NORBERT MEYN
Royal College of Music (UK)
September 2025
Published in Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 24 (5): 60–83 [pdf]. https://doi.org/10.22176/act24.5.60
Abstract: In this article I discuss how a focus on migration and transnational mobility of composers and performers can help to overcome exclusionary methodological nationalism in higher music education and foster an increased awareness of artistic citizenship in a global rather than national arena. Reflecting on insights from participatory action research at the Royal College of Music in London that engaged with the theme of music and migration and encouraged student musicians to explore hybrid transnational identities in classical music, I explore the usefulness of a utopian concept of “global artistic citizenship” as a prototypal term. Attached to historical research about migrant musicians from Nazi Europe who found refuge in Britain during and after World War II, the research invited student musicians to perform repertoire by these previously marginalised composers and become part of a process of reflection about the wider implications of this action. The research took place during four consecutive performance projects involving student performers from diverse backgrounds over a period of three years. Reflections, notes and semi-structured interviews with participants of these projects prompted the wider theoretical discussion of the concept of artistic citizenship in this article. Engaging with Garcia-Cuesta’s suggestion of a more fluid concept of artistic citizenship and recent research about the concept of global citizenship, I develop the prototypal concept of ‘global artistic citizenship’ as a tool for critical reflection and activism within diverse learning communities in higher music education.
Keywords: Music and migration, music education, nationalism, identity, artistic citizenship, inclusivity, arts in society, citizen of the world, action research
Methodological Nationalism in Conservatoire Education
In Western conservatoires such as the Royal College of Music, where the research that underpins this article took place, historical repertoire is often taught and thought of in national containers (Bullock and Tunbridge 2021). Conservatoires focus on the skills and performance traditions associated with Western classical music, and students within them frequently encounter national categorisations through established narratives that align historical repertoire with nations (Riley and Smith 2016). National identification has served as a pedagogical framing tool for a long time, with curricula segregating national repertoires. In particular, vocal repertoire, tied to a language, has been celebrated and taught in national containers, as German, French, English, Italian, Scandinavian, or Russian song and opera are explored in separate classes. The concept of national traditions, exported and disseminated around the globe, shaped the pedagogy of both vocal and instrumental music (Chang 1994; Miller 2002). In addition, performers are often associated with and marketed through their nationality as experts or champions of national repertoires or performance styles, and composers are almost universally associated with nationality through entries in encyclopaedias, national anthologies, and scholarly categorisation. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the most widely used musical encyclopaedia in the English-speaking world, ascribes a main national identity to every composer (Meyn 2021). The ascription of singular national belonging to composers and musicians follows inherited essentialist views, such as those expressed in the 1934 essay “Should Music be National?” by Ralph Vaughan Williams. He argued that a composer’s music should first and foremost command the sympathy of those “who by race, tradition and cultural experience are nearest to him; in fact those of his own nation, or other kind of homogeneous community” (Vaughan Williams 1972, 1).
Such views have continued to spread in music, and have been described and critiqued as methodological nationalism (Chernilo 2011; Glick Schiller and Meinhoff 2011). The widening of access to classical music in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries coincided with the big nation-building projects in Europe and other parts of the world, and the founding of conservatoires themselves was often a matter of national pride, aiming to strengthen national schools of composition and performance. Folkestad (2002) pointed out that during what he called the “national Romantic” period before World War II, “artists and their works were used for educational purposes, in which the aim of using art music, literature and paintings in school teaching was to bring about education in nationality, and to accomplish the formation of national identities” (155). Such musical nationalism was used heavily by fascist regimes, for example in Germany and Italy (Illiano and Sala 2012; Levi 1996).
While such excesses were widely rejected after the war and countered by internationalist initiatives such as the International Society for Contemporary Music, nationalism has continued to influence musical scholarship and music education profoundly to this day (Hebert and Kertz-Welzel 2016; Masters 2022; Riley and Smith 2016). This is even though recent scholarship challenges and disproves essentialist views of music as an expression of national temperament or “spirit”, showing that national music across different nations is remarkably similar and often shares the same syntax (Riley and Smith 2016, 14). In the field of music education, Regelski (2002) criticized essentialist or culturalist perspectives that understand groups, for example nations, as unified cultural entities for relying on “unexamined assumptions,” when accounting for culture “in terms of the symbols, artifacts, and intellectual products that embody the shared values and habits of a group” (9). However, as Bohlmann (2011) argued, the influence of musical nationalism persists because individuals and nations continue to benefit from the use of national containers: “even though so many find nationalism’s impact on music unacceptable, uncoupling nationalism from music has served the interests of no nation” (11).
