Sociomusicology: July 2024

7/5/24

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.

7/3/24

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.

Click HERE for more information on the doctoral summer school.

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:29), with professional activities in an average of 8 countries per year across the past decade (2008-2020).