Intercultural dialogue and the mobilisation of aural skills

ABSTRACT

A model for incorporating diverse musical content into the core conservatory aural skills curriculum is presented. We position the contemporary conservatory as a solid institution providing Western musicians with a sense of stability and heritage in an age of anxiety (Bauman’s ‘liquid modernity’). Despite these benefits, we argue that the conservatory education leaves graduates ill-equipped for the society in which they will build their careers. We therefore advocate for diversification as a means of producing more versatile graduates. Two aural perception classroom workshops were led by a Chinese pipa expert. A range of Chinese notation systems were introduced, before students were led through interactive practical activities engaging these systems. Reflecting on the success of our workshops alongside student feedback, we conclude that intercultural musical experiences encourage students to critically examine their existing skillsets. Intercultural dialogue presents an opportunity to mobilise these skills and recognise their diverse potential.

KEYWORDS:

• Aural perception
• music skills
• phenomenology
• liquid modernity
• diversification
• Chinese music

Introduction

Western music educators are increasingly aware of the need to build curricula with more diverse cultural content. Speaking at the Society for Music Theory in 2019, Philip Ewell (2021) called attention to ‘Music Theory’s White Racial Frame’ and argued that the modern-day teaching of music in the West is continually informed by assumptions of white superiority. Ewell’s paper was controversial and influential, leading to numerous rebuttals (most notably in a special edition of the Journal of Schenkerian Studies) while also inspiring others to critically reassess the longstanding methods of Western music pedagogy – including analysis, history, and aural skills training (Chaouat 2020; Fruehwald 2021; Lavengood 2021).

Ewell was not the first to raise this issue. In ‘Equity and Music Education: Euphemisms, Terminal Naivety, and Whiteness,’ Hess (2017) uses critical race theory to analyse how class and race hierarchies have shaped music education in the West. Her subsequent book, Music Education for Social Change (2019), offers examples of how these oppressive structures can be challenged by the modern ‘activist-musician’. Walker (2020) similarly highlights the narrow scope of tertiary music history curricula, and advocates for contextualising Western art music within an inclusive global history of music.

Yet these and other likeminded scholars discourage tokenistic gestures of inclusiveness, arguing instead for collaborative forms of diversification that move beyond mere ‘colonial cartography’ (Hess 2021). Bradley (2021) urges music educators to develop collectivist activities that encourage ‘we-mode’ thinking. A focus on group thinking with an anti-racist foundation, Bradley argues, offers individuals ‘access to more knowledge and better understanding of those with whom we interact, including their identities, their cultural knowledge, and the Backgrounds (sic) that influence their thoughts and actions’ (10). Working at a Western music conservatory in multicultural Sydney, Australia, we are aware of these issues and the need to respond to real inequalities within our institution and field.

In this article, we analyse a range of social and cultural factors that are causing us to reconsider the way we teach tertiary-level aural skills. We outline a series of intercultural music skills lessons that were conducted in our aural perception classrooms. We discuss students’ responses to these experiences, aiming to identify our students’ openness to non-Western musical content. Through this experiment in curriculum diversification, we seek to explore how encounters with non-Western music might ultimately strengthen the skills of our graduates. We then discuss the possibility of a future form of Western music education that combines a solid foundation of practical skills built on the Western tradition with advanced intercultural competencies. We argue that this approach will address the abovementioned social justice issues while also developing musicians who are capable of interrogating, adapting, and transferring their traditional Western skillset throughout their careers.

The human condition in the twenty-first century

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman began using the phrase ‘liquid modernity’ to describe the current phase of humanity. According to Bauman (2007), centuries of progress driven by rational human thought, supported and enabled by the general expectation that institutions will act in their community’s best interest, had yielded to a new phase of globalisation, mobility, fragmentation, and precarity (1–4). This, in turn, resulted in a weakening of ‘solid institutions with a life expectation much longer than that of individual life projects’ (Bauman and Tester 2001, 77). The term ‘post-modernity’ was insufficient as we have remained committed to the characteristically modern obsession with progress and self-sufficiency. Yet we are no longer grounded by our cultural roots. We are, instead, ‘like ships anchoring successively or intermittently in various ports of call’ (Bauman 2009, 20).

