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20/11/25 - Prof. Huib Schippers - FUAIM Lecture, Ó Riada Hall, 11:00am
Music as Intangible Cultural Heritage: Understanding Cultural Ecosystems
From time immemorial, communities (or at least those in power) have supported learning, creating and performing music in myriad ways: from nurturing bodies to feeding egos, and from providing patronage to granting subsidies. Over the past decades, as the world and technology change at unprecedented pace, awareness of the need to protect the diversity of music practices on our planet has grown exponentially, particularly since the influential 2003 UNESCO Convention on the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. In this lecture, I will briefly discuss the genesis of this Convention with both its intended and unintended consequences. From there, we will explore the idea of "cultural ecosystems," an alternative approach to understanding the forces impacting on the vitality and sustainability of any music practice.
Huib Schippers is Distinguished Changjiang Professor and Director of the new International Centre for Cultural Sustainability at Zhaoqing University in Guangdong Province. He is one of the world’s leading scholars on the crossroads of music education, community music, music industry, cultural diversity, and sustainability. In over three decades of leadership roles in arts and academia, he founded the World Music School in Amsterdam (1990-1996) and played a key role in realising the World Music & Dance Centre in Rotterdam (2001-2006). He was Founding Director of the innovative Queensland Conservatorium Research Centre in Australia (2003-2015) before moving to Washington DC as Director/Curator of the iconic label Smithsonian Folkways Recordings (2016-2020). In 2022, he was UC Regents’ Professor at UCLA, and in 2023 Visiting Professor at Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. Among over 200 publications from his hand for scholarly and general audiences, most noteworthy are Facing the music: Shaping music education from a global perspective(Oxford University Press 2010); Sustainable futures for music cultures: An ecological perspective (OUP, 2016) and Music, Communities, Sustainability: Developing policies and practices (OUP, 2022). The latter two are part of an ongoing research trajectory focusing on thinking about ecology and sustainability in the arts.