Sociomusicology: January 2026

1/17/26

Board Meetings and PhD Completions

On behalf of the ISME Board, the Executive Committee has just completed 10 hours of online planning meetings across the past week for future activities of the International Society for Music Education. It has been a pleasure to collaborate with this tight-knit group of such professional, thoughtful and committed international colleagues from Mexico, Australia, USA, Hong Kong, India and Norway.

It is also a pleasure to announce that across the past few weeks, two PhD students, for whom I served as an external examiner, have formally passed their doctoral defense (viva voce) and now proceed to some final revisions before receiving their PhD degrees.

-Nurezlin Mohd Azib (2025, December), Reconceptualising the Learning of Expressiveness in Music Performance: Malaysian Undergraduate Voices Beyond Western Traditions (viva voce, Royal College of Music, London, UK).

-Huang, Yuqing (2026, January), Vocal Characteristics and Social Class in Light Soprano Roles: A Study of Character and Performance in Opera (viva voce, UCSI University, Kuala Lampur, Malaysia).

I eagerly look forward to seeing what they achieve in the future!

Life always has its ups and downs, but music certainly helps us to find the resilience to get through everything. Click HERE to access a recent blues performance.

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