Liquid life can be described as ‘episodic’: a series of rolling projects replacing what might once have been a ‘whole life’ project (Bauman and Tester 2001, 89). This contemporary condition has been directly linked to an increased prevalence of loneliness. Adopting Bauman’s perspective in analysing data from a range of surveys conducted in Australia at the beginning of this century, Franklin (2012) notes that the ‘values of collective belonging have come to be seen as an encumbrance and an obstacle to the exercise of freedom and choice’ (25). Thus, in the pursuit of individuality, we cast off our support structures. The problem, for Franklin, lies in the failure of Australian policy makers to understand and cater to the needs of a willingly detached population. Where individualism is stigmatised, loneliness may become a significant social burden.

This emancipatory shift has a direct impact upon the choices individuals make in their professional lives, as Sultana (2017) describes a ‘context where solidarity is no longer valued, and the notion of the entrepreneurial, self-creating individual attains quasi-heroic status’ (68). Aspirational individuals seek opportunities to mobilise socially and geographically, and educational choices are reframed as ‘biographical solutions, that is, as active choices to invest time, money, and effort in the hope of realising imagined futures and new identities’ (Singh and Doherty 2007, 120). In response to these new market demands, a new entrepreneurialism has emerged within the tertiary education sector. The ‘entrepreneurial university’ prioritises the development of new curricula and modes of teaching, while expanding its outreach into the public sphere (Barnett 2010, 35–38).

In Higher Education in Liquid Modernity, Oxenham (2013) presents tertiary study as akin to ‘a cosmetic operation that produces charm and gives pleasure, but has low aspirations to change anything because it believes that everything is changing anyway’ (67). The modern Western university was originally designed with a view to cultivating culture upon which nations could be built. However, those same institutions have morphed into passive tools of mass civilisation where transferrable skills – separated from ideals – are sold to those ‘dropping anchor’ en-route to the dynamic workforce: ‘Competences help the individual adapt to reality, and since reality happens to be market-driven, liquid education helps the soul adapt to the realities of the market’ (88). Crucially, Oxenham observes, liquid education is anti-elitist and places high value on diversity and tolerance. Yet these emphases and the environment of ‘commitment-phobia’ they create also ‘deprive the learning community of the right to embed its students within a tradition and to carry that tradition into society’ (166).

Western music education in liquid modernity

Many music conservatories in the West, including in Australia, have now been assimilated by universities and are, to varying extents, affected by these recent trends and value shifts (Fadnes 2021). However, the primary purpose of the conservatory remains to train the next generation of musicians to perpetuate a very specific cultural heritage, with little consideration given to either individuality or social reality (Gaunt et al. 2021, 8). They can therefore be seen as relatively solid institutions standing firm within this liquid social context. At the Sydney Conservatorium of Music (a faculty within the University of Sydney; hereafter, SCM), most of our students are studying Western instruments, playing Western repertoire in Western ensembles, drawing on extensive pre-tertiary training in Western musicianship. Here, as at other conservatories and music academies, aural skills pedagogy has served to improve the performance and analysis of Western music. The same is true in China and across South-East Asia, where the conservatory system is based on Western values and pedagogies (Caillouët 2020).

Teaching methods that remain widespread today are legacies of the first modern conservatory, the Paris Conservatoire, which was founded in 1795 and subsequently standardised the teaching of sight-singing and dictation (Andrianopoulou 2019, 14–15). These methods aim to develop a musician’s ‘inner ear’, strengthen their aural imagination, and enable them to understand the Western music they hear. The development of these skills of perception is a long-term – in some cases, ‘whole life’ – endeavour that enables a musician to become immersed in their Western musical practices. All of us begin our implicit music education in infancy, as we unconsciously learn the patterns and structures that dominate the music we encounter in our daily lives (Hannon and Trainor 2007). This process of enculturation precedes formal education or training, and it provides the basic mental representations that we use to ‘make sense’ of music (Sloboda 2005, 265). The conservatory education uses centuries-old music theory to solidify the knowledge we have been developing since birth. This explicit musical knowledge, representing long-cultivated cultural roots, can then be applied to diverse and creative music-making.

The attachment of aural skills training to strict theoretical frameworks clearly reflects a modern obsession with imposing order on our environment and eliminating ambiguity (Bauman and Tester 2001, 78–79). This obsession can mean that anything not conforming to existing models and structures is met with indifference, confusion, or even disdain (Bauman, Portera, and Mazzeo 2021, 25). In Western music, our very models are a product of modernity, its ideals, and the technologies it produced: tonal relations, metric alignment, and strict two-dimensional notation (Walker 2020). The apparent need to make sense of music with exclusive reference to these models has recently led many music theorists – especially in North America – to argue that their field is grounded in racism and ableism (Ewell 2021; Straus 2021). As a solid institution arguably stuck in the ways of old modernity, the conservatory has thus become a pariah in the liquid education space. On the other hand, those opting to immerse themselves in this specialist environment may find refuge from the loneliness and anxiety that many in contemporary society face. We therefore intend to explore how Western conservatories might engage with non-Western musical cultures without sacrificing or diminishing the fundamental strengths of their programmes.

