Gillian Howell On Music's Role In Peace Building And Bridging Cultural Divides

Dr. Gillian Howell is a musical connector and changemaker whose creative practice and applied research explores the contributions of community music to post-war transitions and recovery including peacebuilding, community dialogue, and music restoration.

She is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, and director of Tura’s Sound FX project in the Kimberley. Her work has taken her around Australia and the world, including to Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sri Lanka, Timor-Leste, Kosovo and North Macedonia. She has delivered research consultancies for Save the Children Middle East, Musicians Without Borders, and the Sri Lanka Norway Music Cooperation. Closer to home, Dr Howell’s long-term, community-led research and songwriting collaboration with First Nations language educators in the Kimberley has produced an album of original songs (with another on the way) and a soon-to-be-completed community songbook in three endangered Aboriginal languages.

Gillian discusses the benefits of participatory artistic expression in complicated cultural contexts and the positive impacts and key learnings gained from working with various communities to foster connection and engagement through music.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Sarah Ripper] - To start off, could you please share a bit about your background and what led you to where you are now?

[Gillian Howell] - My background is as a musician; I did an undergraduate degree in Music Performance on the clarinet. After that, even though that was a very straightforward, mainstream path to becoming an orchestral chamber musician in the Western classical music world, I quickly after that moved more into improvisation, devising music in the same way a rock band might if they were creating a song together. It's where everybody in the room has a say in the shape of the music you're going to play. I started using those techniques and working a lot in a community context, which became a big part of my creative practice early on after I finished my undergraduate training. This was partly because I moved to the UK and did some study there as a postgraduate, and that opened up a much broader musical world for me.

Now you’re working globally in community music and peace building. Can you tell us more about your work in those spaces?

The practice side came about because I was working with music to create a space in which good things can grow. Peace can grow, feelings of connection can grow, feelings of empathy between people can grow, and those voices which might have struggled to find a space to be heard in other contexts can be amplified. Metaphors, symbols, and gestures of music can offer a space in which all people become a part of your communicative toolkit. It was increasingly a space (particularly in the work I was doing with young people) to explore difficult topics. That was the starting point, and I didn’t think about it as peace building until recently, because I always thought about peace building as the rebuilding of social fabrics or the repair of social relationships after violent conflicts or war; times where there has been a schism down identity lines that's pulled people apart and forced them to live in segregated ways. I worked in the Balkans in Bosnia-Herzegovina for almost a year after the war had ended there, and that was the seminal experience in my life as a musician which made me think about the ways music making and connecting might offer healing capacity. This is not the same as a music or clinical therapy model, but as a well-being practice and way of caring for yourself and others. As a music facilitator, I became increasingly interested in what this meant for my creative practice and how I worked with groups to allow space for healing to emerge.

Can you tell us about your projects and key learnings you’ve gained from working across complex contexts?

When I went to Sri Lanka in 2016, I worked as part of a project called the Sri Lanka Norway Music Cooperation. Norway's government was investing money in the development or support for the restoration of Sri Lanka's music tradition. The Civil War in Sri Lanka had divided communities, and it was a complex war in terms of how it was ended. The ceasefire came about through a violent government process to fully quell and bring an end to the separatist movement of the Tamil Tigers of Elam. Many lives were lost, many people were displaced, huge traumas were suffered, and the island was essentially left divided.

This music cooperation had both a music development goal, but also a reconciliation goal. They saw folk music as a space of common ground, where there were shared traditions, or if not exactly shared, a lot of common or similar traditions which had common roots.