The exclusionary impact of musical nationalism in higher music education largely remains hidden. As Hebert and Kertz-Weltzel (2016) pointed out, “Music educators often do not seem to fully realize the impact of patriotism and nationalism on the music education curriculum” (1). They concluded that a focus on nationalism and patriotism in music education can promote an “artificial view of heritage and tradition that, while comfortably suggestive of a cohesive national identity, largely neglects the actual musical diversity of cultural minorities residing in most nations” (Hebert and Kertz-Welzel 2016, 175). The idea of homogeneous national cultures is clearly at odds with the increasingly diverse communities that populate modern day conservatoires. While truly inclusive access to higher music education remains unrealized, conservatories today have more international student populations than ever before (Bull et al. 2022). While the average percentage of overseas students in the United Kingdom was 23% in 2023/24 (Lewis, Gower and Bolton 2024, 4), the proportion at the Royal College of Music (RCM) in 2024 exceeded 50%, with over sixty nationalities represented (RCM internal data). In addition, contemporary conservatoire leaders engage in efforts to increase representation of international students in their student bodies, raising awareness of the diversity of nationalities within the student community at all levels (Royal College of Music n.d.).
While students come to a conservatoire such as the RCM to learn classical music traditions, the historical focus on national identity clearly privileges dominant nations, such as Germany, France, and Italy, over others, which were historically seen as exotic or inferior (Taruskin 2001; Riley and Smith 2016). In a Western conservatoire, German, French, or Italian musicians will find more opportunity to proudly enact their national or cultural identities through championing national repertoire than those from formerly colonized nations, who teachers often expect to assimilate. While many of those foreign students assimilate voluntarily and intentionally, the diversity of their lived experience nevertheless warrants critical reflection about the historical relationship between nationalism and music.
Wenger’s (1998) concept of a community of practice, which places learning “in the context of our lived experience of participation in the world” (3), highlights the importance of lived experiences within a community of learners. As diverse student groups combine lived experiences from many parts of the world, a heightened awareness of intercultural, global perspectives becomes important. As issues of identity and cultural differences come to the fore, teachers are called on to develop culturally responsive pedagogies, particularly in group teaching (Johnson 2022; Larke 2013). The Association of European Conservatoires highlighted this issue in its 2002 report Music Education in a Multi-cultural European Society, arguing that group settings are an ideal space to “reformulate what a musician should be—what they have beyond their technical proficiency” (Association Europeenne des Conservatoires 2002, 44). Similarly, Gaunt et al. (2021) have pointed out that “an intercultural axis within group creativity may be transformational at multiple levels” (11). These authors challenge the conservatoire community to reflect on its inherited cultural practices and evolve to accommodate the multiple identities and perspectives of its members, as student musicians learn in group settings and experience co-presence between “performers (each with their own history)” and “between performers and audience or community” (Gaunt et al. 2021, 11).
Such reflection is complicated by the limitations of the concept of diversity, which tends to assign singular belonging and struggles to accommodate fluid and hybrid identities. In their recent edited volume Politics of Diversity in Music Education, Kallio et al. (2021) pointed to “the complex situations that arise when negotiating diversity in practice’, highlighting ‘the ways in which difference is promoted, represented, negotiated, navigated, contained, or challenged in different music education practices” (12). Furthermore, Ford (2021) highlighted how concepts of national and cultural diversity in conservatoires often preserve essentially colonial power structures. While the construction of difference through essentialist national categories in music has served and continues to serve predominately national interests, conservatoire communities need to overcome their reliance on such categories if they want to serve and engage all their members and audiences in what Folkestad (2017) has called the “global, intertextual musical arena” (122).
National and Global Artistic Citizenship
The increased focus in conservatoires and music education in general on social engagement and responsibility for the wider community has found expression in the concept of artistic citizenship (Elliott, Silverman, and Bowman 2016). However, the concept fails to address the inherent tension between its focus on social engagement for a greater good and its association with the exclusionary concept of citizenship, which is still predominately associated with nations. Artistic citizenship portrays artists as citizens with privileges and obligations towards their communities and evokes familiar patriotic narratives of working for the good of the nation. However, it does not sufficiently consider the inequalities in both privileges and obligations that result from national citizenship and appears “unhinged from its associations with state and nationhood” (Bradley 2018, 71). Given the prevalence of methodological nationalism in connection with the repertoire taught in Western conservatoires, the increasing diversity of conservatoire communities warrants a deeper discussion of the connection between artistic citizenship and national citizenship.
