Bringing music education into the 21st century
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Ashish Khan (far right), sarod master in Hindustani tradition of North India, teaches students on the instrument in 1970. Photo courtesy of Patricia Campbell/UW

. ETHNOMUSICOLOGY, from Page 33

each other because of that.”

Dudley said an appealing thing about the discipline of Ethnomusicology in general is that research for it must be done in the field.

For Dudley, whose area of research is Caribbean music, such as steel bands, this means many trips to the Caribbean. He said it’s important to stay involved in your craft through research in the field. He said it can be difficult to balance being a teacher and performer of your craft, but he tries to swing both.

“One of the things we have right now is two faculty members who are very active performers,” he said. “That might be a model going forward that we could hope to maintain.”

Besides positions as professors, Ethnomusicology students can look forward to careers in museums, archives and academic performance, Campbell said.

Looking to the future, Dudley said he is excited to see the connections that can be made between Ethnomusicology and music education. He said he’s been seeing a lot of crossover between courses and students in the Ethnomusicology and Music Education programs.

Dudley said he is encouraged by seeing these students thinking in creative ways about how music teachers can “diversify their repertoires they teach in schools” and connect better with their communities.

“It’s a difficult time to innovate, but I think there’s a lot of creative thinking going on in this program about some new ways to do music education and make it exciting and bring it into the 21st century,” he said.

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