Keynote and Lectures in China, Autumn 2025

 

I look forward to offering lectures through the Graduate School of Education at the Education University of Hong Kong, as part of the Global Competence Partnership project. This time my lectures will be on quite practical topics that nevertheless have broad relevance across academic fields, including how to publish in scholarly journals and effectively participate in academic conferences.

It is also a great pleasure to be offering a keynote speech for China’s 6th National Symposium on Oral History of Music and the Annual Meeting of the National Society for Oral History of Music in Nanning city, in the beautiful Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of China (2025). 

Here is a link for more information on this event (in Chinese):

https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/tcFhRtKSuwv7kJr51uOqZA

Image source (Guangxi): 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Yanshan,_Guilin,_Guangxi,_China_-_panoramio_%281%29.jpg

 

Nordic Intensive Master Course

It is exciting to now be at the Nordic Network for Music Education (NNME) intensive course, which includes participants from Master programs across all eight of the Nordic and Baltic (NB8) countries. I have been managing the NNME for several years, which receives government funding from Nordplus, and our course this year is hosted by Marja-Leena Juntunen in Finland at the beautiful Kallio-Kuninkala villa.

We eagerly look forward to seeing presentations of the Master thesis projects developed by each of the students and to sharing new ideas in the field of music education. These courses are a profoundly meaningful learning opportunity for the students, as they share with peers from across the region and develop networks that benefit them across their careers.

Click HERE to see the book produced a few years ago by this network.

Shown above is a public-domain image of Ainola, the former home of composer Jean Sibelius, which is walking distance from the course site.

Historical Ethnomusicology Section 2025

It is a pleasure to now have an appointment as Chair of the SEM Historical Ethnomusicology Section, a division of the Society for Ethnomusicology. I will continue to work closely with Otto Stuparitz (University of Melbourne), who is now Past Chair, preceded by Kristina Nielson. 

We already have an excellent nomination for our next Secretary/Chair-Elect and will vote on this appointment in the coming months. We will also meet as the leadership team to set goals and detailed plans for the coming years, and I look forward to seeing what we can accomplish.

 

The mission of the Historical Ethnomusicology Section is to support historical studies in the field of ethnomusicology, primarily through the sponsorship and promotion of discussions, events, panels, and publications related to historical approaches to the study of music.

 

The Historical Ethnomusicology Section had several activities recently at the 70^th Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, in Atlanta, 2025:  The Section organized and sponsored various historical paper sessions and offered travel awards as well as its annual Student Paper Prize. Additionally, more than 20 participants came to our “Meet and Greet” and 15 came to our Business Meeting where we offered an appreciation for preeminent fiddling researcher Chris Goertzen, discussed recent projects, and planned future activities.

 

The 2025 paper prize selection committee awarded the Student Paper Prize in Historical Ethnomusicology to Melissa Camp for her paper titled Robert Lachmann’s Listening Ear at the 1932 Cairo Congress and Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv” and Honorable Mention was awarded to Sora Woo for her paper “‘The Ballad of Chol Soo Lee’ as an Asian American Anthem.”

 

The Society for Ethnomusicology has around 1,700 members, nearly 10% of which are counted in the Historical Ethnomusicology Section (although not all actively pay dues).

 

Below are some numbers from the latest Historical Ethnomusicology Section Annual Report submitted shortly before the 2025 meeting:

 

Number of Members

Member Count: 160

Listserv subscribers: 191

 

Facebook Group

URL: https://www.facebook.com/groups/324391271000182/

Number on Facebook: 2000 members

 

Images (my photos): downtown Atlanta and Saint Louis Cathedral of New Orleans.

 

Music Education in the CABUTE Project

After three intensive seminars across the past two weeks, the Music Education strand of the CABUTE project is going very well! Our Master students have robust research proposals for their theses and our PhD student has completed his study with even more ideas for how to expand on his findings.

We eagerly look forward to seeing what these fine students will achieve in the long term to strengthen teacher education and music heritage in Uganda.

Deep Soundings on Bloomsbury

Paperback editions of the books in our series Deep Soundings: Critical Studies in Historical Ethnomusicology are now available through Bloomsbury press.

The books have received outstanding reviews and are now in many libraries.

Music and Politics Keynote

I look forward to giving a keynote speech soon for the 2025 Music Research Today (Musikforskning idag) conference of the Swedish Society for Music Research, hosted by the School of Music, Theatre and Art at Örebro University. This year’s conference theme is Music and Politics.  

 

Click HERE for a description of the keynote speeches. Below is the title and summary for my presentation.

