Why Global Musicianship?

In too many instances, professional music education does not prepare students for the multicultural/intercultural/transcultural world in which they will actually live their musical lives. Musicians, in turn, fail to connect with the real musical lives of those who would celebrate music with them—to great loss. Global Musicianship is therefore an imperative in our time, but it also embodies a dilemma, because no one can be expert in the deep details of all musics and their histories. In that light, Global Musicianship seeks to focus on creating experts in music as synthesis, based on the premise that musics have always been syntheses of stylistic elements; that these syntheses are ever evolving; and that this evolution has been super-accelerated by technology and instantaneous communication into the 21st century. Musicians therefore benefit greatly from first understanding the principles at the heart of human musics (“qualified universals”: see Hijleh Towards a Global Music Theory), and then how to understand their distinctive manifestations in any music. Global Musicianship is a new definition of expertise for a new era.