Sociomusicology: December 2022

12/20/22

GAME Symposium 2022

The Grieg Academy Music Education (GAME) research group, which I have been leading for a few years, held its first small symposium for consultation on our various projects a few days ago. The GAME research group has produced many publications and has also been rather successful with obtaining grants for various projects from an array of sources, including Nordplus, Nordforsk, Utforsk (HK-dir), Swedish Research Council, Norad/Norhed, EU-Erasmus Plus, etc.

We invited an excellent group of highly productive and innovative music scholars to the discussion in Bergen. The following guests participated in our research group’s “think tank” consultation event: Gareth Dylan Smith, Samantha Dieckmann, Lauri Vakeva, Stefan Ostersjo, Thanh Thuy Nguyen, Marianne Løkke Jakobsen, Mary Stakelum, Mikolaj Rykowski, and Markus Tullberg, as well as (briefly) some additional visitors: both Melissa Brunkan and Sergej Tchirkov.

Other notable international guests to visit the GAME research group in 2022 have included Masafumi Ogawa, Chee Hoo Lum, Koji Matsunobu, and Anita Prest, in addition to the several meetings with our visiting professors Stefan Ostersjo and Helga Rut Gudmundsdottir (who was unable to join this symposium). GAME members who presented their research at the event included (in addition to me), Thanh Thuy Nguyen, Steinar Saetre, Heather Arghandeh Paudler, David Johnson, and Marianne Løkke Jakobsen.

Our invited guests stayed at Moxy Hotel and we enjoyed a concert organized by composer Jostein Stalheim at Bergen's oldest surviving structure, Mariakirken cathedral. Below is the program from the event. We look forward to having more symposia like this one in the future, at least once every two years. In 2023 we plan to host multiple visitors, especially from East Africa and East Asia.

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).