Music in a Concussive Monologue

The latest issue of Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy contains an article inspired by reflections on a complex experience from about five years ago. We believe it may be useful for those who study music cognition or who treat those with head injuries.

via GIPHY

Still image from: 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PLoSBiol4.e126.Fig6fNeuron.jpg 

Oral History Discussions

Dr. Yang Yang at Education University of Hong Kong has just posted a brief interview based on questions that emerged in response to one of my earlier videos – “Oral History Methods for Sustaining Music Heritage in Education” – which was widely shared in China.

Click HERE to access the new Q&A session.

Click HERE to access an explanation and link to the original video (speech) that served as a basis for this Q&A session.

English versions are available on each of the above sites, but it is necessary to scroll to the bottom of each page.

Pictured above is a public domain image, a sketch of the Old Summer Palace in Beijing, where western music was often performed before the palace grounds (including concert hall) were destroyed in 1860 during the Second Opium War.

East African Education and Doctoral Supervision

I look forward to participating soon as a session chair and discussant for the first East African Teacher Education Symposium: Challenges and Opportunities in Teacher Education (November, 2021). This initiative was developed through the Norad-sponsored CABUTE project, and will take place both online and physically at Makerere University, in Kampala, Uganda. Eight presentations at this symposium - around half of what was selected for this event - are concerned with music-related topics, including papers by accomplished scholars such as James Isabirye, Nicholas Ssempijja and Milton Wabyona.

It was also a pleasure to learn yesterday that I have been formally appointed by the Royal Danish Academy of Music as a doctoral supervisor for a dissertation through Aalborg University concerned with online music learning between Denmark and China. It promises to be a very interesting project, and this means that I will soon have served on doctoral committees for universities in 11 countries, each of which has been uniquely stimulating. Later this week I teach for University of Bergen’s annual university-wide course on Doctoral Supervision, and next week I will be in Iceland for the NNME intensive course/conference. 

 

Although the pandemic has made international initiatives more challenging than before, it is encouraging to see that many forms of collaboration are still possible.

 

 

Image of Makerere University retrieved from: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ssetendekero_Makerere.jpg

Global Higher Education & Arts Summer PhD Course

It is a pleasure to announce that we have co-developed a new PhD course with cultural geographer Erlend Eidsvik, Global Inequalities in Higher Education and the Arts, which will be part of Bergen Summer Research School in 2022. Bergen Summer Research School attracts doctoral students from across the world for interdisciplinary courses concerning global challenges.

More information will be posted here soon.

Above is an image of Bergen harbor, a photo I took a few weeks ago when our postdoctoral researcher was visiting from Sweden. 

Music and Cultural Diplomacy Panel at BFE

We look forward to giving a panel presentation “Ethnomusicology and Cultural Diplomacy” at the British Forum for Ethnomusicology conference Ethnomusicology in 2022 and Beyond in mid-November 2021. The conference format allowed for only 3 papers in a panel session, so this is just a tiny preview of what will appear in the book, but future conferences will give us more opportunities to share what we have developed through this project.

 

Ethnomusicology and Cultural Diplomacy

This panel is based on a book by the same title that will be in press at the time of the conference. Three contributors will present material from their chapters on music diplomacy projects from Afghanistan, Iran, and Vietnam. Rather than explaining how western nations use music for diplomacy, they take a decolonizing approach to ethnomusicology, by determining how non-western cultural practices impact music diplomacy directed toward Europe and North America. Two presenters are from the countries discussed (Iran and Vietnam), while the other devoted three years to music diplomacy in Afghanistan, a nation now embroiled in a tragic crisis. 

 

Session Format:

·       Introduction, Prof. David G. Hebert, session chair (Western Norway)

 

·       Paper 1: ‘A Very Beautiful Image of Afghanistan’: Cultural Diplomacy through Music Performance and Education - Lauren Braithwaite (PhD candidate, Oxford University)

 

·       Paper 2: Soft War and Multilateral Creative Pathways in Iran - by Nasim Niknafs, PhD (Associate Professor, University of Toronto)

 

·       Paper 3: Cultural Diplomacy and Transculturation through the History of the Vọng Cổ in Vietnam - by Thanh Thuy Nguyen, PhD (Postdoctoral Researcher, Royal Academy of Music, Stockholm)

 

·       Q&A Discussion, moderated by Prof. Hebert

We are also making further progress now on the forthcoming book on Viking musical heritage, hence the image above. 

Hong Kong Appointment and Doctoral Supervision

It was a great pleasure to officially learn today that I have been re-appointed as Honorary Professor with the Education University of Hong Kong, where I have also served as external evaluator of the creative arts doctoral program. EdUHK is ranked in the world’s top 10 in the field of education. In creative arts there are several excellent colleagues, including Bo-wah Leung, Koji Matsunobu, Yang Yang and Matthew Thibeault. 

Recently I also learned that I have once again been invited to teach on a panel for University of Bergen’s university-wide course on doctoral supervision for its lecturers and professors. Click HERE for more about my own approach to doctoral supervision as well as my research and teaching in the field of doctoral supervision.

Music Learning Technology in Reykjavik

The 2021 Master course/conference of the Nordic Network for Music Education “Music Learning with Digital Technologies” is scheduled for early November in Reykjavik, Iceland. Here is the announcement, which as of yesterday indicates this event will be both in person for those who can travel to Iceland and online for those who cannot: https://sites.google.com/view/nnme-2021/home

This Nordplus-sponsored course is hosted by Adam Switala and Helga Rut Gudmundsdottir, and will likely include participants from the major music teacher education institutions in all eight Nordic and Baltic countries. We will have many presentations of ongoing Master student thesis projects as well as keynote speakers and various activities. I look forward to presenting some ongoing NNME projects, including COIL collaborations between classes on different continents and video interviews with both Nordic and global leaders in the field. 

Image: "Diego Delso, delso.photo, License CC-BY-SA"