Teaching Music Performance in Higher Education

A new book Teaching Music Performance in Higher Education has been published that promises to stimulate important discussions about how the methodology of artistic research can strengthen higher music education. Music performance pedagogy has long needed more systematic approaches, and I have been arguing in favor of artistic research for many years, and mentored some artistic research dissertations at Sibelius Academy more than a decade ago, including Ari Pouitianen’s study Stringprovisation.

Higher education is often resistant to change, but the book Teaching Music Performance in Higher Education shows promising innovations that will be relevant to music lecturers and professors in many different institutions. 

Some of the authors of Teaching Music Performance in Higher Education are affiliated with my institution in western Norway, including Stefan Ostersjo, who was our visiting professor across recent years, and cognitive musicologist Odd Turleiv Furnes. Click HERE to access another recent co-authored book that combines the fields of ethnomusicology and artistic research, and demonstrates how transcultural approaches can fit in higher education.

AND, click HERE to access Teaching Music Performance in Higher Education, which is published in open-access format, freely available to anyone curious to read it.

Dissertation on Sight Reading Pedagogy in China

It was a pleasure to serve as external examiner for the Doctoral Defense of Ms. LIN Qi at The Education University of Hong Kong. This dissertation was supervised by Koji Matsunobu (main supervisor) and Bo-Wah Leung (committee member), and the defense was held today in a hybrid session with participants in both Hong Kong and Europe.

Teaching of sight reading is often challenging for music teachers. Ms. Lin’s doctoral study is a multifaceted exploration of current approaches to sightreading pedagogy (how people are taught to read western classical music notation on keyboard instruments) at multiple higher education institutions in the mainland China context. It also tests the impact of an intervention (implementation of a specific sightreading pedagogy) in terms of both quantitative data (testing of sightreading skills as well as self-efficacy scores) and qualitative data, which include observations, journals, and over 50 interviews.

This unique doctoral study demonstrates relationships between self-efficacy and competence in the field of sight-reading pedagogy, and affirms the effectiveness of newer pedagogies in the mainland China context.

Ms. LIN Qi’s doctoral dissertation makes a new contribution to knowledge in this area, and she has demonstrated an array of skills that are likely to serve her well as a researcher in the future with a doctorate from The Education University of Hong Kong.

Image source (at top): Brian Ferneyhough Day, Barbican Centre | The Arts Desk

World Conference in Helsinki

It is a pleasure to return to Helsinki, Finland—where I worked as a Professor more than 10 years ago—to participate in the world conference of the International Society for Music Education (ISME) in July/August 2024.

I currently serve on the Board of ISME and I am Chair of its History Standing Committee, so there are many activities at this world conference. Also, two of my current PhD students are giving presentations, but an additional one recently had to withdrawal and postpone their participation until next time.

In the late morning on Monday, the History Standing Committee (HSC) hosts an open session called “Meet the Mentors” which is intended to offer helpful suggestions to PhD students and postdoctoral researchers who are beginning to develop research projects on any historical topics. We have already confirmed participants are coming from the Americas, Europe, and East Asia. 

On Monday afternoon, I chair an HSC symposium on intercultural issues, with participants presenting papers on historical topics in music education in Japan (I collaborate here with Koji Matsunobu), Germany (Alexandra Kertz-Welzel), Australia (Malcolm Cole), and the Faroe Islands (my PhD student Knut Eysturstein).

On Tuesday I give a presentation as part of a symposium on AI and philosophy of music education with several well-known researchers, such as Jiaxing Xie, Pamela Burnard, Alex Ruthmann, and Victor Fung.

I have also been asked to participate in the ISME Publications Committee meeting on Wednesday afternoon with Gwen Moore.

On Thursday I will also be a Discussant for a symposium on preliminary outcomes from the Nordic Singing Maps project, led by David Thorarinn Johnson.

The HSC also has our meet & greet session and business meeting later that day.

Finally, on Friday a presentation with my PhD student Marianne Jakobsen on Nordic approaches to advanced orchestral instrument pedagogy comes at the very end of the conference.

