Sociomusicology: Historical Ethnomusicology Section 2025

10/30/25

Historical Ethnomusicology Section 2025

It is a pleasure to now have an appointment as Chair of the SEM Historical Ethnomusicology Section, a division of the Society for Ethnomusicology. I will continue to work closely with Otto Stuparitz (University of Melbourne), who is now Past Chair, preceded by Kristina Nielson.

We already have an excellent nomination for our next Secretary/Chair-Elect and will vote on this appointment in the coming months. We will also meet as the leadership team to set goals and detailed plans for the coming years, and I look forward to seeing what we can accomplish.

The mission of the Historical Ethnomusicology Section is to support historical studies in the field of ethnomusicology, primarily through the sponsorship and promotion of discussions, events, panels, and publications related to historical approaches to the study of music.

The Historical Ethnomusicology Section had several activities recently at the 70^th Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, in Atlanta, 2025: The Section organized and sponsored various historical paper sessions and offered travel awards as well as its annual Student Paper Prize. Additionally, more than 20 participants came to our “Meet and Greet” and 15 came to our Business Meeting where we offered an appreciation for a preeminent fiddling researcher, the late Chris Goertzen, discussed recent projects, and planned future activities.

The 2025 paper prize selection committee awarded the Student Paper Prize in Historical Ethnomusicology to Melissa Camp for her paper titled Robert Lachmann’s Listening Ear at the 1932 Cairo Congress and Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv” and Honorable Mention was awarded to Sora Woo for her paper “‘The Ballad of Chol Soo Lee’ as an Asian American Anthem.”

The Society for Ethnomusicology has around 1,700 members, nearly 10% of which are counted in the Historical Ethnomusicology Section (although not all actively pay dues).

Below are some numbers from the latest Historical Ethnomusicology Section Annual Report submitted shortly before the 2025 meeting:

Number of Members

Member Count: 160

Listserv subscribers: 191

Facebook Group

URL: https://www.facebook.com/groups/324391271000182/

Number on Facebook: 2000 members

Images (my photos): downtown Atlanta and Saint Louis Cathedral of New Orleans.

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Welcome to Sociomusicology

For nearly 20 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 both University of the Faroe Islands and Kyambogo University (Uganda), 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:21), with professional activities in an average of 8 countries per year across the past decade (2008-2020).