 

Music Diplomacy Amid Populism and Protectionism

 

If one were to summarize the main political tendencies impacting the world today, far-right populism (with the rise of authoritarian leaders) combined with protectionism (featuring preoccupation with borders, migration and tariffs) would seem to be among the most prominent. There is also a noticeable shift from multilateralism toward transactionalism, which appears to be eroding the post-WWII world order through the ascent of BRICS and related alliances. How does music interact with these tendencies, and what hope might music provide in efforts to nudge humanity toward a more just and sustainable world in these uncertain times?  Music can play a highly effective role in cultural diplomacy that aims to bridge between ideological divides exacerbated by social media siloization. One relevant case comes from Samarkand, a great city on the historic Silk Road: The Sharq Taronalari Festival, which is one of the world's largest international folk music events, funded by UNESCO and the government of Uzbekistan. I participated in this spectacular festival on three different years, experiencing remarkable performances of traditional music from all inhabited continents. There are also entire institutions devoted to music diplomacy, a prominent example of which is the Barenboim-Said Academy, a conservatoire in Berlin founded with the purpose of inspiring cooperation between Arabs and Jews through classical music. In the field of Chinese music, a notable case was Copenhagen’s Music Confucius Institute, which I researched by interviewing expert pedagogues who had taught traditional Chinese musical instruments to European students. In the opposite direction, the Intensive World Music Concerts—developed across recent years among Chinese traditional instrument majors in the “Cross-Cultural Music Diplomacy” course at Beijing Language and Culture University—are another example, through which Chinese students learned to perform songs from Europe, Africa, Middle East, Polynesia, and the Americas. Finally, music diplomacy can also take the form of research and development initiatives. For example, the Sapmi Singing Map is a Norwegian Research Council-funded project that features close collaboration with Sami joikers to develop educational resources so their music, which had long been marginalized, can be sensitively taught to all students in Nordic schools. For each of these cases, anecdotes will be shared from direct personal experience, and each example will be considered in relation to state-of-the-art theories that provide a deepened understanding of music diplomacy. However, today perhaps the greatest threat to all these inspiring forms of heritage is AI’s unregulated colonization of human arts, so promising ways of responding to AI must also be briefly discussed. Taken as a whole, these examples show how the power of music diplomacy can foster forms of empathy and reconciliation that emphasize our shared humanity and thereby counteract the threat of deepening political divides.

 

Here I will note that I gave a speech covering some of the same examples in Hong Kong last month, but it looks quite unlikely even one person will be in the audience in Sweden who was also there in Hong Kong, so presumably nobody will notice or mind. I continue to refine the topic as well as how these examples are discussed. 

Image source (Orebro Castle): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%C3%96rebro_slott_May_2014_01.jpg

GAME research group

The Grieg Academy Music Education (GAME) research group has been achieving so much across recent years, exciting to see: many publications, grants, lectures, workshops and performance activities.

Recently we have meetings about once a month, and lately these are hybrid events with participants gathering in person in Bergen, Norway as well as online from North America, Asia, and Africa. Many GAME members plan to give presentations at the 2026 ISME World Conference in Montreal.

Pictured above is renowned composer Edvard Grieg, the most famous person from the city of Bergen, where the GAME research group (named for his legacy) is based.

Here is a photo from a GAME research group meeting (3 October 2025), which included many special guests. In person, we were joined by one of the GAME founders, Steinar Sætre, who brought guests from Uganda that are in the CABUTE project, Music subject leader Dr. Nicholas Ssempiija, PhD student Erisa Walubo, Vincent Muhindo, and Hellen Hasahya (new Master students who were traveling outside Uganda for the very first time), as well as Kjersti Elisabet Lea, a recent department head at University of Bergen. PhD student Knut Eysturstein was also here from University of the Faroe Islands. The event was hosted by HVL PhD student Kristian Iversen with support from our HVL postdoc Dr. Karan Choudhary, and included online guests from the CABUTE project in Uganda as well as Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK) and other institutions.

Online we were joined by HVL Associate Professor David T. Johnson, Julia Katarzyna Leikvoll (University of Bergen), Craig Resta (Kent State University, USA), Sangmi Kang (Eastman School of Music, USA), CABUTE postdoc Milton Wabyona (Makerere University, Uganda), CABUTE postdoc James Isabirye (Kyambogo University, Uganda), ISME Routledge Book Series Assistant Editor Esther Chunxiao Zhang (EdUHK), recent PhD graduate and Cantonese opera expert Kimmie Sin-Yee Ma (EdUHK), and Yuki Morijiri (Tokyo Gakugei University). The event featured insightful presentations by two PhD students who are nearing completion: Knut Eysturstein and Erisa Walubo, a stimulating presentation by Craig Resta on approaches to historical research in music education, and some brief introductory presentations of thesis concepts by new CABUTE Master students Vincent Muhindo, and Hellen Hasahya. Michael Chi-Hin Leung (EdUHK) also gave an interesting presentation on his music education technology research.