Coordinator: Makoto Harris Takao (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), Mike Block (Cello player, Composer, Singer, and Educator), David R. M. Irving (ICREA & Institució Milà i Fontanals de Recerca en Humanitats, CSIC)
The Idea: Motivations & Scope
Throughout our collective history we have shaped sound into musical meaning, finding expression, connection, and creativity in ways that resonate with our worlds. Musics also move across borders (whether geographic, cultural, or disciplinary), transforming alongside the people who make, hear, and remember them. Scholars have long noted how musical practices have played an active role in shaping communities, for better or for worse. In our present moment, and in the face of resurgent nationalisms and divisive populisms, musics can offer us a unique approach to work toward human flourishing: how can we connect, heal, and better understand our pasts and futures through sound?
This pillar supports activities invested in continually rethinking the scope of musical experience and music research by deepening and expanding ongoing dialogues between performance, the humanities, and STEM disciplines. Fields such as neuroscience, psychology, music therapy, and paleoanthropology offer powerful insights into how music acts on minds and bodies. At the same time, historical, musicological, ethnomusicological, sociological, and anthropological approaches situate those effects within larger stories of migration, displacement, and encounter. Together, these perspectives invite us to reimagine what it means to study, perform, and experience our world’s musics.
Guiding Questions
- What role has music played across human cultures in deep time? What can we learn from comparing diverse thoughts about our world’s musics and the broad spectrum of their political, religious, social, aesthetic, mental, and medical effects? And what of their patronage systems, educational practices and institutions, and media of transmission?
- How can engaging with the diverse musical traditions and voices of Eurasia, Africa, the Indigenous Americas, the Pacific Rim, and historically marginalized communities enrich our approaches to composition, performance, and the study of music?
- How can we disrupt and radically redefine disciplinary boundaries while also accounting for the various ways these disciplines developed and are currently practiced around the world?
- How can we facilitate new conversations between scholars, composers, performers, and activists for the flourishing of diverse music cultures?
Goals & Actions
- Convene leaders in musical performance, philology, composition, theory, and other fields from across the world and collaboratively develop models for broader dissemination of highly specialized and academic knowledge
- Confront how sound and music have played and continue to play a role in colonial violence, displacement, exclusion, and cultural loss—challenging us to critique the forces that have shaped the world we inhabit today
- Promote transcultural music-making and facilitate opportunities for creative encounters between performers and scholars
- Create an advisory board of performers, teachers, and researchers committed to advancing curricular and pedagogical approaches that foster inclusive institutional spaces for a diversity of musics