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The discourse community that I have chosen to focus on for the rest of the semester would be the music education and performance community. While most discourse communities are small and possibly meet in a single location, this community stretches across the whole world and involves thousands of people who are constantly collaborating and sharing to achieve their goal of either teaching or performing. Even while being so large and spread out I believe this to be a discourse community due to the common set of goals as well as a large amount of communication that uses specific phrases and words that only people in the community would be able to understand.

Some of the documents that could be associated with this community would be the thousands of musical pieces created by modern composers as well as academic papers written by music professors or analysts who study pieces of music and use that information to teach others. Here would be an example of a musical analysis on one of my personal favorite modern composers David Maslanka. https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=13097&context=etd

While there is not a specific format or communication between music educators, there is a large amount of networking and personal connections. This stems from the fact that the people who are pursuing music as a career have known each other for a long time. This would be because of the large amount of collaboration that happens on top of performers playing gigs with hundreds of different musicians and getting to know them for future gigs/ opportunities.

What I would like to better understand in this community is the road to becoming widely known and influential throughout the community. There are hundreds of different top level performers and professors out in the music community and they all have had different roads to get where they are in their career. One example of this would be trumpet player/ music educator Wynton Marsalis, he grew up around the jazz community in New Orleans and was quickly regarded as one of the top performers in the country for his age. This led him to the Julliard school of music where he would later go on to be a prolific performer as well as the head of the jazz department at Julliard.

https://www.juilliard.edu/music/faculty/marsalis-wynton