Dr. Lee Higgins is thinking community music

December 2024

A leading scholar in the field of Community Music, Dr. Lee Higgins has long had an impact in this space through his teaching, practice, leadership, and scholarly contributions. With his highly-cited 2012 book, Community Music: In Theory and Practice, he helped begin to contextualize, define, theorize and challenge community music in the broader disciplinary landscape. He serves as Director of the International Centre for Community Music (ICCM) based at York University in York, UK, which focuses on nurturing research, teaching, practice and pedagogy through global collaboration with international partners, including with Wilfrid Laurier University’s Faculty of Music. Lee has always been highly engaged in the broader community of practice, scholarship, and mentoring, including serving as President of the International Society for Music Education from 2016-2018; senior editor of the leading Community Music academic journal (IJCM) from 2017-2021; founder of Transform: New Voices in Community Music online journal and symposium for emerging scholars, and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Community Musicalong with LCMC Fellow, Brydie-Leigh Bartleet (2018), to name a few.

He continues to be involved with several international projects through the ICCM. The Singing for Health Research Network (2023-2025), which focuses on singing for health and well-being, involves a number of key projects. Currently, in partnership with renowned scholar Dr. Stephen Clift, a set of seminars and webinars are being developed that examine various projects across the Network, including one with the Bassett Institute of Global Affairs and the Faculty of Music at Northwestern University in Chicago, IL (US) exploring stress post-COVID in young people. Lee also highlights the connection with ‘social prescribing’—a process that enables medical practitioners and primary care providers the ability to prescribe a range of non-clinical services to support their health and well-being, something that has been in place in the UK for some time but is now finding interest abroad as well. Another ICCM project taking shape that he is closely involved with is MetamorPhonics, which sees collaboration with the Iceland University of the Arts in Reykjavík and will explore the growth of socially engaged and participatory music making around the world.

As a Fellow of the LCMC, his relationship with Laurier’s Community Music programming has been a long-standing and invaluable one, including serving as an advisor in the initial development and ongoing growth of the CM Masters and PhD programs, as well as a thoughtful and provocative guest presenter to graduate students in those programs. Lee’s latest book, Thinking Community Music(November 2024), uses eight separate ‘think pieces’ to offer fresh perspectives and theoretical contexts, contemporary challenges and emergences, and presents provocations on what we might consider moving into the future. The book has already garnered much interest and prompted wonderful discussions. He shares “This book has been written over a twelve-year period as a response to issues and themes commonly arising through the wider community music discourses as I have experienced them. Each ‘think piece’ has been conceived as a self-contained jumping-off point, a moment of reflection, a springboard for discussion, and an opportunity to extend the conversation into new territory.” Thinking Community Music is available through Oxford University Press and several other outlets.