Eva Saether

Struggling for integration: universalist and separatist discourses within El Sistema Sweden

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the El Sistema programme, which started up in Sweden in 2010 with the objective to deal with segregation problems typical for Swedish urban areas. The purpose of the article is to examine how promoting integration through music and music education is constructed within El Sistema as a way to help children growing up in multi-ethnic suburbs participate in Swedish society. The empirical material used derives from two different ethnographic research studies conducted in Gothenburg and Malmö. The results show that integration is constructed through two antagonistic discourses competing for hegemony. In the first, the idea of integration is based on a rhetoric of similarities between people playing music together, a rhetoric drawing on the modernist idea of humans as universal and alike. In the second, integration is articulated through a rhetoric of differences related to cultural affiliation.

Please, give me space: Findings and Implications of the GLOMUS Intercultural Music Camp, Ghana 2011.

Folk music programmes have been a major feature of higher education music departments across the Nordic region for several decades. Still, programmes that offer the opportunity to deeply study non-European music (other than jazz) are very rare in most of Europe, and programmes in music education that offer such opportunities at anything more than a superficial level had been virtually non-existent until the launch of the international collaborative Nordic Master of Global Music (GLOMAS) programme at WOMEX in 2009. This article is based on observations and interviews with participants at the GLOMUS1 camp, an intensive post-graduate music course affiliated with the GLOMAS programme that was first held in Ghana (3–13 April 2011), as well as questionnaires administered at the beginning and end of this unique event and examination of the first five master theses produced by GLOMAS students. The findings suggest that the camp was largely successful in terms of advancing creative artistry, intercultural understanding and pedagogical competence via both traditional and experimental fusion musicianship that transcends cultural boundaries. The conclusions illustrate how similar programmes might be implemented in other settings to enhance the diversity and relevance of music teacher training.

Music in motion : diversity and dialogue in Europe ; study in the frame of the "ExTra! Exchange Traditions" project

Diverse musical cultures of migrant communities have existed in Europe for centuries. This volume will focus on different musical traditions and practices, but also raises questions such as: how are musical traditions of migrants integrated into education and public music; can music facilitate transcultural dialogue; and, to what extent does the practice and performance of music reassert cultural traditions in a foreign environment. Answers to those questions as well as a review on what can be observed in twenty-first century Europe are gathered in various thematic sections; model projects will provide a practical insight into the life and work with music of migrant and minority cultures in Europe. This volume results from a project of the European Music Council, a non-governmental network of music organizations.