novay and the Utrecht University of Applied Sciences. BMC Consultancy and Manage¬ment also took part in the project. This broad consortium has enabled us to base the project on both knowledge and experience from a practical and scientific perspective. The purpose of the PACE project was to examine the ways in which social tagging could be deployed as a tool to enrich collections, improve their acces¬sibility and to increase visitor group involvement. The museums’ guiding question for the project was: ‘When is it useful to deploy social tagging as a tool for the benefit of museums and what kind of effect can be expected from such deployment?’ For the Crossmedialab the PACE project presented a unique opportunity to conduct concrete research into the highly interesting phenomenon of social tagging with parties and experts in the field.

A multidimensional inquiry into Chinese outbound tourism to Western Europe: the visitation of Chinese millennial students to the Netherlands