CUMIN: Contemporary Urban Music for Inclusion Network

Contemporary urban music (hip-hop, grime, contemporary R&B and more) is arguably the most listened to music in the world (The Independent), with an estimated global audience of 1.5 billion for dance/electronic music (IMS report 2019). Nonetheless, hip-hop is 'frequently excluded' from even popular music education (Journal of Popular Music Education, 2(1/2)), let alone the mainstream music curriculum.

In the UK, the current National Curriculum for Music places emphasis on 'music from great composers and musicians'. Some rock and pop has found a place in schools over recent decades, but contemporary urban music (a far more ethnically/ racially diverse music, typically) remains marginalised, not only in schools but also in mainstream culture.

Given the wealth of compelling research evidence on the value of the arts and music in education and for our lives (APPGAHW 2017: Bruin and Burnard 2018; Biesta; Dewey; Vygotsky; Routledge Reader on the Sociology of Music 2015), we need to ask whether music and arts which are more relevant to contemporary urban communities might be more engaging to those communities. The contemporary urban environment is ethnically and racially diverse, yet schools and mainstream culture/society leave the most popular contemporary urban music at the margins: the choice of Grime artist Stormzy for Glastonbury headliner in 2019, for example, met outcry from some within the mainstream popular music establishment.

Questions of cultural identity (Hall 1996) and around race and music (Gilroy 1993) remain of crucial importance to lived experience. Researchers have shown that a sense of cultural inclusion can impact on attendance, behaviour and attitude in schools and help to make individuals of all ages and ethnicities feel that they belong (Count Me In 2002; NESF 2007; Voices of Culture 2018).

Can projects using contemporary urban music impact significantly on educational/social inclusion? If so, how can we best measure this impact?

Individuals and small organisations (e.g. Grime Pays, Noise Solution, In Place of War and others listed in the Case for Support), who will be key project partners in the planned Contemporary Urban Music for Inclusion Network (CUMIN), have already begun to demonstrate that their use of contemporary urban music enables impact. This music has even been used for US cultural diplomacy (Katz 2019).

However, a funded network would allow knowledge exchange between such practitioners, based on critical examination of practice and world-leading guidance on measurement of impact.

CUMIN will place knowledge exchange and rigorous measurement of impact at the heart of its innovative workshops and its large-scale conference at the end of the funded period. Each workshop will feature one or more practitioner from the contemporary urban music field, and will bring together the voices of music producers, consumers and social project organisers, as well as expert researchers.

Regarding the measurement of impact, Prof Anna Vignoles and Dr Sonia Ilie (both Cambridge University) will play a key role in Workshop 1 by showing what existing measures are available and how best they could be applied/adapted by CUMIN-affiliated organisations.

To date, the role contemporary urban music plays in the recognised successes of the projects which are affiliated to CUMIN has been under-theorised: they have demonstrated impact in different ways (for example, improvements to health and well-being measured through WEMWBS), but there is limited knowledge exchange amongst practitioners in the field as to why they have this impact. There is a great need, therefore, for practitioners to meet, publicly share their experiences and co-create new knowledges around the value of contemporary urban music for social engagement: how is it that these projects achieve such positive levels of social engagement?