Sociomusicology: January 2020

1/27/20

Harvard Music Preference Project

It has been a great pleasure to spend some time in Boston, where I am collaborating with a brilliant professor in Harvard's school of public health for development of a new project on public music appreciation and wellbeing. We have a novel plan for a series of research projects that promise unique insights into how musical understanding and participation can be more widely developed through new technologies.

Ideally, our project may help to broaden appreciation of music connected to cultural heritage, and possibly encourage a wider swath of the public to regularly listen to, and participate in, traditional genres that are less impacted by the tendencies of commercialization. This seems quite important in both North America and Scandinavia, where audiences for traditional music are dwindling. I will post more details here in the future as the project develops further.

It is hard to believe it has been more than a decade since I left my job as an Assistant Professor at Boston University to begin working in Northern Europe. It was very enjoyable to visit Boston again.

Welcome to Sociomusicology

For a decade (since 2007), this website has offered musings on contemporary society and its music by David G. Hebert, PhD. He is a sociomusicologist specializing in global music education who has held academic positions with universities on five continents. Dr. Hebert is now a tenured full Professor with Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Bergen. There he leads the Grieg Academy Music Education (GAME) research group and manages the multinational government-funded Nordic Network for Music Education, which organizes annual intensive Master courses and exchange of teachers and students across eight countries. He is also a Visiting Professor in Sweden with the Malmo Academy of Music (Lund University), and an Honorary Professor in China with the Education University of Hong Kong.

Professor Hebert's research applies an international-comparative perspective to issues of pluralism, identity, and cultural relevance in music education, as well as processes by which new music traditions emerge and change - both sonically and socially - as they are adopted into institutions. Born in the 1970s, he is among the most widely-published and globally-active music scholars of his generation (h-index:20; i10-index:28), with professional activities in an average of 8 countries per year across the past decade (2008-2020).