Beginnings are important. “Music and Resilience” (M&R) came to life in 2012 as a support project for the development of music resources within the Palestinian refugee community of Lebanon, targeting two spheres of activity concerning children and adolescents: community music-making and clinical music therapy. Eight years later, the project has expanded to sustain not only these two aspects, but also psycho-social music support for the young, and music in the community's nursery school curriculum. M&R has also spawned a European-based online resource and training centre for music interventions in marginalized communities worldwide.¹ These new articulations and adaptations bear witness to the most important lesson learnt during the project's lifespan, evoked in the title metaphor of “adjusting the pitch”; namely, the development of a modus operandi of continuous monitoring, observing, reflecting, learning, and re-planning, in order to maintain relevance and efficacy in response to the needs of the specific context.

The project owes its conception not to an application call or a funding approval, the origin of so many cooperation projects; rather, its initiatory thrust was provoked by the Italian Embassy of Beirut's refusal to issue entry visas into Italy for fifteen young Palestinian musicians invited to participate in a cultural exchange in Summer 2011. This refusal, while justified by Italian law, effectively amounted to a denial of civil rights for those young students, and epitomized exquisitely the intolerable lot of the Palestinian refugees of Lebanon, which will be addressed in the next section. The response of the Italian CBO Prima Materia ² (PM), was a direct demonstration of solidarity with the offended party through an institutional visit to the Palestinian NGO Beit Atfal Assumoud (“House of the Children of Resilience”: hereafter referred to as Assumoud) ³ by PM's musical director Henry Brown in September 2011. The purpose of the visit was purely and socially human: if Palestinian students from Lebanon had been deprived of the possibility to come to Europe, European students would try to go to Lebanon, in order to retrieve the lost music exchange. Firm conviction that music had to be made was expressed by both PM and Assumoud, the former as a promoter of positive social change through music, and the latter as a protector of the young generations of Palestinian refugees and other vulnerable subjects in Lebanon.

Effectively therefore, the partnership of M&R was founded on an ethical consensus in response to a small but nevertheless significant crisis of socio-political nature. This has remained a characteristic of the project's driving force and has drawn support through the years from numerous other partner organizations, sponsors, donors, and volunteers in sympathy with the project's ethos. In 2013, M&R's significance was highlighted through the concession of the Musical Rights Award by the International Music Council, in recognition of its advocacy of the universal right of children to have access to, and be creative through, music.

Similar projects are often considered within the context of music and conflict transformation (Urbain, 2015). In this instance, the conditions for conflict transformation do not exist (Robertson, 2010), given the context of the Palestinian refugee community in Lebanon. The European team aims to express solidarity with its friends overseas, by helping them to develop resources which, in their life situation, are extremely problematic. The reason for this difficulty is only due to the fact that they are deprived of their basic rights. It is essential to keep one thing in mind always: if the Palestinians of Lebanon had civil rights equal to their European counterparts, they would be able to develop their rich cultural potential, for the benefit of the community, without foreign aid. M&R is configured therefore as an exchange project, which supports strategic planning for the development of music resources, through interventions which benefit both operative partners (see Fig. 1).

For strategic planning to be in any way effective, it must be informed by at least a conscious attempt at coherent understanding of the context in which the project develops. In the case of M&R, far from being a convenient “point of departure,” the context in question was, and continues to be, a highly complex process influenced by a fatal constellation of historical and socio-political factors, which can be defined in two main categories: firstly, the circumstances leading to the presence of a Palestinian refugee community in Lebanon, and secondly, the unique political characteristics of this host country.

The first wave of around one hundred thousand Palestinian refugees fled from Northern Palestine into Southern Lebanon in 1948–49, during the Israeli “War of Independence,” prior to the founding of a Jewish State in Palestine. For Palestinians this moment is al nakba, which translates into English as “catastrophe,” as does the Hebrew term shoah. As a result of the Six-Day War in 1967, a second wave of Palestinian refugees flooded into the camps which had been set up by the UN on small plots of land (no more than 1,5 km²). Since then, despite considerable population growth, the areas allocated have not been increased; the inhabitants have substituted the original makeshift tents with buildings of bricks and cement, expanding only vertically within the perimeters. These districts remain isolated within, and from, the cities, surrounded by walls and/or barbed wire, permanently controlled by the Lebanese army, with virtually no possibility for interchange with the host society.