These recent discussions around curriculum diversification and decolonisation highlight that teaching music (and other disciplines) through a Western lens leads to a lack of non-Western cultural representation, which equates to a significant cultural misalignment with wider society. For example, Lavengood (2021) argues that the limited tools available to Western music theorists have caused a scholarly neglect of much of the music encountered within the social space. As a means of correcting this misalignment, educators and policy makers have explicitly sought to include non-Western content in their music curricula. In Australia, the inclusion of Indigenous, Middle Eastern, and Asian music begins in primary school for many children (Cain 2015). Yet their tertiary-trained teachers are both ill-equipped to engage meaningfully with such diverse material, and hesitant to defocus this early stage of explicit music education. At the other extremity, Francis (2021) has outlined an advanced aural unit, developed at the Royal College of Music, London, in which students analyse Western popular and non-Western music excerpts. It is also commonplace for sight-singing courses to include simple melodies (such as national anthems) from diverse cultures (Karpinski and Kram 2017; Noda 2017).

Concluding The Routledge Companion to Aural Skills Pedagogy with an eight-point ‘Manifesto for Aural Skill Education,’ Cleland and Fleet (2021) explicitly advocate for the inclusion of ‘examples from outside Western European Art Musics’ (481). Yet these documented examples of intercultural musical encounters in the classroom are episodic in that they likely have minimal lasting impact on students’ musical thinking. In some cases, the short-term study of music from a foreign culture is used as a gateway to more general intercultural awareness (Amin 2020; Arya 2015). However, more shallow attempts to diversify risk perpetuating ‘illusions of cultural universalism’ (Kolakowski 1991), as we overestimate our ability to understand the perspectives of others.

If musicians are to be ‘makers in society’ (Gaunt et al. 2021, 9), then by developing solid musical ears that are designed to function in a fixed cultural setting alone, we are doomed to produce musicians who are entirely unprepared for contemporary social reality. As Madrid (2017) suggests, ‘the current crisis of the classical music industry will eventually force conservatory-like programmes that still focus on Western art music to redefine themselves in ways that prove to be more relevant to the world awaiting their music graduates’ (124). May we progress beyond the now defunct version of modernity that gave rise to our Western music institutions and the teaching methods upon which they were founded?

The challenge for higher education institutions is to prepare their graduates for the world into which they are ‘thrown.’ In Bauman’s view, the deregulation of the job market in liquid modernity ‘transforms a well-profiled, logically coherent body of skills and habits from the asset it used to be into the handicap it now is’ (1997, 23). Far from landing in a stable job with, say, a publicly funded orchestra, today’s classical music performance graduate (if indeed they proceed to forge a career in their field of study) will likely find themselves working multiple jobs in a range of guises such as teacher and performer (Miksza and Hime 2015). Within those roles, they may well be required to work across a diverse range of genres and styles – perhaps even picking up secondary instruments. It would be impossible to acquire all relevant skills over the course of a single conservatory study programme.

Musicians must therefore prepare to mobilise their skills so that they are an asset, both inside and outside traditional Western musical contexts. This kind of ‘knowledge travel’ is at the heart of academic entrepreneurialism (Barnett 2010, 41–43). At a time of decreasing levels of arts-directed financial support from governments around the world, an entrepreneurial mindset is increasingly valued among those entering creative fields such as music (de Reizabal and Benito Gómez 2020). Rather than promoting diversity for diversity’s sake, we consider whether non-Western cultural influences can actively improve Western higher educational practices by aligning these practices with contemporary market demands.

Chinese music in Sydney

Arguably the most significant diversification initiative taken at the SCM in recent memory was the creation of a large-scale non-Western music ensemble: The Chinese Music Ensemble (hereafter, CME). The CME has, over seven years, had a tangible impact on the lives of a broad range of tertiary students and their teachers (Ingram, Liu, and Ng 2021). However, it is crucial to note that the CME is an anomaly within this institution, where Western music performance and composition remain the most highly valued pursuits. The CME is the bastion of inclusion and engagement with non-Western culture at the SCM, yet it struggles to receive the same structural support as the ‘traditional’ Western ensembles.

