2025 Teaching World Music Symposium

Format and Themes

The symposium will include two keynote addresses, three lunch-time performances, two evening concerts, an open-mic night and a showcase world music concert, as well as research paper sessions, roundtable discussions and workshops/demonstrations.

To expand the term "world music" and its possibilities, the symposium will focus on three broad pedagogical trends:

• World music in education: teaching methods, teacher training, the use of technology, the adoption of culturally responsive pedagogy, and instruction in music theory and music history

• World music in performance and composition: the tension between preserving tradition and developing new stylistic approaches and stylistic fusions, as well as the use of mixed media to enhance musical creations in a wide variety of genres (i.e. visual arts, dance, theater)

• World music in cultural studies: K-12 social studies and interdisciplinary studies in the arts and humanities (anthropology, history, art history, foreign languages, political science, sociology, intercultural communication, global studies, etc.)

Session Types

Individual Spoken Research Paper/Artistry Project

The 30-minute research paper session presents research, a significant discovery or an artistry project (e.g., a composition). You have 20 minutes to read your paper and 10 minutes for a question-and-answer (Q&A) session.

Please submit an abstract of 250-300 words with a tentative bibliography. You may include significant audio/visual documentation if submitting an original composition or performance.

Roundtable Discussion

The 90-minute roundtable discussion includes six speakers giving 10-minute presentations and a 30-minute discussion.

If you wish to organize your own panel of no more than four presenters, please provide the title of the session and an abstract (250-300 words), as well as the name, academic/professional position and a brief biography of each presenter. 

Workshop

The 55-minute workshop/demonstration is a hands-on, interactive session that helps participants learn about materials, methods or resources. It consists of a 45-minute presentation followed by 10 minutes for discussion.   

Please include a short abstract (200-250 words) with an outline of the activity and a list of instruments and necessary equipment. NIU has a large collection of world music instruments you may request.

Possible Topics

The following topic suggestions for each theme are meant as points of departure to encourage a wide range of creative, exciting submissions.

World music in music education:

• Research exploring teaching world music in higher education

• Research exploring strategies in teaching-methods classes (elementary, secondary)

• Research exploring the application of world music idioms to developing musicianship (ear training, improvisation skills)

 World music performance and composition:

• Compositions that expand the repertoire through inclusion of world music idioms and/or creative multi-media or mixed-media elements

• Performances involving creative fusions of world music idioms that point to new artistic directions, with or without creative multi-media or mixed-media elements

World music in cultural studies:

• Research exploring the application of world music in K-12 cultural and global studies

Research exploring the connections between world music and other arts and humanities disciplines 

 History of World Music at NIU

NIU Presidential Teaching Professor Emeritus Kuo-Huang Han and his graduate student Jeff Abell titled the April 1975 concert "Musica Exotica," to both attract a large audience and suggest the "exotic" excitement of the non-western classical music featured in the concert. For most audience members from the NIU community, this concert was their first opportunity to see and hear instruments and music styles from around the world.

Fifty years later, NIU's world music offerings are no longer exotic but rather an integral part of the fabric of our community and a distinctive element of NIU's proud tradition of excellence. This is the powerful result of the tireless efforts of generations of enthusiastic scholars, performing artists and educators on and off the NIU campus who have developed and presented hundreds of concert performances and outreach programs over the past half-century.

Today, it is a matter of course to hear NIU's panoply of world music ensembles and our excellent steel band. Our rich, deep and pioneering history has both paved a nationwide path for academic world music studies and is simultaneously a reflection of broadening trends in musical idioms and practices since the 1970s. It is precisely this history and trajectory that has generated the theme of our symposium.