A street music festival: Informal learning perspectives

Abstract

Community music forges relationships and interactions between people and the location they live. Previous research into community music and learning demonstrate that these social interactions can in turn lead to informal life-long learning. This article reports on learning perspectives of festival participants and organizers, of the HONK! Oz Street Music Festival. The data revealed that many participants noted an increase in their understanding and ability to improvise, play tunes in genres outside of their previous experience and play their instruments more freely due to the nature of mobile street music. Specifically, they talked about how the pre-festival workshops, which were an innovative feature of these festivals, helped them to meet and interact with other musicians at the festival and helped them to improve their understanding of how to play street music.