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.

We believe our many initiatives will help make ISME even more effective and responsive to its members across the world.  

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. 

A New Philosophy of Music Education

 

Our latest book will finally be published in the coming months, A New Philosophy of Music Education for the Era of AI.

As artificial intelligence (AI) more deeply impacts many aspects of education and the arts, we are hopeful that this book will become a helpful resource for teachers of all kinds. 

This original monograph is the outcome of a long-term collaboration with Professor Jiaxing Xie, an ethnomusicologist and music teacher educator who worked for years in Beijing as Director of the Chinese Music Research Institute of China Conservatory, and recently published an 18-volume encyclopedia on the history of Chinese musical thought.

 

Here is a summary:

This book outlines a philosophy of music education that is responsive to the age of artificial intelligence. Against the background of AI's challenges to human modes of production, the authors demonstrate how music education can become a tool for self-discovery in this transformative era. Taking the approach of a dialogue between Chinese and Western perspectives, the book addresses the relationships between the social functions of music education and individual development in different historical periods, and envisions the potential role of music education in a new environment shaped by AI. Integrating insights from recent research, it establishes a forward-thinking philosophy of music education that is oriented towards self-discovery and grounded in science. Bringing together philosophical perspectives from Chinese and Western scholars, this book shows how integrating these perspectives can clarify the values that shape music education practices, and enable scholars and educators to better address contemporary issues in the teaching of music.

 

Prof. Pamela Burnard (Cambridge University) also wrote a beautiful Foreword for this book. Detailed information is available on the Routledge website.

 

GAME Symposium 2025

Across recent years we have been hosting the GAME symposia in Bergen each December as an annual activity of the Grieg Academy Music Education (GAME) research group.

This was another great year, with participants from more than 12 countries and territories, including USA, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Faroe Islands, Poland, France, Greece, Japan, China, Malaysia, and Hong Kong.

This year, our PhD Candidate Kristian Tverli Iversen gets much of the credit for hosting and chairing. 

A special hightlight of the first day was a full 1-hour presentation of the nearly completed PhD dissertation of Knut Eysturstein on music heritage and education in the Faroe Islands.

Click HERE to see the academic program and HERE to see the program from our concert at this event.

Click HERE to learn about previous GAME Symposia.

Keynote and Lectures in China, Autumn 2025

 

I look forward to offering lectures through the Graduate School of Education at the Education University of Hong Kong, as part of the Global Competence Partnership project. This time my lectures will be on quite practical topics that nevertheless have broad relevance across academic fields, including how to publish in scholarly journals and effectively participate in academic conferences.

It is also a great pleasure to be offering a keynote speech for China’s 6th National Symposium on Oral History of Music and the Annual Meeting of the National Society for Oral History of Music in Nanning city, in the beautiful Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of China (2025). 

Here is a link for more information on this event (in Chinese):

https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/tcFhRtKSuwv7kJr51uOqZA

I am also an invited speaker for upcoming events in Seoul and Amsterdam. Click HERE and HERE for details.

Image source (Guangxi): 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Yanshan,_Guilin,_Guangxi,_China_-_panoramio_%281%29.jpg

 

Nordic Intensive Master Course

It is exciting to now be at the Nordic Network for Music Education (NNME) intensive course, which includes participants from Master programs across all eight of the Nordic and Baltic (NB8) countries. I have been managing the NNME for several years, which receives government funding from Nordplus, and our course this year is hosted by Marja-Leena Juntunen in Finland at the beautiful Kallio-Kuninkala villa.

We eagerly look forward to seeing presentations of the Master thesis projects developed by each of the students and to sharing new ideas in the field of music education. These courses are a profoundly meaningful learning opportunity for the students, as they share with peers from across the region and develop networks that benefit them across their careers.

Click HERE to see the book produced a few years ago by this network.

Shown above is a public-domain image of Ainola, the former home of composer Jean Sibelius, which is walking distance from the course site.

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.

Click HERE to learn about my paper presentation at SEM 2025. 

 

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 preeminent fiddling researcher 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.

 

Music Education in the CABUTE Project

After three intensive seminars across the past two weeks, the Music Education strand of the CABUTE project is going very well! Our Master students have robust research proposals for their theses and our PhD student has completed his study with even more ideas for how to expand on his findings.

We eagerly look forward to seeing what these fine students will achieve in the long term to strengthen teacher education and music heritage in Uganda.