Australia is continuing to expand its international education industry by prioritising the import of students from within the Asia Pacific region (Hong 2020). At the University of Sydney, a significant majority of these students come from China. Elective participation in the CME provides an opportunity for such students to foster connection with fellow members of this unique diaspora community and, most importantly, to gain a sense of belonging and stability within the local community. Nonetheless, if teaching diverse music only engages students and teachers from a specific cultural background, these students and teachers may become further segregated from the wider local community. Furthermore, the perception of segregation may deter domestic students from participating. For the CME to continue to succeed, a healthy cross-section of students from the community must be maintained.

While such initiatives move us towards a more inclusive and diverse learning environment, their impact is only felt by those who choose to become actively involved. Bringing diversity to the core of the conservatory curriculum is the only way to ensure a wide dissemination of intercultural competency. At the SCM, Aural Perception (AP) forms part of the core music skills component undertaken by undergraduate students. We now present a case study of our first attempts at transforming the AP classroom into a space for experimentation in skill mobilisation through intercultural collaboration.

Method

For this exploratory qualitative study, author 2, a Chinese pipa (four-string plucked lute) player drawing on seven years of teaching experience with the CME, designed and delivered two one-hour workshops for AP students: one exploring different notation forms found in Chinese pipa solo tradition, and another focused on the Chinese nanyin pipa tradition (a practice in which the instrument is held horizontally, rather than vertically). The first workshop was ultimately used as a pilot for the final design of our second workshop.

The two authors together designed 21 questions for the students to answer in face-to-face interviews which would be conducted after the initial workshop. When conducting exploratory research such as this, interviews provide the chance for probing follow-up questions which can potentially lead to deeper insight (Jain 2021). However, interviews are also time-consuming, requiring one-to-one engagement with participants and post hoc transcription. As only one participant agreed to be interviewed after our pilot study, we decided to replace interviews with a survey in our main study.

Pilot study

The aim of the first workshop was to have students apply Western skills and knowledge systems to Chinese repertoire, and to gauge their general awareness of Chinese music and Chinese simplified number notation. Students were presented with a brief introduction to the pipa and the various forms of notation found in Chinese music: wenzi pu (written character notation); jianzi pu (simplified character notation); yanyue banzi pu (half character notation); suzi pu (popular character notation); gongche pu (Gongche notation). They were then taught to read number notation (jian pu, or ‘reduced notation’) and proceeded to sight-sing a range of traditional Chinese melodies.

Nine students attended the first workshop in semester 1, 2022. We invited students to voluntarily attend face-to-face interviews in the days following the workshop. However, only one student accepted an interview with our research assistant. From this experience, we redesigned both our lesson plan and our approach to data collection for the main study conducted in semester 2.

Main study

Buoyed by the ease with which students in these first classes adapted their solfège skills to the unfamiliar notation, the aim of our second workshop was to challenge our students further. In this instance, we sought to push our Western music-focussed students into a non-Western musical environment where their developing skills were less obviously transferrable, and to see whether they recognised the relevance of such exposure. This second workshop focused on the nanyin pipa gongche notation (a Chinese character notation specific to the nanyin pipa), rather than the more accessible number notation. Students were asked to directly interpret the foreign characters after a brief introduction and discussion. They were also required to follow a score and aurally analyse the author’s idiomatic interpretation – a process that moved their engagement beyond issues of pitch/rhythm notation and into the realms of expression, technique, and performance practice.

This time, rather than inviting students to participate in an interview, an anonymous online Qualtrics survey was created. We appropriated the same open-ended interview questions used in semester 1, and students were given time to respond via their own devices at the end of the workshop. Ethics clearance was provided by the Human Research Ethics Committee of The University of Sydney.

Participants

28 students participated in this second workshop. 27 completed the survey (13 male, 14 female). No students had participated in our semester 1 workshop. All participants were enrolled in one of the following undergraduate programmes offered by the SCM: instrumental performance (n = 9), classical voice (9), composition (6), music education (2), musicology (1), contemporary music (1). 11 respondents had some form of non-Western ethnic background (Chinese, Malaysian, Pakistani, Korean, Indonesian). However, only one student had experience working with non-Western notation.

Results and discussion

Analysing the survey responses collected after the second workshop, we found that most students provided positive feedback regarding their in-class encounter with Chinese music. For example, to gauge their openness to exploring the content further, we asked students, ‘If you can’t read Chinese cipher notation, please tell us if you are interested in learning it and why?’ Twenty-five students affirmed their interest, and their reasons included:

It seems like a completely different way of learning notation, and I would love to have a go of learning something different in music.

