Sociomusicology: Historical Ethnomusicology 2026

9/17/26

Historical Ethnomusicology 2026

I look forward to participating in the 71st Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), which will be held on November 5 - 8, 2026, in Bloomington, Indiana (USA), on the Indiana University campus.

At this conference, I will lead one meeting as Chair of the Historical Ethnomusicology Section, and will also be presenting a paper, “A Philosophy of World Music Instruction for the Age of AI”. I also intend to visit the university's world-renowned Archives of Traditional Music to discuss digitization and research procedures related to a proposal to develop a major music research center in Bergen, Norway.

The Historical Ethnomusicology Section meeting will be on Thursday, 05 November 2026, 7:00pm - 9:00pm, in the Walnut room, Main Floor, 60.

The abstract of my paper presentation is below.

A Philosophy of World Music Instruction for the Age of AI

David Hebert

Western Norway University of Applied Sciences; Education University of Hong Kong

In most ethnomusicology graduate programs, current debates in philosophy of education tend to receive little to no attention. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the application of a new philosophy in the teaching of world music, a common responsibility of ethnomusicologists in higher education. While previous books (e.g. World Music Pedagogy, VII: Teaching World Music in Higher Education) offer helpful methods for collegiate world music instruction, the purpose of a philosophy text is to provide foundations that empower us to reconceptualize the meaning and ultimate purpose of instruction in this field, while illuminating new resources for sustained inspiration, thereby reducing professional “burnout”. The presenter’s twelfth book, co-authored with a Chinese ethnomusicologist (Routledge, 2026), is concerned with how music educators can respond to the array of novel challenges coming from generative AI, and serves as background for this paper. Our book applies a systems science approach to global philosophy of history by arguing how and why human narratives evolved in particular ways across time, which ultimately engenders a new perspective on musical meaning in relation to both personal identity and AI. This matters for ethnomusicologists teaching world music, particularly as the popularization of generative AI tools challenges us to reconsider what quality education entails and what we could hope world music students might learn to do and understand through our teaching. AI prompts us to rethink not only classroom activities and approaches to assessment, but also notions of creative originality, ownership, and music heritage, demanding a new educational philosophy.

Session Details:

12I: Mediating World Music: Authority, Authenticity, and Musical Tradition in a Global Age
Time: 08/Nov/2026: 10:45am-12:15pm · Location: Dogwood

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