Music for Global Human Development
Music is a social technology of tremendous potential for positive social change. Music for Global Human Development (m4ghd) is an approach to applied ethnomusicology. M4GHD entails participatory action research projects in music & development (humanized in aims and methods), centered on global collaborations between academics, NGOs, government organizations, musicians, and others, applying ethnomusicology to real-world social issues, focusing on peoples who have been marginalized--socially, politically, economically--by colonialism and its aftermath, whether in the "developing" world or not. These music-centered projects, often including also related arts (dance, poetry, drama) as well, are ideally twinned with evaluative evidence-based research, gauging project impact through anthropological and sociological study. They are carried out as collaborative partnerships with artists and other experts in each locale.
M4GHD is a project of the Canadian Centre for Ethnomusicology
M4GHD comprises three main branches:
- (1) Songs for sustainable peace and development: primarily via local mass-mediated popular music styles, to disseminate messages relevant to crucial development issues, especially public health, education, peace, tolerance, and constructive critique...and especially to the youth, while building a culture of music. This project focuses on social weft, the horizontal threads the bind society today. A crucial application is GIVING VOICE TO HEALTH:
- Traditional music and dance for health education and promotion in rural northern Ghana. This, our principal current project, in collaboration with the Youth Home Cultural Group in Tamale, Ghana, centers on health promotion in rural areas of Ghana's Northern Region, via dance dramas combining music, dance, and theatre, and performed live in regional villages. Sustainability is ensured by initiating also local village-based musical groups carrying the same repertoire. All this is coupled with research -- survey, focus group, and participant observation ethnography-- along with monitoring and evaluation, whose results feed back to guide the project.
- Sanitation and its accompanying documentary.
- Music for Ebola awareness, prevention and training
- Music for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health, funded by Global Affairs Canada development (ex-CIDA), through a Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry grant in collaboration with St. Paul's hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. (http://bit.ly/musmnch)
- (2) Music for cultural continuity and civil society: supporting participatory musical continuity (neither stasis nor displacement) towards broader intergenerational social and cultural connectivity over time--the social "warp"--and hence social solidarity in the present. Ironically one of the most powerful ways to support musical continuity is by injecting "traditional" music into the local media space, which otherwise tends to become filled with global popular music. Subprojects include partnerships with culture organizations in Egypt, Lebanon, and elsewhere. See for instance, in Ghana: Kinka: Songs from Avenorpedo
- (3) Musical tourism: promoting economic development through tourism powered in whole or in part by music and related arts, including special cultural festivals and concert events drawing visitors, regular live performances for tourists who may also visit for other reasons, as well as longer-term practical study of local music and dance with local artists.
Click to view current m4ghd project taxonomy
Please follow the above links to learn more...
For more information contact us: info@m4ghd.org.
--Michael Frishkopf, Professor of Music, University of Alberta
http://frishkopf.org
