Sociomusicology: January 2024

1/7/24

China Symposium on Talent in Music Education

It was a pleasure to participate this week as the only non-Chinese invited guest in a major academic event at China’s leading faculty of education, Beijing Normal University, as featured on national CCTV.

This was the 2024 symposium on “Global Perspectives Toward Talent Development in Music Education,” and included the prominent Chinese researchers in the field of music education: Jiaxing Xie (China Conservatory), Bo-wah Leung (Education University of Hong Kong), Aiqing Yin (Northeast Normal University), Honglai Liang (Capital Normal University) and the host, Lu Zhang (Beijing Normal University).

We had a very interesting discussion of recent issues and developments in the field. My talk emphasized the themes of Resilience and Flexibility in music teacher education, with particular attention to how we may prepare teachers to effectively respond to major challenges, such as the recent Covid-19 pandemic and the increasing popularization of AI tools in music and education.

I am happy to find that leaders at Beijing Normal University recognize the value of our Global Competence Partnership project, and also seek to develop new forms of international collaboration with Europe.

Empowering Voices

It was a great pleasure to host a weekend conference in Bergen recently (mid-December 2023) for development of our application seeking EU support for the Empowering Voices project.

The Empowering Voices project assembles a consortium of skilled researchers from diverse academic fields (musicology, sociology, political science, media studies) as well as prominent musicians from an array of minority traditions in Europe and abroad, including Sami, Ukrainian, Syrian, and other Indigenous and refugee minorities. The project consortium includes universities, NGOs, and both media and arts organizations in Norway, Sweden, Poland, Germany, Luxembourg, Austria, the Czech Republic, and New Zealand.

We are excited about this promising project and hopeful it may receive EU research funding.

We are also seeking funding to extend the Music Talks project in a new direction, which aims through technology-enhanced music activities to empower youth voices toward civic engagement in three regions of Europe: Nordic (Norway), Baltic (Latvia) and Balkan (North Macedonia) youth, ages 15-25.

The image shown above is of one of the most celebrated singers of all time, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

Welcome to Sociomusicology

For over 15 years (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 an Affiliated Professor with University of the Faroe Islands 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:30), with professional activities in an average of 8 countries per year across the past decade (2008-2020).