The Global Musicianship Project

Global Musicianship is a set of perspectives, concepts, and competencies with which twenty-first-century musicians might thrive in a musical world that is increasingly multicultural, intercultural, transcultural. In that sense it is not theory and analysis only, but a view of human musical history and of human music making in which to situate analytical and (re-)creative skills.

• We need first to become experts in the analysis of musical synthesis: music as a synergism of eclectic influences, as an integration of interrelated and overlapping elements of time, pitch, timbre, and process. We need a music theory that fosters in musicians both the abilities and the sensibilities for a life of musical freedom and flexibility in the context of a musical world that now has conceptually limitless creative possibilities.

• We need also to become experts in understanding human musical history as a history of synthesis. This is both an imperative and a dilemma. No one can learn all of the special histories of every musical culture. A single, manageable narrative is needed for the development of global musicianship for a global age.

• We are therefore actually in need of a global musicology, a synergy of theoretical/analytical and historical perspectives and tools for how music has evolved as globalization has unfolded over millennia. In this, we navigate musics as ongoing syntheses of syntheses, accelerating into the future.

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