Connecting refugees through music: Charity Organisations and the Instrumentalisation of Culture

Abstract

In the context of the so-called refugee crisis, an increasing number of non-profit organisations established music projects for and with refugees, asylum seekers, and status holders. While research in the music of refugee communities in host societies has been growing, the charity organisations that work with music projects and refugees themselves have not received much scholarly attention. In this thesis, I provide an initial indexation of charity organisations based in the Netherlands and their main features. This overview of the organisational landscape is the backdrop for a discussion of two case studies, namely Catching Cultures Orchestra (CCO) and Orchestre Partout (OP). I argue that the aims of these organisations to connect refugees and “hosts” together rests on ideas about the presumed quality of music as a universal language and its ability to connect. By bringing the organisational reasoning about their music projects in dialogue with the context of Dutch cultural policy, I show how these efforts can be understood through the “instrumentalisation of culture,” namely the use of music and art as a resource to achieve goals such as social cohesion and even “integration.” First, I compare almost a dozen charity organisations in the Netherlands through the following features: how they are funded, where they are located and what their reach is, what their target groups are, which kind of music they chose to use, and their labelling practices. This overview forms the basis for a further analysis of the influence that place, locality, and spatial politics of asylum seeker centres and local neighbourhoods have in the efforts of CCO and OP to construct communities within and around their ensembles. The idea that music connects people with different musical and cultural backgrounds is taken up next in light of the instrumentalisation of culture. Within the climate of ideas about intercultural dialogue, cultural participation and diversity, I show that governments and the organisations alike draw on ideas that music has an intrinsic value while simultaneously using it as a tool for economic and social development. The ability of music to aid “social integration” rests on the idea that refugees and hosts can transcend cultural differences and connect through music.