Intercultural musicianship - a collective and participatory form of music exchange across the globe

Oct 15, 2026

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Cultural boundaries are no longer constrained by geography. The intercultural music-making initiative supported social cohesion for North-West University students in South Africa, enabling them to prepare authentic musical artefacts for “export” via video, online chat rooms, and web-cam communication. Digital links connected exporters to artefacts while allowing Charles Sturt University students in Australia to engage through repeated encounters and create performances using Orff melodic and non-melodic instruments.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages10

Reading Time25 min

AccessFree to download

Providing opportunity for intercultural exchange

Communicating with digital technologies

Intercultural musicianship: a collective and participatory form of music exchange across the globe Christopher Klopper Griffith University Abstract Cultural boundaries are no longer geographically dictated. This intercultural music making initiative made provision for the social cohesion of the North-West University, South Africa Tswana students as they prepared musical artefacts for ‘export’ that convey, confirm and explore their culture of birth. Advancement in emerging digital technologies assisted to facilitate the export through video, on-line chat room and web-cam communication. Such technology supports the conveyance of originality, authenticity and context. The exporters were not remotely detached from the musical artefact but were connected digitally. The ‘importers’, Charles Sturt University, Australia were able to access the musical artefacts through repeated, close and careful encounters. The students in Australia were then tasked with having to create a performance of the musical artefact using Orff melodic and non-melodic instruments. In so doing this intercultural music exchange results in a collective and participatory music-making initiative. Keywords: Intercultural musicianship, music exchange, globalisation Australian Journal of Music Education 2010:1, 48-57 Providing opportunity for intercultural exchange Globalisation and the rapid advancement of technology have contributed to the expansion of Marshall McLuhan’s (1967) envisioned‘global village’ and intercultural exchange. Communication technology enables us to link and transact simultaneously with events from the most remote parts of the world and connects us to persons we may never meet in person (Martin & Nakayama, 2007) . Such meetings and transactions open pathways to and possibilities for intercultural exchange. One such opportunity is the extension of the traditional classroom setting to include community representatives where the teacher/lecturer is not the source and/ or provider of knowledge but rather the facilitatorof learning experiences. This article reflectson a pilot project, Orff-Tswana, focussing on intercultural music exchange between students of North-West University (NW), South Africa and Charles Sturt University (CSU), Australia. The Orff-Tswana intercultural music-making initiative (Figure 1) encouraged dialogue and social transaction between two disparate groups of students that resulted in a collective and participatory music-making initiative supported by the original custodians of the musical artefact preparing the material for ‘export’ ensuring authenticity and capturing the context of tradition. Details of the project are presented as an exemplar of how intercultural music-making traditions can be shared and experienced transnationally by utilising digital technologies for communication between trans-national higher education institutions. The project has laid the foundation for further research to recognise how individuals relate to intercultural music artefact exchange in varying and multiple ways. 48 2010, No. 1 Figure 1: Orff-Tswana: an intercultural music-making initiative Communicating with digital technologies While anthropologists and ethnomusicologists have long insisted that musical traditions be seen in the context of the wider culture of which they are a product (Hendrickse & Thomson, 2005), music educationalists have often described and treated music as a discrete entity. Within the discipline of music the conditions for bordercrossings by music practitioners and scholars in the field of ethnomusicology have been gradually extended over the last half century (Shehan Campbell, 2003) providing a wider and deeper understanding of the plurality of musical cultures around the globe. Swanwick (1988, p. 101) described musical meaning as ‘sufficiently abstract to “travel” across cultural boundaries, to step out of its own time and place’. Kwami, Akrofi and Adams (2003) argued for intercultur

FAQs

How did digital technologies support the intercultural music exchange?

Video, online chat rooms, and web-cam communication enabled exporters to share musical artefacts with importers while maintaining digital connection and conveying originality, authenticity, and context.

What did the students in Australia do with the exported musical artefacts?

They created performances of the musical artefacts using Orff melodic and non-melodic instruments, based on careful repeated encounters with the materials.

Why was the initiative described as collective and participatory?

It encouraged dialogue and social transactions between two student groups, supported by the original custodians of the musical artefact, resulting in shared participation in music-making.

Oct 15, 2026

Upload by Aldword