Something old, something new, something borrowed, woven through: Hospitality as a sounding reality

Drawing on Lee Higgins’s concept of hospitality in community music, this article explores whether hospitality can be understood not only as a pedagogical or ethical stance but also as a sonic reality embodied within musical processes and musical outcomes. Grounded in French-speaking didactic theory, the study reconfigures the traditional didactic triangle to foreground the dynamic relationship between music, facilitator and participants. Using a qualitative case study of a large-scale community orchestra project, the research analyses five co-created musical pieces, combining close analysis of their musical structures, materials and formal development with an examination of the collaborative processes that shaped them. The study draws on multimodal data, including observations, interviews, recordings and post-process transcriptions, analyzed through key concepts from comparative didactics, particularly mesogenesis, topogenesis and chronogenesis. Findings show how structured yet flexible musical starting points, carefully designed didactic situations and responsive didactic contracts enable participants to engage creatively in co-composition. Hospitality emerges not only in interaction but also within the music itself, audible in the acceptance, transformation and layering of participants’ ideas over time. The study introduces the notion of the facilitator as a ‘composer in dialogue’ and argues for the centrality of musical analysis in community music research, with implications for facilitator training and hospitable co-compositional practice.