Official records of Palestinian refugees resident in Lebanon are contrasting: according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency ⁴ (n.d.) the figure is 475,075, whereas a recent census, the first ever for this population, gave the figure as only 183,255 (LPDC et al., 2019). An explanation for this contrast can be found in the politics of the host state, for whom the presence of Palestinian refugees has always been extremely inconvenient, precluding any plans for their effective assimilation. The Lebanese population is clustered into no less than eighteen state-recognized religious sects, reflected in the confessional nature of the country's political system. All political positions are appointed on the basis of proportional religious representation within the population, based on a census dating back to 1932, which defined around 52% Christians and 48% Muslims out of a population of 793,396 (Maktabi, 1999). Since the Palestinian refugees are mostly Sunni Muslims, their inclusion in civil life would certainly upturn these proportions. No Lebanese statesperson has ever assumed this responsibility; on the contrary, legislation consistently aims to maintain their marginalization, not only physically in the camps, but also socially, through the denial of all basic civil rights. ⁵

Other reasons for the systematic exclusion of Palestinian refugees from Lebanese civil life include the “Right of Return” to Palestine (UN Resolution 194), which would be lost in the event of full naturalization. Furthermore, the historic presence of the PLO in Lebanon is associated with dramatic events relating to the fifteen years of bloodshed of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90). Indeed, many Lebanese hold the Palestinians directly responsible for the war, thus nurturing a widespread distrust towards this population (Haddad, 2004).

M&R's local partner in Lebanon, Assumoud, was founded in August 1976, following one of the most tragic pages of Palestinian history in Lebanon, namely a Lebanese military action, which razed to the ground the entire refugee camp of Tel Elzaatar (North Beirut). Assumoud was among the first organizations to offer assistance to the many orphaned refugee children. Since then, Assumoud has extended and consolidated its actions, maintaining its focus on children and adolescents in a community approach closely involving family and other social entities. As a humanitarian, non-sectarian organization with no political affiliations, its mission is to provide social care and support development for Palestinians and other disadvantaged people.

Over the last decades, the determinants of social development have been investigated within the theory of social capital. In the view of American political scientist Robert Putnam, this term refers to “social networks and the associated norms of reciprocity” (Putnam, 2000, p.21). The accumulation of its positive consequences—“mutual support, cooperation, trust, institutional effectiveness” (Putnam, 2000, p.22)—is a prerequisite for political integration and economic health in any given society. Putnam identifies voluntary organizations, or “third sector organizations,” as essential in the construction of social networks; both of the principal partners of M&R fall into this category. For French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, social capital implicates inevitable power relationships and “becomes a resource in the social struggles that are carried out in different social arenas or fields” (Siisiäinen, 2003, p.2). It interlinks with cultural, economic and symbolic forms of capital, to form a context-based aggregate of resources available to each individual, determining their “social trajectory.” The conversion factor of these resources qualifies them as capital, supporting a continuous, transformative and generative mechanism, particularly evident and significant within a migration context (Erel, 2010).

The Palestinians in Lebanon live in a double absence: firstly from their homeland, and secondly from a host society which denies the “settled” refugees recognition and inclusion (Sayad, 1999; Hanafi, 2008). The camps bear witness to this suspended existence in a spatial sense; they have become “spaces of exception,” within which national law is suspended and replaced systematically by temporary or emergency regulations (Agamben, 1998), typical of humanitarian response to sudden crises. The inappropriateness of such governance in this context is blatant. For four generations, in these enduring spaces of exception, Palestinians have been forced to reconstruct their identity based on “otherness,” and to invest in the struggle for social capital by means of a “quotidian and never-ending practice of constructing home” (Taylor, 2013, p.136). In so doing, the foundation stone is laid for reclaiming agency and demanding full recognition of their double status as Palestinian nationals in exile and as resident refugees in Lebanon. This is the essence of assumoud, which encompasses adaptation to harsh life conditions whilst preserving the community's long-term objective. The term, which translates as “resilience,” denotes a collective and therefore social skill, performed in the community:

Resilience represents the core of the daily performance of Palestinian identity in forced and permanent exile—an ongoing process of negotiation between tradition and adaptation. Cultural expression is fundamentally important in affirming the collective self, and guaranteeing new, shared “social trajectories” which constitute that collectivity. Culture promotes social engagement and participation, contributing to general well-being and resilience, which can be strategically transformed by the “community of practice” into social capital.

Throughout more than forty years of nurturing this community of practice, Assumoud has consolidated strategies for responding sensitively and adequately to the emergence of social change. First and foremost, the institution adopts a “person-centered approach,” defined in the words of this concept's founder as “based on the premise that the human being is basically a trustworthy organism, capable of evaluating the outer and inner situation, understanding herself in its context, making constructive choices as to the next steps in life, and acting on those choices” (Rogers, 1990, p.382). This respectful approach to the individual is complemented at project development level by the framework of the “Action Learning Cycle” (see Fig. 2), described within the Theory of Social Change as: “an approach that accompanies and seeks to enhance existing change processes and to surface potential through continual learning” (Reeler, 2007, p.21).

