Conference Agenda

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.

As bone-rattling Dongba chants collided with jarring guitar distortions at Wacken Open Air 2023, Five Penalties' performance projected a public display of musical rebellion. The band infuses glottal vibrations and microtonal lamentations into distorted, aberrant riffs, openly subverting Eurocentric expectations of Chinese "folk" music and creating a powerful, eerily surreal clash of cultural contexts. Moreover, while dressed in bone-adorned Dongba attire, performing on an industrial stage surrounded by mosh pits, they strive to redefine cultural representation through a bohemian performance. This study explores how Five Penalties challenges and confronts both traditional approaches to cultural preservation, which emphasize "authenticity" in world music, and China’s state-driven "museumification" of ethnic cultures, which often reduces music to a static, archival form. By fusing metal’s transnational energy with Naxi heritage, the band disrupts dominant cultural narratives through an empirical, theoretical strategy of anti-essentialism-rejecting fixed, narrow definitions of "authenticity" to produce a more fluid, dynamic, and novel expression of culture. This study explores whether this hybridization promotes cultural agency or risks co-optation, using the genre’s perceived "foreignness" to defy cultural commodification. Through textual analysis of live recordings and ethnographic interviews, this paper illustrates how the band’s sonic practices confront the commodification of heritage, positioning their work as a decolonial act of cultural resistance. Five Penalties offers marginalized communities a dynamic model for preserving and reinterpreting heritage through music, actively resisting global homogenization. This case highlights music as a site of cultural reclamation, redefining heritage as an evolving, insurgent force rather than a static artifact.

This paper examines the evolution of The Wounded Hussar from its eighteenth-century origins to contemporary circulation in Irish traditional music, using the song and its air as a lens through which questions of transmission, authenticity, and performance practice are raised. Beginning with the Romantic-era poem and early instrumental settings, the study traces the processes through which text and melody were fixed in print, detached, recombined, and recontextualized. Particular attention is paid to collectors and revivalist mediators whose editorial decisions shaped the separation of air from text and subsequent privileging of instrumental transmission. Drawing on comparative analysis of twentieth-century performances and methodologies of Irish song scholarship (Williams and Ó Laoire 2011), the paper examines how musicians negotiate declamation, ornamentation, and variation in mimesis of an implied or remembered text. These analyses reveal the relationship between air and song to be neither stable nor hierarchical but rather continually renegotiated in performance. The revivalist assertion that airs form legitimacy from fidelity to song (Ó Riada 1982) is shown to function less as fact than ideological claim embedded within discourses of authenticity. By foregrounding multiformity and the politics of mediation (Caldwell 2025), the paper contributes to ethnomusicological discourse on the construction, authorization, and reproduction of tradition. It argues that slow air performance constitutes a critical site in which archival authority, aesthetic ideology, and individual agency intersect. In doing so, the study challenges essentialist narratives of continuity in Irish traditional music and advances a more historically contingent account of stylistic evolution and expressive authority.