ABSTRACT
The HONK!TX Festival of Community Street Bands is a grassroots, non-commercial, community-oriented music festival featuring energetic brass band performances meant to encourage audience participation and community engagement. This chapter describes the efforts behind and experiences of hosting hundreds of visiting street band musicians in the communities of various HONK! festivals. It shows how the ethics of hospitality at work in HONK! festivals are grounded in community activism operating in an uncommodified network of social trust in a world that increasingly commodifies and privatizes such experiences. In the HONK! network, openness to the unknown, rather than the fear of it, is a core assumption when engaging local residents to solicit their participation in hospitality. The act of hosting – whether at the event level or as a host – is a form of participation that is essentially a gift, and one that helps the network of HONK! festivals and musicians continue to thrive.
