Community Music Today highlights community music workers who constantly improvise and reinvent to lead through music and other expressive media. It answers the perennial question "What is community music?" through a broad, international palette of contextual shades, hues, tones, and colors. With over fifty musician/educators participating, the book explores community music in global contexts, interconnections, and marginalized communities, as well as artistry and social justice in performing ensembles. This book is both a response to and a testimony of what music is and can do, music's place in people's lives, and the many ways it unites and marks communities. As documented in case studies, community music workers may be musicians, teachers, researchers, and activists, responding to the particular situations in which they find themselves. Their voices are the threads of the multifaceted tapestry of musical practices at play in formal, informal, nonformal, incidental, and accidental happenings of community music.

Community Music Today highlights community music workers who constantly improvise and reinvent to lead through music and other expressive media. It answers the perennial question "What is community music?" through a broad, international palette of contextual shades, hues, tones, and colors. With over fifty musician/educators participating, the book explores community music in global contexts, interconnections, and marginalized communities, as well as artistry and social justice in performing ensembles. This book is both a response to and a testimony of what music is and can do, music's place in people's lives, and the many ways it unites and marks communities. As documented in case studies, community music workers may be musicians, teachers, researchers, and activists, responding to the particular situations in which they find themselves. Their voices are the threads of the multifaceted tapestry of musical practices at play in formal, informal, nonformal, incidental, and accidental happenings of community music.

In 1712, English naturalist Mark Catesby (1683-1749) crossed the Atlantic to Virginia. After a seven-year stay, he returned to England with paintings of plants and animals he had studied. They sufficiently impressed other naturalists that in 1722 several Fellows of the Royal Society sponsored his return to North America. There Catesby cataloged the flora and fauna of the Carolinas and the Bahamas by gathering seeds and specimens, compiling notes, and making watercolor sketches. Going home to England after five years, he began the twenty-year task of writing, etching, and publishing his monumental The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands. Mark Catesby was a man of exceptional courage and determination combined with insatiable curiosity and multiple talents. Nevertheless no portrait of him is known. The international contributors to this volume review Catesby's biography alongside the historical and scientific significance of his work. Ultimately, this lavishly illustrated volume advances knowledge of Catesby's explorations, collections, artwork, and publications in order to reassess his importance within the pantheon of early naturalists.