Research summary
What is the nature of musical experience and how are musical experiences connected to other parts of culture and society? These are the questions that ethnomusicology—the study of music in its cultural context—aims to address. Dr. Harris Berger is shedding new light on the nature of musical experience (the phenomenology of music) and using information from field studies to discover new ideas about the nature of music, the aesthetics of performance, and the political meaning of culture.
As Canada Research Chair in Ethnomusicology, he is co-authoring a monograph on phenomenological ethnomusicology, producing two conferences on the phenomenology of music (which will lead to edited books), and pursuing a new publication series. He and his research team are also exploring the applied ethnomusicology of Newfoundland and Labrador in order to create two online archives of traditional music, a CD series, and live events that showcase the music of the province and its region.