We know armed conflict and war has a devastating impact on music traditions, because knowledge holders may lose their lives. Also, they may lose instruments or practices which are closely connected to place. When those people lose access to those places, or even access to the night which might be the traditional time when performances take place, it means it's difficult for those practices to be restored without support in the years after the war. Norway was stepping into that space, but it was also interested in if this was a space in which people's lives and fabrics of connection could be restored. I came in as a researcher to look at what reconciliation looked like in this space. A key learning I got from the Sri Lanka project was about the limitations of music; music never works with this independent magic ingredient, where you bring music in and that's it, you’ve found the answer. I could see that in this music cooperation, where there were a lot of different projects happening (festivals and small workshops between people in villages), cultural learning was taking place, but also there was an opportunity to build friendships and independent relationships. It wasn't necessarily a matter of just bringing two young drumming groups together, one Tamil and one Sinhalese, to create a music collaboration together:

There needed to be opportunity for them to not just make music together, but also to get to know each other and build the trustful relationships that come about when you share a meal or have an unstructured conversation with each other.

Just making music together wasn't going to deliver a real change in relationships, which seems obvious to say, but I think for quite a long time early research in music and peace building was built around an idealistic idea of what music could produce. There was this idea it would be a universal language which in and of itself would be enough to solve problems. The Sri Lanka project showed there are nuances which need to be applied; understanding of context and remembering these are human beings is required. We use music as one expressive part of our toolkits, but it can't do all the heavy lifting on its own. It’s useful that people also get to sit down and have a meal together, it's useful if they are in the same accommodation and have shared spaces to hang out in. When those things are there, we start to see changes in people's relationships with each other, and when they're not there, we don't see it as much. It might feel like a meaningful experience at the time, but it's one that people later when they talk about it realise they didn't get anyone else's phone number! They're were not actually connecting on social media (in 2016, that was the case). That idea of the social must continue to sit in the social space is important.

Could you share some of the projects you've been working on with First Nations communities in Australia?

The work I've been doing has predominantly been in partnership with Tura, a new music organisation based in Western Australia. I've been working with them on a project called Sound FX in the Fitzroy Crossing in Kimberley. Our project is all about the ways music can support different forms of cultural wellbeing, healing, and connection, particularly through working with language. I work with early childhood educators’, Aboriginal women who have committed to working with the youngest children to give them a great start in life. They're also wanting as part of that program for it to be as culturally rich as possible: grounded in local knowledge, languages, and place. My role has been to support them to create new songs in their heritage language(s). Many of the educators are still learning to speak their heritage languages because the legacies of colonial violence meant traditional transmission methods were disrupted. We are talking about until the day after the anniversary of the apology by the Rudd Government to the Stolen Generations. The Stolen Generations and those practices of removing children have had a terrible, devastating impact on language strength and people’s ability to be able to continue traditional ways of passing on their language, such as through grandparent or carer child relationships.

My role is just to be a facilitator of that language transmission process, the song topics and languages are driven by the community. It's owned by them and it’s a process they have initiated as they perceive it as something important and useful for them in their work.

We create songs about goannas, hunting, fishing, how to care for country and how to live sustainably; all these important cultural lessons they want young children to be learning and singing about. We’re also using different forms of storytelling and play to embed this knowledge in their daily lives. For every day they come to kindergarten or play in a group, they'll be engaging with this material. It's a linguistically complex space, there are three heritage languages being spoken and used within the Early Childhood Centres. There's also Creole (which is probably the main language in most people's homes) and Dated Australian English, which is what I and some of the other non-Indigenous educators are all speaking. We are trying to create a supportive environment for these young children to hear their heritage languages. We also want adult educators to reclaim their languages and build their experience of being creative through the support of their elders. It's a beautiful project, I'm always excited to talk about it and we've got all sorts of upcoming songs and albums which will be available for everyone in the communities and everywhere to download. We're also creating a songbook with artwork from children and adults in the community; all the song lyrics and notations are set up so people can put the song book and their album together and learn to sing these fabulous songs.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across creating a positive social change?