Figure 2

The Action Learning Cycle

In January 2020 PM organized a public seminar in Montespertoli entitled “Music & Resilience Lebanon-Italy, achievements and challenges,” supporting community participation in the Action Learning phases of observation, reflection and learning. The contents of this seminar form the basis of this and the following three sections of the present study and provide an account of where M&R is to date (see Fig. 3). The seminar consisted of a “team narration” to a public which included members of the local music community and representatives of the local council under whose patronage M&R runs. The narration occurred through music and film, verbal accounts by the authors of this article and others, and witness stories from both partner communities; this constellation of diverse communication modalities, which allowed the music to speak for itself in ways which words cannot convey, has been maintained in this article, where the audiovisual elements are intended as substantial elements of the text. All participants in the seminar gave informed consent for audio recording of verbal discourse and audiovisual recording of musical contributions, and for the subsequent publishing of these contents. Use of audiovisual documentation from M&R actions in Lebanon was permitted by both partner organizations following informed consent from the families of the children involved.

Since M&R is considered first and foremost an exchange project, such occasions offer opportunities for participants in the actions in Lebanon to connect with children, students, and families who experience the project only on home-ground in Italy. As often as the Italian embassy allows, these events include the participation of a key figure from the PR community in Lebanon: in January 2020, Mohamad Orabi, Palestinian psychologist working with Assumoud since 2010, was present, together with Italian staff, music students, and trainees who had participated in Summer 2019, and the youngest orchestral group from PM's local community project. This latter group, comprising twenty children aged 8–10, opened the seminar with a performance of two Arabic songs—“Al Maya” and “Nassam Alaina el Hawa,” arranged for them by Henry Brown, who contributes in a similar way in Lebanon (discussed in more detail in the section ‘Community Music’ below), providing purpose-built arrangements of both Arabic and European repertoire (see video excerpt 1).

This first, musical “narration” was a simple and direct way of underlining one aspect of the riches which M&R brings to PM's local community: the promotion of knowledge of the Palestinian culture through its music. Other Arabic pieces were played during the seminar by the older student group which had participated in the exchange program in Lebanon in July 2019, forming an orchestra with their Palestinian counterparts. The seminar performances included a new member, a young Swiss clarinetist from the Mosaico music school in Wattwil (Zürich), which had recently joined the M&R partnership. The continuous development of the European network indicates an important protection factor for the project's health and sustainability.

As in the seminar, the following narrations of groundwork in Lebanon are articulated by the different, but not distinct actions, reflecting the framework for planning and monitoring the project's development.

Hanna's reflection reiterates the human ethic driving the project and reminds us of the importance attributed to emotion in person-centered interventions, which, in the case of M&R, are framed and channeled by and through music. That music is potentially a powerful generator of social change is borne out by diverse theories. Community music practice (Higgins, 2012) recognizes music as a primary resource for individual expression, communication and social well-being. Music is extensively present in everyday life (Tagg, 2013)¹², whether purposely or casually, and serves an infinity of interconnected purposes, including pure enjoyment, relaxation, education, artistic expression, and therapeutic care (MacDonald, 2013). Music is also significantly present in terms of its effects on the individual, ranging from basic metabolic changes (Yamasaki et al., 2012) to more complex neurological and psychological influences, including perception, memory, and emotions (Baumgartner, 1992). Without denying the fact that music can be a chosen profession, necessitating adequate training, community music celebrates the universal human inclination towards creating, discovering, and learning with sound, whether this be a baby gurgling to a parent, a hungry toddler discovering the potential of a fork bashed on the table, or an amateur musician playing with friends. Innate musicality has extremely deep roots, which start to develop before birth, laying the foundations for “communicative musicality” (Malloch & Trevarthen, 2009), which colors all human interactions throughout life. Humans are intensely musical animals, and music is part of what defines humanity.