Very interested in learning and expanding my knowledge. Alternative music notation is an important skill for composers!

If I can find a way to incorporate it into my practice, I would love to expand my knowledge outside of western systems of notation.

I would be interested in learning to read Chinese cipher notation because sometimes my eyes hurt after staring at similar looking music for a long time so it would be nice to continue practicing music but with a new method of seeing it.

I am interested in learning as I believe as a high level academic musician, we should educate ourselves to learn as much about other musical cultures around the world.

Here, some students identified practical ways in which knowledge of Chinese cipher notation might benefit them (adding to their creative skillset or academic expertise, or enabling them to practise their instrument for longer), while others simply exhibited general curiosity and openness. Not all students responded positively, however, with one stating:

Not useful for my career. I rather focus my studies on bettering the skills needed for my future, and this is in western notation.

Although students overwhelmingly welcomed this limited exposure to diverse musical content, and showed willingness to pursue it further, their responses also reveal low levels of expectation regarding non-Western content. This reflects the current understanding of Western music conservatories as lacking in non-Western representation and perspectives. When students were asked, ‘What did you initially expect to gain from Aural Perception in terms of cultural diversity, and what do you think you actually gained?’, their responses included:

I wasn’t expecting to gain cultural diversity, but I have gained lots of experiences with different cultural music which is so different to the western style of music making which was cool.

I did not expect any cultural diversity in AP. I have been pleasantly surprised by the guest speakers and the insights into different cultures and their aesthetic values.

I initially thought it would only be western music, but we are gradually learning more and more about different cultures which is great!

Well, I guess like all throughout high school, any kind of aural stuff was also based on Western tradition, so I didn't really expect to learn any outside of that, so I was really happy that we did get to a little bit.

I expected to gain skills in sight singing and notation, but this course has made me realise how different notation can be and different perspectives in the notation and performance process (differing from western styles of composition).

Among these positive responses, most encouraging are those that demonstrate how the encounter with Chinese music caused students to identify gaps in their musical worldview. In such instances, students demonstrate both an openness to more diverse musical experiences and a newfound recognition that Western musical systems and values are by no means universal. Some students’ responses did, nonetheless, speak to a wariness of tokenism:

Didn’t expect to gain much in relation to cultural diversity. And the course has mostly met that expectation excluding a few one-off lessons.

I expected nothing from cultural diversity in Aural Perception and received exactly that.

These comments may stem from a lack of clarity, on our part, regarding intended learning outcomes. Scepticism would indeed be justified if, for example, our aim was for students to master ‘Chinese aural skills’ in a one-off activity. Therefore, to prevent a situation in which lessons focusing on non-Western music are dismissed as over-ambitious, anomalous deviations from the core curriculum, we should more directly inform students of our purpose: to develop their abilities to mobilise and transfer their existing aural skills.

The above survey responses demonstrate how students’ expectations are influenced by their previous education. Some comments directly point to a lack of non-Western music content in pre-tertiary education systems. Working in the tertiary sector, the issues of diversity in primary and secondary education are outside our scope and we are only able to work with the students these systems have graduated to us. Thus, in concluding this article, we will specifically consider how our students’ relative lack of exposure to non-Western music might in fact facilitate uniquely meaningful and thought-provoking experiences within our classrooms.

Musical cultures in dialogue

The classroom experiences described above caused our students to think critically about their pre-existing understanding of music and, crucially, to recognise that there are alternatives to Western modes of musical thought. This is, in itself, a positive outcome, as the American-Chinese ethnomusicologist Bell Yung once stated: ‘We must recognise that Western art music is not music with a capital M but merely one kind of music’ (Campbell 1995, 40). In music higher education, such moments of recognition create vital opportunities for perspective-altering reflection. Students in these circumstances perceive non-Western music as a disruption, forcing them to reconsider the musical object and the subjectivity of the tools with which they relate to that object. Rather than devaluing these as one-off tokenistic episodes, we argue that the disruptive nature of these experiences highlights their effectiveness.

