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