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Photo: David G. Hebert, May 2015, all rights reserved. |
The Nordic
spring has sprung at last (with incredibly long and bright days), and there are
various new developments with the music programs at my institution. We will
soon be making curricular plans for a 5-year integrated Bachelor/Master program,
which provides an opportunity to develop some new approaches. We also recently
offered an honorary concert “You
Taught My Heart to Sing” that celebrated the distinguished career of our fine
jazz keyboard teacher, Stein Bakke. He has been with the institution for over
40 years, and will retire soon. A few weeks ago I was also appointed
institutional coordinator for the Nordic
Network for Music Education, a productive organization with a focus on
postgraduate training, which has active members in several Nordic and Baltic
countries. The network is funded by Nordplus and coordinated internationally by Torunn Bakken
Hauge through Bergen University College.
It looks like we
may soon have a partnership with Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Porto Alegre, Brazil. UFRGS stakes a claim as one of
Latin America’s most prominent research universities, with programs across
virtually all major university subjects, as well as a highly regarded PhD
program in music. Brazil is also a very important country for music, so we are
excited about the possibility of strengthening ties with that country. I look
forward to visiting there someday (perhaps with Norwegian students) and hosting
Brazilian musicians in Norway.
Recently I have enjoyed Geoffrey Baker’s brand new book El Sistema: Orchestrating Venezuela’s Youth,
which much like one of my earlier books Wind
Bands and Cultural Identity in Japanese Schools offers a detailed socio-historical
examination of an entire national system of music education based on
ethnographic fieldwork. El Sistema has been attracting a lot of attention
worldwide, and it is good to see a thorough study that critically examines the
strengths and weaknesses of this increasingly prominent approach to music
education.
In terms of
writing, I have finally recovered some data, the absence of which had caused a
major delay in completing a book chapter. This has been an embarrassment, and I
am rushing to complete that chapter now in the hope of finishing before the editor has to tell me I am too late. It is my first time facing this situation, but hopefully the last. Also, two co-authored publications are now
either in press or in revision for publication in 2015: an article in the field
of computational musicology (considered
a division of “digital humanities”) based on a very fruitful collaboration with
Kristoffer Jensen, and an article on music education in Guyana with Rohan
Sagar. The contract is also finally signed for my next book, International Perspectives on Translation,
Education and Innovation in Japanese and Korean Societies (David Hebert,
ed., Springer, 2016). This book is based on conference proceedings and at this
point requires some substantial editing and formatting, and will be ready for
press by winter. I am also looking forward to an upcoming collaboration with
Alex Ruthmann (NYU) and Jiaxing Xie (China Conservatory, Beijing) in a
pioneering project that promises to have a major impact on how advanced institutions globally collaborate in the field of music.
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