I look forward
to giving a keynote speech soon for the 2025 Music
Research Today (Musikforskning idag) conference of the Swedish
Society for Music Research, hosted by the School of Music, Theatre and Art
at Örebro University. This year’s conference theme is Music and Politics.
Click HERE
for a description of the keynote speeches. Below is the title and summary for
my presentation.
Music
Diplomacy Amid Populism and Protectionism
If one were
to summarize the main political tendencies impacting the world today, far-right
populism (with the rise of authoritarian leaders) combined with protectionism
(featuring preoccupation with borders, migration and tariffs) would seem to be
among the most prominent. There is also a noticeable shift from multilateralism
toward transactionalism, which appears to be eroding the post-WWII world order
through the ascent of BRICS and related alliances. How does music interact with
these tendencies, and what hope might music provide in efforts to nudge
humanity toward a more just and sustainable world in these uncertain times?
Music can play a highly effective role in cultural diplomacy that aims to
bridge between ideological divides exacerbated by social media siloization. One
relevant case comes from Samarkand, a great city on the historic Silk Road: The
Sharq Taronalari Festival, which is one of the world's largest international
folk music events, funded by UNESCO and the government of Uzbekistan. I participated
in this spectacular festival on three different years, experiencing remarkable
performances of traditional music from all inhabited continents. There are
also entire institutions devoted to music diplomacy, a prominent example of
which is the Barenboim-Said Academy, a conservatoire in Berlin founded with the
purpose of inspiring cooperation between Arabs and Jews through classical
music. In the field of Chinese music, a notable case was Copenhagen’s Music
Confucius Institute, which I researched by interviewing expert pedagogues who
had taught traditional Chinese musical instruments to European students. In the
opposite direction, the Intensive World Music Concerts—developed across recent
years among Chinese traditional instrument majors in the “Cross-Cultural Music
Diplomacy” course at Beijing Language and Culture University—are another
example, through which Chinese students learned to perform songs from Europe,
Africa, Middle East, Polynesia, and the Americas. Finally, music diplomacy can also take
the form of research and development initiatives. For example, the Sapmi
Singing Map is a Norwegian Research Council-funded project that features close
collaboration with Sami joikers to develop educational resources so their
music, which had long been marginalized, can be sensitively taught to all
students in Nordic schools. For each of these cases, anecdotes will be
shared from direct personal experience, and each example will be considered in
relation to state-of-the-art theories that provide a deepened understanding of
music diplomacy. However, today perhaps the greatest threat to all these
inspiring forms of heritage is AI’s unregulated colonization of human arts, so
promising ways of responding to AI must also be briefly discussed. Taken as a
whole, these examples show how the power of music diplomacy can foster forms of
empathy and reconciliation that emphasize our shared humanity and thereby
counteract the threat of deepening political divides.
Here I will note that I gave a speech covering some of the same examples in Hong Kong last month, but it looks quite unlikely even one person will be in the audience in Sweden who was also there in Hong Kong, so presumably nobody will notice or mind. I continue to refine the topic as well as how these examples are discussed.
Image
source (Orebro Castle): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%C3%96rebro_slott_May_2014_01.jpg
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