Contemporary community music practice has developed over the last eight decades into a globally present and highly complex constellation responding to the concept of music as a primary resource for individual expression, communication and social well-being (Higgins, 2012b; Bartleet & Higgins 2018). Veblen (2007) writes of “CM typologies” and underlines the fact that “Community music is always shaped and defined by particular social settings” (Veblen, 2007, p.2). As an alternative to the restricting nature of a definition, Veblen proposes five domains in which general characteristics common to all CM practice can be discerned: “(a) the kinds of music and music making involved in a CM program; (b) the intentions of the leaders or participants in a program; (c) the characteristics of the participants; (d) the interactions among teaching-learning aims, knowledge, and strategies; and (e) interplays between informal and formal social-educational-cultural contexts” (Veblen, 2007, p.2). Some of the salient features arising from these domains are that: music-making is active, embraces all genres of music and styles of music-making, and takes place in an unlimited range of social, cultural, and educational locations; the educational context is that of open access and permanent education, prioritizing process over product and nurturing individual and collective well-being; the range of participants is unlimited, conditioned only by specific context; similarly, a wide range of terms denotes the leaders, reflecting their social and relational functions alongside their musical competence; action learning is characteristic and involves teachers and learners alike in a flexible and non-hierarchical sharing of responsibility; the complex and ambiguous term community defines not only what is inside, but also, by default, the surroundings which are outside, evoking the mosaic of resulting inter-relations between informal and formal structures, both implicit and explicit.

Huib Schippers (2018) offers a useful distinction between three main contexts for CM, the first of which, “Community music as an ‘organic’ phenomenon,” reminds us that from the beginning of human culture, and long before the term came into being, communities have been making their own meaningful music. “Community music as an intervention” denotes the social need “for active interventions to establish or restore practices” (Schippers, 2018, p.23) which arose during the last century and continues to be relevant in many contexts, and where the project under examination in this study is situated. Schipper's third context, “institutionalized community music,” reminds us that most formal music making originated from the need to create long-term structures for music making, and reflects the challenge of sustainability of music resources and services within every socio-cultural context.

One of the most important institutions nurturing CM is the Community Music Activity Commission (CMA), affiliated to the International Society for Music Education, which promotes music education and music making for all. CMA's vision states that: “Community music activities … provide opportunities to construct personal and communal expressions of artistic, social, political, and cultural concerns” and “contribute to the development of economic regeneration and can enhance the quality of life for communities” and “can complement, interface with, and extend formal music education.” ( https://www.isme.org/our-work/commissions-forum/community-music-activity-commission-cma)

Community music projects seek to develop inclusive and accessible music resources within the context of their local territories, in recognition of the valued contribution which every member of the community can offer. Higgin's interpretation of “community” as unconditional hospitality, discussed earlier in relation to communities living in perennial exclusion, identifies an essential component for inclusion and accessibility “that results in an experience of a greater sense of connectivity among and between participants, and between participants and the music” (Higgins, as cited in McPherson & Welch, 2012, p.109). The generation of richer social relations and sense of belonging can be understood within the concept of social capital, and community music activities are recognized as having inherent properties supporting and facilitating this, as Simon Procter has stated:

Finally, musician Christopher Small (1998) reminds us that the primary significance of all music lies in the field of action it affords for those who participate in it. His provocative statement “There is no such thing as music” (Small, 1998, p.2) is strategic in moving our attention away from the “product” and towards the “process”, as he specifies: “Music is not a thing at all, but an activity, something that people do” (Small, 1998, p.2). Accordingly, Small transforms the substantive “music” into the gerund “musicking,” where the sense of action is explicit, and invents the verb “to music.” Furthermore, the field of action afforded by musicking is identified clearly in terms of its social significance and potential: “ … for whatever else it might be, all musicking is ultimately a political act” (Small, 1998, p.213). Small invites us to consider musicking as “an aspect of the language of biological communication… part of the survival equipment of every human being” (Small, 1998, p.210). If music is understood as a primary human resource, generating protection for social well-being, then it will be invoked with justification where well-being is threatened and risk factors abound.

In the best of all worlds, social capital represents one of the unlimited, renewable, and therefore sustainable resources available to humanity, and its accumulation provides the fuel for the motor of positive social change supported by international cooperation. Unfortunately though, as envisaged by Bourdieu, the relentless power of globalization and neoliberalism has found ways of controlling and exploiting this precious resource. The mechanisms behind this appropriation are described by South African social facilitator Doug Reeler. “Development has become a global project” (Reeler, 2007, p.3), sweeping economic resources up into the capitalist spiral, and under the control of world corporate management, thus destroying the hitherto more local, and direct relationships between administrators, donors and third sector organizations. Civil society organizations are no longer seen as the legitimate promoters of change, but as “puppet agencies,” delivering programmes and “solutions” decided by a distant central corporate commission, within a global design which has no time or space for local niceties. The funding of development is transforming into “a marketplace governed by tender processes and business-talk” (Reeler, 2007, p.3), forcing operative organizations into the stressful position of having to deliver results, with aggressive requests for accountability. Reeler sees this as a further threat to the quality of work:

