Music Education in the CABUTE Project

After three intensive seminars across the past two weeks, the Music Education strand of the CABUTE project is going very well! Our Master students have robust research proposals for their theses and our PhD student has completed his study with even more ideas for how to expand on his findings.

We eagerly look forward to seeing what these fine students will achieve in the long term to strengthen teacher education and music heritage in Uganda.

Deep Soundings on Bloomsbury

Paperback editions of the books in our series Deep Soundings: Critical Studies in Historical Ethnomusicology are now available through Bloomsbury press.

The books have received outstanding reviews and are now in many libraries.

Music and Politics Keynote

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

GAME research group

The Grieg Academy Music Education (GAME) research group has been achieving so much across recent years, exciting to see: many publications, grants, lectures, workshops and performance activities.

Recently we have meetings about once a month, and lately these are hybrid events with participants gathering in person in Bergen, Norway as well as online from North America, Asia, and Africa. Many GAME members plan to give presentations at the 2026 ISME World Conference in Montreal.

Pictured above is renowned composer Edvard Grieg, the most famous person from the city of Bergen, where the GAME research group (named for his legacy) is based.

Here is a photo from a GAME research group meeting (3 October 2025), which included many special guests. In person, we were joined by one of the GAME founders, Steinar Sætre, who brought guests from Uganda that are in the CABUTE project, Music subject leader Dr. Nicholas Ssempiija, PhD student Erisa Walubo, Vincent Muhindo, and Hellen Hasahya (new Master students who were traveling outside Uganda for the very first time), as well as Kjersti Elisabet Lea, a recent department head at University of Bergen. PhD student Knut Eysturstein was also here from University of the Faroe Islands. The event was hosted by HVL PhD student Kristian Iversen with support from our HVL postdoc Dr. Karan Choudhary, and included online guests from the CABUTE project in Uganda as well as Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK) and other institutions.

Online we were joined by HVL Associate Professor David T. Johnson, Julia Katarzyna Leikvoll (University of Bergen), Craig Resta (Kent State University, USA), Sangmi Kang (Eastman School of Music, USA), CABUTE postdoc Milton Wabyona (Makerere University, Uganda), CABUTE postdoc James Isabirye (Kyambogo University, Uganda), ISME Routledge Book Series Assistant Editor Esther Chunxiao Zhang (EdUHK), recent PhD graduate and Cantonese opera expert Kimmie Sin-Yee Ma (EdUHK), and Yuki Morijiri (Tokyo Gakugei University). The event featured insightful presentations by two PhD students who are nearing completion: Knut Eysturstein and Erisa Walubo, a stimulating presentation by Craig Resta on approaches to historical research in music education, and some brief introductory presentations of thesis concepts by new CABUTE Master students Vincent Muhindo, and Hellen Hasahya. Michael Chi-Hin Leung (EdUHK) also gave an interesting presentation on his music education technology research.