I'm inspired by the work of Musicians Without Borders. They do great work in making music happen in so many different settings. They work in beautiful partnership as allies and have a clear model based on partnership, collaboration, allyship and solidarity. They are very much led by community desires, so they don't initiate projects but instead communities approach them. One project of theirs I've been involved with as a researcher is a project called Music Connects, which is happening in the Balkans. It involves three different rock schools, and they have partnerships also happening in Belgium, Germany, and The Netherlands. These rock schools bring young people together across these lines of linguistic division that been entrenched since the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. They make rock bands, write and record songs for concerts. All of that is super normal, except it's not normal for young people to mix or interact with each other so much in some of the settings these projects are taking place in. I love this project because it's completely uncompromising with its artistic intention. This is about rock music, and that's what young people are excited by. At the same time, its making change, and those changes are always going to be somewhat contingent on what's happening politically. If things get wound back, and there's an outbreak of hostilities (maybe not even armed violence but just a political impasse), cooperation will be vastly reduced and this can affect people's freedom of movement and ability to travel from one side of a divided city to the other.

Music is not doing something super magical, but what it is doing is creating spaces in which young people get to come together and just be themselves, not just an ethnicity or one aspect of their experiences. They can be a whole person, their full identity.

That's something music offers; we bring our whole selves into a musical space. We don't just bring our ethnic identity, language, status as a refugee or our status as a First Nations person, we bring all of ourselves. That’s rich because I think in this life we live, sometimes a lot of spaces get narrowed. Living in a narrowed existence constrains you in so many ways in terms of energy and spirit. For you to be someone who can bring about change in your community, all these constraints are not good for the world.

What books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?

There are some fantastic podcasts out there. I love to often go back and listen to podcasts which were produced by a media platform in the US called the Choral Commons. They were active during COVID lockdown times, but they continue to work. I've often gone back to their back catalogue to check out some of their earlier interviews. Second and third time around, I am still amazed by how they interview inspiring practitioners from around the world. I listen to it through Apple Podcasts, but it's on all the platforms. There's also a podcast published by the European Union based organisation ART27. Their name is from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 27, which states we all have the right to participate freely in cultural life. They have a podcast called ReSounding, where they interview artists, activists, and advocates who are looking at the role the arts can play in social change. Their work's fantastic, and another great podcast is Music and Peace Building, which is being produced by a researcher in the United States, Dr. Kevin Shorner-Johnson. He interviews a lot of musicians, activists, and advocates as well. There's a book called A Restless Art by François Matarasso and it's free and available for download. It's a great book for anyone who's a practitioner in this space who is looking for the words to describe what they do. François Matarasso has been writing on this topic for a long time, and I think his writing is beautifully thoughtful, reflective, critical, humble, and vivid. He has witnessed and been part of so many different diverse projects, so he produces a lot of great resources and many of them are available for free. The book A Restless Art I recommend in terms of the experience of the artists themselves and what it is to create work in this way. I love the writing of peace building scholar John Paul Lederach. He's someone who has made the link between art and peacemaking being about creating something that doesn't yet exist; the work of imagining and then bringing something into existence. There's a book he wrote with his daughter, who's also a musician, Angela Lederach, and that book is called When Blood and Bones Cry Out. That book is about social healing, and he writes powerfully about metaphors as well. That's a book I have returned to many times. Another book of his is called The Moral Imagination, which is about the art and soul of peace building. There's much to learn from his writing as well for us artists who are interested in what it means to be working with our art form to bring about and create spaces in which peace can grow. We must think about all these different levels from the individual right through to the societal level. Please watch this space, because I'm working on a book as well which is still some way off, but I do quite a bit of writing on this topic of music and peace building. There's an article I wrote which came out a couple of years ago called Peace’s of Music. One of the things I'm trying to do is just create more vocabulary with which we might talk about the work musicians’ as peace builders do.

This is right from protest music and disruptive work to inner peace and bringing about change within us; that deep, difficult struggle we go through to process difficult experiences but to also be the change we want to see.

That was quite a list, but it's a lot of reading. There's so much out there, and I wish I had more time to read. Even though I have more time than most because I'm a full-time researcher, it's a never-ending list. There are people doing great work and documenting it in different ways, so there is lots to learn and absorb.