Professor Josh Dickson, Head of Traditional Music at Royal Conservatoire of Scotland is delighted to announce a landmark conference on the future of traditional music learning  – Pedagogies, Practices and the Future of Folk Music in Higher Education – to take place from 18-20 January 2018.

Josh writes, “The year 2016 marked the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the BA (Scottish Music) at Scotland’s national conservatoire. We celebrated this milestone at the Royal Conservatoire by taking stock of the significant educational, professional and artistic developments to have taken place since the degree’s first days, re-imagining our degree for the challenges and opportunities of the 21^st century, and re-launching it as the BMus (Traditional Music) and (Traditional Music – Piping). This recent milestone comes at a critical juncture in the development of traditional and folk music in higher education, both in the UK and elsewhere: funding models across much of the UK present challenges to inclusion and participation, but it could be argued that the expectations and aesthetics of today’s emerging traditional musicians present challenges of an even more profound character. Issues of digitization, commodification, transitions to and from higher education, increasingly porous boundaries between genres (alongside increasingly fortified national boundaries in Europe and the West), evolving concepts of performance practice and the role of the individual in tradition are all providing fresh contexts, within which fresh approaches to pedagogy and curriculum are needed if folk an traditional music education at the tertiary level, particularly in the performance-based conservatoire context, is to continue to flourish.”

More information and a call for papers can be found HERE.