Exploring the nature and significance of “participation” has ostensibly been at the heart of ethnomusicological study since at least the mid-twentieth century, yet the development of a “more refined vocabulary for distinguishing between competing models of participation” (Jenkins, Ito and boyd 2016, 181) has received little attention. This thesis is based on situated fieldwork at public participatory music events in the city of Sheffield – including open mics, jazz jam sessions, and instrumental folk sessions – and is supplemented with contextualising survey data from participants of comparable events across the UK. These events host “participatory performance” (Turino 2008), ostensibly being oriented towards openness and inclusivity, and thus represent ideal environments for developing a better understanding of the dynamics of participation.
Fieldwork findings are first considered in light of commonly referenced models of “community”. These are argued to function as useful points of departure for further theorisation, but as prone to supporting unnuanced readings of the relationships between participating individuals, which may be impersonal or antagonistic. Ensuing discussion of the relationship between public participatory music events and the Sheffield music “ecology” (Behr et al. 2016) highlights the economic and “opportunistic” (Frith 2022) motivations and cultural policy changes informing a shift away from the hosting of small scale presentational events in favour of participatory ones. The inclusivity of public participatory music events is connected to the establishment and maintenance of “cosmopolitan politesse” (Rapport 2012), and some of the encountered strategies for securing this - relating to structural organisation, demographic exclusion, and the regulation of objects - are reviewed.
The thesis concludes that enduring participation is dependent on co-participants perceiving one another’s engagement to be compatible with their own. Two original models – one relating to practical engagement with repertoire, and the other relating to subjective motivation and evaluation – are provided to illuminate potential sources of conflict.