It will be exciting to reconnect with colleagues from around the world and to learn about the very latest developments in our field.

Image source: Helsinki Skyline | Helsinki is the capital of Finland and ho… | Flickr

Music PhD students in Bergen

I am pleased to report that we will soon have two PhD students in residence with the GAME research group in Bergen and a third at University of Bergen who collaborates closely with us. 

These are Erisa Walubo, who is part of the CABUTE project in Uganda, Kristian Tverli Iversen, a Norwegian music teacher who has just been accepted into our education PhD program, and Bruno Tagliasacchi Masia, a percussionist doing an artistic research PhD at University of Bergen. 

Erisa is now completing the data collection for his PhD, which is on Indigenous music and dance traditions of the Basoga region of Uganda, and how they may be successfully introduced into school music programs.

Kristian will be researching the effectiveness of various ways of integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into music education, and will participate in the Global Competence Partnership project in collaboration with partners in Hong Kong. 

Bruno is embarking on a exploratory study of how various approaches to the notion of silence can guide creative experimentation in music. 

More information will be posted here as their projects proceed further. 

GAME is already frequently visited by two excellent doctoral students based elsewhere in Scandinavia: Marianne Jakobsen (Copenhagen) and Knut Eysturstein (Faroe Islands), and we are developing a great synergy across the group.

GAME will also host the visits of several accomplished professors in Autumn 2024, including Jiaxing Xie, Koji Matsunobu, and Helga Rut Gudmundsdottir. 

World Music Concert in Beijing

It was a great pleasure to direct a world music concert (lecture-recital) last week, for the second time in recent years for the music performance degree students at Beijing Language and Culture University.  

While these students normally focus on performance of Chinese songs on traditional Chinese instruments, for this concert we performed original arrangements of songs from around the world in many different languages and contrasting musical styles: Japan, India, Puerto Rico, Argentina, Brazil, Northern Ireland, Egypt, and Aotearoa/New Zealand.

The audience was quite enthusiastic with our public concert, which was at a modern theatre in Guomao, near the heart of Beijing’s bustling central business district. It is exciting to see how much the students learn from this kind of experience, and I hope to see more projects of this kind in other countries over the coming years.

 

Doctoral Summer School in Hong Kong

Soon I will be taking a group of PhD students from Norway to participate in a summer school event at Education University of Hong Kong: The 2024 International Postgraduate Roundtable and Research Forum cum Summer School, with the theme "Innovations and Sustainability: Shaping Education and Global Futures".

This event includes keynote presentations by professors from Education University of Hong Kong, Lancaster University, University of Auckland, University of Reading, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Michigan State University and Pennsylvania State University.

Our PhD students come from diverse fields including performing arts education, business education, and early childhood education, and have quite interesting dissertation projects.

It was quite interesting to serve as Session Chair for the 2024 summer school’s concluding keynote speeches by Michelle Ming Yue Gu and Mark Levine. Click HERE for more information on the doctoral summer school.

Forthcoming Book on AI and Music Education

It is exciting to be progressing toward completion of a book contracted by Routledge on the topic of AI and philosophy of music education. Jiaxing Xie—probably the most well-known Chinese music educator—is my co-author for this book called A Philosophy of Music Education for the Era of AI: Dialogue Between Chinese and Western Perspectives.

Since both Xie and I are ethnomusicologists as well as music educators with a deep interest in technology, we take an approach that is rather different from most previous writings on the nature and purpose of music teaching and learning. Our book adopts a globally comparative perspective informed by decolonial theory, acknowledging both the opportunities and threats of AI tools for heritage and self-identity. We are making good progress and intend to submit the complete text to the press by the end of 2024 for publication in 2025. Our monograph extends on a series of presentations we gave at various national and international conferences in 2022-2024, including in China and at APSMER and ISME. Hopefully music teachers will be curious to read it.

Displayed above is one of several AI painted images developed by Zhengcui Guo for our book project.