ABSTRACT
The research examines how the experience of working with prisoners might expand a musician’s understandings of their professional responsibility. It is an autoethnographic (Ellis & Bochner, 2000), arts-based (Leavy, 2017), examination of a musician-facilitator’s experience in a prison art project in Finland with 4 male prisoners and a group of artists. It consists of a literature review on community music and music making in prisons, a reflexive thematic analysis of the content of diary entries, poetry, and compositions, and final conclusions.
The research strengthens earlier findings that community art projects may expand the art facilitator’s understandings of professional responsibility (Solbrekke & Sugrue, 2011; Sutela et al, 2022) and direct the artist-facilitator to be more involved with their diverse local others (Bartleet & Higgins, 2018). Even though it can be argued whether community art is necessarily enhancing participants’ lives (Baker, 2021; Aakala, 2018), I explore how working with prisoners pushed my professional responsibility in a direction that is valuable for society which needs art professionals who can work in diverse environments (Sutela et al, 2022). Overall, this research contributes to wider discussions on community music and its role, impacts, ethical complexities, possibilities, and challenges in the prison environment.
COMPOSITIONS
The compositions presented here are one part of the content of the research. I have composed, recorded, edited, and mixed the tunes in the autumn 2022.
Through thematic analysis, I have found that these compositions have served as a means to relate to the prisoners I worked with on an emotional level and thus feel more empathetic towards them. What unites all three compositions chosen to this research, is that I have started creating them from a very intuitive angle having the aim in mind to relate with the prisoners’ emotions. To understand profoundly the relation of the compositions and the research, I suggest both reading the research paper and listening to the pieces.
