Soon, Guo Wei (2026) Exploring Spirituality, Connection, and Belonging through Minimalist Music Techniques in a Community Context. Masters thesis, York St John University.
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Abstract
This study explores how minimalist music techniques might facilitate personal expressions of spirituality and foster connection and belonging within a community music context. Spirituality, in this study, is understood as an individual’s musical search for meaningful values and self-expression, encompassing reflective engagement involving a conscious awareness of what spirituality may signify, alongside an expressive response that may be embodied, perceptual, or intuitive.
A qualitative case study was undertaken involving six weekly community music workshops with a group of eight participants. The workshops centred on minimalist music techniques as a creative framework, introduced alongside three guiding musical structures — cells, soundscape-making, and tintinnabulation — which drew on ideas inherent in compositional structures but were adapted for improvisation, within a spiritually exploratory music-making process. These techniques included repetition, gradual development, limited materials, and working within adaptive constraints. As facilitator-researcher, I engaged in ongoing reflexive practice, with session planning and delivery shaped by my positionality and responsive facilitation. Data were generated through session plans, facilitator reflections, and focus group discussions.
Findings indicate that minimalist music techniques appeared to create conditions that support participants’ engagement with spirituality as a personal, reflective, embodied, and emergent experience within music-making. Repetition enabled musical continuity and the exploration of personal spirituality. Gradual development supported subtle variation and expanded expressive engagement. Limited materials encouraged focused attention on subtle musical details and manageable experimentation. Working within adaptive constraints (of how musical materials were manipulated or developed) offered a safe framework for creative exploration, expressive engagement, group cohesion, and co-creation, through which connection and a sense of belonging were evident.
Overall, the study suggests that minimalist music techniques can offer a supportive and participatory framework that facilitates personal expressions of spirituality. These findings highlight the potential of minimalist music techniques as facilitative approaches to inform future community music research and practice.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Masters) |
|---|---|
| Status: | Published |
| Subjects: | M Music and Books on Music > M Music |
| School/Department: | School of the Arts |
| URI: | https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/15391 |
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