Philosophy scholar Lawrence Hatab (2018) uses the term contravention to describe such ontological disruptions in his interpretation of Heidegger’s phenomenology and the zuhanden-vorhanden relation. Contraventions pull one out of their immersed activity. Crucially, immersion is a pre-condition for the contravention. Hatab uses the example of writing as an immersive activity, and even this mundane activity is dependent on formal training (most of us are explicitly taught how to hold a pencil and write in childhood). Immersion in music might equate to an immediate aural understanding of musical material, through which we perceive, for example, tonal relationships and metric structure. We might even imagine the movements required to replicate the sounds on an instrument. Again, such ‘ready-to-hand’ skills and expertise only come with extensive formal training. Contravention, according to Hatab, leads to an exposition: a new attention to, and analysis of, the tools with which one was operating. Returning to our AP case study, we contend that this realisation presents a unique pedagogical opportunity: to redirect existing foundational skills toward gaining new competencies through intercultural dialogue.

Expanding on the work of Heidegger, Gadamer 2004) proposed that dialogue allows us to fuse our experiential ‘horizons’ with those of the Other, and together we thus ‘rise to a higher universality’ (304). However, Soviet scholar Mikhail Bakhtin subsequently argued against this illusory goal, insisting that the relationship of externality between two subjects in dialogue must be maintained (Gardiner 1998, 64). Bakhtin’s dialogic theory has been used as a framework for discussing intercultural engagement. According to Godzich (1991), ‘Bakhtin identified discourses as the vectors of cultural conflicts’ and ‘carriers of cultural orientations’ (17, original italics). Dialogue, according to this framework, occurs when two conflicting orientations meet. In the context of music perception, such conflict arises whenever two subjects draw upon two distinct mental models in attempting to ‘make sense’ of a single musical object. Eungjun Min (2001) suggests that those adopting a Bakhtinian perspective, whether in intercultural communication or other contexts, are forced to become self-conscious and to ‘reevaluate (sic) their methodologies’ (9). In re-evaluating the methodologies that have refined their musical minds through decades of implicit and explicit education, our students should come to recognise the potential mobility of their expert skills.

Concluding remarks

Writing at the end of the twentieth century, historian David Lowenthal (1998) observed an emerging ‘cult of heritage’ promising a sense of belonging and purpose in the Western world. He writes, ‘A century or even fifty years ago the untrammelled future was all the rage; today we laud legacies bequeathed by has-beens’ (1). The conservatory is where we meet to laud the legacy of Western music, and where aspiring musicians are offered purpose and stability amongst the anxiety and anomie of liquid-modern life. However, tertiary music education can offer much more and, if its purpose is to prepare graduates for life after study, it is obliged to do so. Musicians educated in an environment that prioritises regular encounters with non-Western music will enter their professions with the ‘reflexive mindset’ that is key to the capacity for lifelong learning (Westerlund et al. 2022).

When we encourage students to engage with alternative modes of hearing and thinking about music, they are free to interrogate the heritage entrusted to them. In A Will to Learn: Being a Student in an Age of Uncertainty, Barnett (2007) poses the question, ‘Isn’t this idea central to the Western idea of higher education, that we look to our students acquiring this capability of coming at things in their “own way”?’ (2007, 43). This can only be achieved when multiple perspectives are made available to students. Barnett uses the term ‘disencumbered’, which resonates when reflecting on standard aural skills pedagogy in the West. However, our goal here is not to destroy the rigid frameworks that have been built into modern Western music education curricula. Rather, we aim to create scenarios in which those frameworks are loosened – and to have students recognise that their skills will remain an asset in such situations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Sydney Conservatorium of Music Internal Research Project Grant scheme.

Notes on contributors

Alex Chilvers

Dr Alex Chilvers is Academic Fellow (Aural Perception) at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, the University of Sydney. He holds degrees in information technology and music, and completed his PhD in composition in 2019. He has published musicological research investigating folkloric influences in the modern music of Poland, where he also studied. He is an Honorary Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Macquarie University, collaborating on interdisciplinary projects studying the social benefits of intercultural music engagement. He is an active composer within the Australian new music scene and collaborates regularly with period instrument specialists.

Lu Liu

Dr Lu Liu 刘璐 (also known as Lulu Liu) is a China-trained pipa performer and Australia-trained scholar who received her PhD from the University of Sydney in 2019 for a thesis entitled ‘The Chinese pipa and its music, from conservatory to concert hall and beyond: Case studies of pedagogues, popularisers and promoters.’ She has contributed a growing number of articles and chapters in journals and books while continuing to perform new pipa works by contemporary composers. She is a Lecturer at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, where she directs the Chinese Music Ensemble, as well as teaching pipa principal study undergraduate and postgraduate students and acting as SCM’s senior advisor for Chinese music strategy.