The principle challenge here is whose agenda should be followed. Monitoring and evaluation are indeed ugly and frightening words, when they are associated with the threat that projects “can be turned on and off, like taps” (Reeler, 2007, p.4). But there is a far simpler significance of these processes, which have been refined and mastered by humanity and indeed all forms of life since the beginning of evolution. Monitoring and evaluation have to do with understanding what is working and what is not, whether this be internally through means of neurobiological feedback, within the context of relationship to the environment, or within sophisticated social relations. The ensuing information serves to “adjust the pitch,” to “change direction” if necessary, in order to keep on course with respect to the aims (Cozolino, 2014). These mechanisms are therefore essential aspects of all “goal-set” processes.

The promotion of positive social change depends on keen attention to the specific social context and therefore cannot be aligned with an impersonal, global view. People are people, communities are communities; respect for the diversity and complexity of the human condition, in whichever place and time it dwells is the baseline for humane development.

M&R has learnt to develop many defense strategies as protection against these risks, in order to keep the project out of the marketplace and safely in the hands of the community it seeks to support. These include:

This article has adopted a number of different epistemological lenses to narrate and assess where M&R is after eight years of development. The frames of thinking, from ethnography and sociology to psychology and community music pedagogy, reflect the range of competences within the project team, all of which are essential in supporting and refining the team's capacity to carry out the steps in the Action Learning Cycle. Constant attention to improving skills in monitoring, observing, reflecting, and learning is a protection factor for the capacity to “adjust the pitch” appropriately in the re-planning of the project's actions.

Community music pedagogy underlines the importance of context, which is unique to each situation and activity. The ethnographic lens is essential here, in order to bridge the experiential and existential gap between the two cultures involved, particularly in consideration of the asymmetry between Europeans who enjoy full civil rights and Palestinian refugees in exile who are denied them. Acknowledgment, awareness and knowledge of this imbalance permits the building of a shared music community where exchange can occur. Frameworks of thinking from sociology contextualize the way the music-making evolves within social and cultural development, keeping view of the broader horizon of possible social change to which community music-making can contribute. Psychological competence informs the relational essence of the project's actions, and works hand in hand with community music pedagogy within the psycho-social music workshops and the clinical areas of music intervention.

Fortunately, M&R is just one of a number of projects developing music resources together with Assumoud in Lebanon. It is by no means the first; for almost twenty years now, the Norwegian Academy of Music has led a similar project in one of the Southern camps (Storsve et al., 2010), pioneering the discovery of music's benefits in this context: “A project that was initially implemented as a ‘cultural’ activity has thus become a health promotion strategy.” (Lenette & Sunderland, 2016). Another project runs in the Beirut camps under the direction of Al Kamandjati association.¹⁴ In recent years, students and teachers from these projects have come together with M&R participants to work and study together, in an exchange of best practices, which represents a significant protection factor for the future of music-making for PRs in Lebanon.

M&R gives form to human relationships based on solidarity and empathy, providing a musical framework for standing shoulder to shoulder with one of the world's most marginalized communities. While striving to increase the musical resources of this community, in order to improve the protection of the younger generations and, through them, to lay the way for a better future for the whole community, actions bring young people together to make music of many kinds in real time. These experiences represent positive bio-psycho-social building blocks, irrespective of what will happen in the future. The project continues to run because of the many people who believe in this quality of togetherness, despite the countless contingency problems of a marginalized community within a chronically unstable host country. Assumoud's Director General, Kassem Aina, is used to large scale global projects starting up and then ending suddenly; he is thankful for this small project which endures and which continues to accompany the fate of his largely “unheard and unseen” community (personal communication, July 2015).

As a protection factor against the uncertainty of the future, M&R aims to promote self-sufficiency in music resources for this community, in the hope that one day the project will no longer be a necessity, but that collaboration and exchange can continue with fully competent young Palestinian musical colleagues.

The four authors are all associates of Prima Materia, active both professionally and as volunteers; their participation in “Music and Resilience” is in this latter capacity. Deborah Parker (MA music therapy), coordinator of the music therapy action, is a cellist and music therapist with extensive artistic, clinical, teaching and research experience, who has published in the field of music therapy and presented at conferences internationally. Henry Brown (D.Phil Music), the project’s musical director, is a composer, pianist and conductor, who has developed a vast repertoire of arranged music for instrumental groups. Dario Gentili (MA Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology), is coordinator of the Community Music action, with research experience about the Palestinian question in the OPT and Lebanon. Alberto Balducci is a music therapist, coordinator of the Psycho-social Support action.