# Carefree noise *Written 6 August 2026.* *For context, please read [[Heritage language is not a detour]] and [[Re-becoming musical]] first.* The Polish parents participating in [[Family musicking|family musicking]] sessions in Reykjavík, interviewed as part of my doctoral research, often highlighted the fact that those sessions were in some ways unique, different from all other activities on offer to families with toddlers in Reykjavík. When asked about what made them special, one of the interviewed mothers answered with just two words which stayed with me for a long time. Her husband was answering at length, mentioning the instruments, the joy of making music together with the child, the songs... She cut across him saying: > [!quote] Two words > Bezkarny hałas. I translated it as carefree noise. More literally, in Polish, it means *noise that goes unpunished*.[^1] I have been thinking about that phrase for quite a long time now. Of all the things she might have said, that the sessions were enjoyable, or musically engaging, or good for her son's development, what she reached for was that *spontaneity there carried no penalty*. Which tells you that she knew places where it did. This note takes one thread out of a paper presentation I gave at the ISME World Conference in Montreal on 28 July 2026. The paper discussing the findings from the study was co-authored with Professor Helga Rut Gudmundsdottir and is currently in review. I will leave the findings to the article and follow the quoted phrase. ## Front stage – backstage Immigrant parents often arrive in their new home country without extended family. No grandmother down the road, nobody to call at seven in the evening for support or advice. Reykjavík is not exactly short of things to do with a small child (even though most activities are tailored towards a slightly older age group than toddlers). An example of what is available would be swimming classes for families with babies, fairly popular amongst parents. Several amongst the interviewed Polish families had tried some of these activities, and had overall a positive experience. However, they reported that people came and went without much passing between them, and that invitations into other people's homes did not follow.[^1] They felt welcome, but *struggled to connect in a meaningful way*. Importantly, this is not a finding about language. Some of the parents who described it were fluent in Icelandic and used it as their main language at work. Still, their impression was: they were received politely. They were not received in. *Goffman's (1959) front stage – backstage distinction* fits the situation closely.[^2] The [[Front stage and backstage|front stage]] is the setting where you are observed, where you *manage* how you appear, where you are playing a part. One mother, talking about a workplace whose colleagues she liked, said she still felt somewhat "out of tune".[^1] Not excluded. *Out of tune*. And the front stage reached further than one might expect. A playground is built for children to run about in and adults to sit and talk. It is an informal space by design. For another respondent, it had also become a stage, on which using her own language with her own child was a *performance under review* (she often chose to switch to English instead).[^1] So the *shortage* was not of social events. It was *of a backstage*, somewhere the performance stops. Migration takes a person's backstage away, and the host country does not issue replacements easily. ## The puzzle... So what was different about the sessions, really? One might say, a family musicking session is another scheduled event, held in a public building, at a fixed hour, among strangers, for forty-five minutes a week... By those measures it should have done what the other events did: people arrive, people leave... It did not, and the question *why* is an important one. In other words: what was in the sessions that made them different? Whether we can answer it or not dictates whether the effect can be *designed for* or only hoped for. ## Togetherness Kulset and Halle (2020) named the experience of social connection and pleasure that arises from making music together [[Musical togetherness|musical togetherness]].[^3] Bishop (2024) takes it further: togetherness in musical interaction is not a by-product of the music but something the participants actively co-create, through sound, through movement, through watching one another.[^4] That sits close to Small's (1998) insistence that music is a verb, and that the meaning of [[Musicking|musicking]] lies in the relationships established between the people doing it.[^5] Ansdell (2016) roots it in something plainer: the need to be included, to take part, to belong.[^6] Parents in the study kept describing it without having a name for it, as a sense of safety, of ease, of being among other people rather than beside them. ## From safer space to culture This effect is related to what Deller (2019) describes as [[Safer-space culture|safer-space culture]].[^7] The qualifier carries the argument. A safe space implies a guarantee no room can give, since no environment is equally safe for everyone in it, and safety is always partial and contingent on who a person is. A safer space is more honest about that. The distinction is not new, and it did not begin in education: Deller traces the practice through feminist, queer and other radical organising, where the working premise has long been that the world is not truly safe for anyone, but is more dangerous for some than others (2019, p. 223). Deller's further move, from a safer space to a safer-space culture, matters a lot in the context of community-oriented projects: a set of rules is fixed, and stops being relevant the moment the group or the circumstances change, whereas *a culture can adapt* to them. The consequence is that no particular set of rules is the ultimate point. What is at stake, in Deller's account, is the extent to which a group is genuinely inclusive, and that turns on how power operates inside it. "Creating a supportive culture is far more important than which techniques are utilised in that creation," Deller writes. "What is central is that everyone wants to feel that they matter; that they can be heard; that they can have some power to impact the world around them" (2019, p. 236). Rules might be a necessary point of departure, but the shared experience is what allows the relationships to grow and become a culture. In the case of the family musicking sessions, the musical aspect was essential in providing the experience. *Music before coffee*. Singing before chat. The framework of the session was precisely constructed and deliberate. The circle, the fixed sequence, the repetition week to week, everybody doing the thing rather than watching it: those were design decisions, and [[Re-becoming musical]] sets them out. The use of heritage language and repertoire also played an important role (see: [[Heritage language is not a detour]]). However, it was how all these things came together that made the sessions a unique experience for the participants. ## What follows... The empowering effect of family musicking is not a happy side-effect of the music. It is produced, by structure, by shared action, by permission, and every one of those is a *design decision*. Which means it can be designed for. **It also means it can be designed away, by a programme that is musically excellent and pays no attention to the relational side of what it is doing.** As educators, we need to keep this in mind. "Carefree noise" was in fact not a description of the music made in the sessions; it was an indication of what the sessions had removed: the judgement, the audience, the effort. [^1]: From interviews conducted as part of my doctoral research with Polish-speaking families in Iceland, reported in Switala, A., & Gudmundsdottir, H. R. *Family musicking with immigrant parents and toddlers: Experiences of Polish parents in Iceland*. Manuscript under review. Translations from Polish are mine. Participants' names and their children's names are withheld here. [^2]: Goffman, E. (1959). *The presentation of self in everyday life*. Doubleday Anchor. [^3]: Bilalovic Kulset, N., & Halle, K. (2020). Togetherness! Adult companionship: The key to music making in kindergarten? *Music Education Research, 22*(3), 304–314. https://doi.org/10.1080/14613808.2020.1765155 [^4]: Bishop, L. (2024). Togetherness in musical interaction. *Routledge Open Research, 3*, 16. https://doi.org/10.12688/routledgeopenres.18202.1 [^5]: Small, C. (1998). *Musicking: The meanings of performing and listening*. Wesleyan University Press. [^6]: Ansdell, G. (2016). *How music helps in music therapy and everyday life*. Routledge. [^7]: Deller, R. A. (2019). Safer spaces. In R. Kinna & U. Gordon (Eds.), *Routledge handbook of radical politics* (pp. 222–239). Routledge.