CESAMM aims to make a significant contribution to supporting musicians and social workers who use music as a tool to bring together young and older participants from diverse backgrounds, enabling them to meet and get to know one another through playing musical instruments or singing.
The Centre will also support research that can help deepen our understanding of the role music can play in social and community work.
CESAMM stands for “Centre for Social Action and Music Making”
Interview with Lukas Pairon
(Chairholder of Academic Chair Jonet)
Participatory social music projects represent a field of social practice that is rapidly developing in many countries. These projects often embrace diversity by welcoming participants from a wide range of economic, social, and cultural backgrounds, creating opportunities for people from different worlds to meet and connect.
“Open Sesame”
The field of social and community music programmes that interests us concerns a practice that opens itself to stories and music from worlds that may be very different from our own. In doing so, it allows us to discover treasures that we might never have imagined were all around us.
It is therefore a happy coincidence that the French pronunciation of CESAMM, the abbreviation of our training and research centre, resembles the magic phrase “Open Sesame” from the tale Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.
Music-Making
We would like to emphasize that the practice on which the Academic Chair Jonet and its research and training centre, CESAMM, focus is music-making within the context of social and community work.
Research has shown that simply listening to music from other cultures or communities does not necessarily bring us closer to those worlds. It has been found that listening alone often results in only a superficial connection to different realities. By contrast, active participation in music-making requires commitment, concentration, and time. This involvement can enable people to develop a deeper connection with different musical traditions and gain better understanding of the cultural contexts from which they emerge
Sympathetic Vibrations
When musicians work together, they seek ways to achieve a form of harmony, to be in “sympathetic vibrations”, “in sound”, “in tune”, and to create a situation in which they find themselves “in resonance” with one another. This is a complex process that requires effort, patience, and mutual understanding.
The projects on which the Academic Chair Jonet and the research and training centre CESAMM focus are often examples of collaborative, pluralistic, and participatory co-design. It therefore makes sense to explore what we can learn from such music-making practices.
We envision a world enriched by a diversity of worlds, a world that embraces difference rather than uniformity. To help build such a world, we need talented and experienced bridge-builders who can connect people across social classes, genders, races, and cultures.
CESAMM’s Objective
There is a growing need for research into the role that music can play in social practice, as well as for high-quality training and support for cultural workers and musicians who wish to use their artistic competencies to contribute to a more inclusive and socially just society.
The Academic Chair Jonet and its Centre for Social Action & Music-Making (CESAMM) aim to offer both training in as well as research on socially oriented music practices, involving various departments of Ghent University and the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Ghent.
This strong connection between research and practice will be a key pillar of the Chair and its Centre.
We focus on investigating and developing the empowering potential of music to create social impact and thereby contribute to building a society that values and promotes diversity and inclusion.
Because we bring together both research on practice and training for practice, we believe that what we are inaugurating today is, for several reasons, a pioneering initiative on a global scale.