In many Western conservatoires, national citizenship still significantly determines the lives and international mobility of students and staff who must abide by different visa rules and right to work regulations. In Britain, national citizenship also determines if students must pay international tuition fees, which cost more than twice as much as “home” fees. National citizenship also determines if students have access to national funding streams. Additionally, after Brexit British students, limited by their nationality, now face diminished access to work opportunities in the European Union. As inequality derived from national identity and citizenship effects the pedagogy of Western classical music both in relation to repertoire as well as differences in rights and privileges among students and staff, developing artistic citizenship requires a negotiation based on an awareness of varying agency resulting from national citizenship and cultural differences. Gaunt et al. (2011) pointed out that a multicultural lens “shifts the concept of artistic citizenship from being one-directional and about an artist giving something back to society, to being about dialogical exchange where artists and their creativity are shaped by the experience, just as the identities and experiences of their participants may be” (11). Elliott, Silverman, and Bowman (2016) argued that “traditional loyalties to sovereign states are declining and transnational, global concepts of citizenship are more appropriate in the context of contemporary arts education” (77).
Considering contemporary realities, such thinking may be seen as wishful and utopian. However, utopian thinking can serve as an important tool for critical reflection and analysis in music education, although it can also relate to “escapism, propaganda and ideologies” (Kertz-Welzel 2022, 102). Garcia-Cuesta (2024) emphasised the connection between citizenship and utopia and proposed a fluid concept of artistic citizenship to develop more inclusive artistic identities, emphasizing “shared lived experiences and togetherness as constituting pillars of the citizen’s identity” (88). He suggested that such a conceptualization of artistic citizenship focus “on the process of ‘citizen becoming’ instead of the status of ‘citizen being”’ (85). Garcia-Cuesta argued that citizenship in a global context can “take diverse and complex meanings” and highlights “the potential of using utopian thinking as an effective tool for change in artistic fields, promoting the use of critical, yet idealistic reflections to uncover new paths forward” (87). However, Garcia-Cuesta also warned that “all-inclusive notions” of artistry and artistic citizenship “risk becoming oblivious to issues of exclusion, marginalisation, and accessibility,” pointing to the intersectionality of the concept of citizenship with “other forms and degrees of exclusion”( 91).
While the concept of global citizenship may be both idealistic and utopian, the understanding of what it means to be a global citizen or “citizen of the world” can vary in different cultural and geographical contexts. In the field of cultural psychology, Carmona, Guerra, and Hofhuis (2022) investigated the lay meanings associated with the term in a Portuguese context and proposed a prototypal definition to reflect the cross-cultural variability in understandings of it. They point out that the World Values Survey revealed that, across sixty countries, 71.3% of participants agreed with the statement “I see myself as a world citizen” (Carmona, Guerra, and Hofhuis 2022, 549). They found that while the term ‘citizen of the world’ does not have a clear-cut definition, most participants recognized it as a concept and could identify relevant attributes. In their study, Human mobility and intercultural competence emerged as the dominant attributes, as 46.67% of participants described citizens of the world as “people who move abroad,” while 42.22% described them as people “who know about and/or interact with various cultures” (Carmona, Guerra, and Hofhuis 2022, 552). While this hierarchy is specific to their sample group in Portugal, it nevertheless points to the importance of transnational mobility for the concept of global citizenship.
As access to mobility can be unequal and determined by socio-economic factors as well as citizenship, global citizenship therefore should not be understood as an inclusive identity, as historically only “citizens of liberal democratic societies and nation-states were endowed with rights to move” (Adey 2017, 105). This inequality is reflected in what Anderson (2006) called the “awkward elitism of cosmopolitanism” (91, quoted in Collins and Gooley 2016, 145). In their essay “Music and the New Cosmopolitanism,” Collins and Gooley explored the history of cosmopolitanism as an alternative concept to essentialist nationalism and observed that those advocating for a global, cosmopolitan perspective often do so from a privileged social position that seems at odds with the “democratic or humanitarian claims” they aim to advance (146). They also observed that privileged cosmopolitans can appear to want to impose their ideas of citizenship onto the rest of the world in a colonial manner.
However, transnational mobility is by far not limited to elites and often occurs as migration forced by wars, discrimination, and economic deprivation. Despite its strong association with conflict, persecution, and trauma, migration can speak to the utopian meaning of global citizenship, as the often-hard-won experience of managing, negotiating, and sometimes severing attachments to different national and cultural identities serves as the foundation of what Flusser (2003) termed The Freedom of the Migrant. Contemplating migrant biographies highlights the idea of multiple national or “subgroup affiliations.” Discussing music education in schools, Bradley (2015) pointed out that “global migration imposes the necessity for children to develop multiple subgroup affiliations as they adapt to new locales and cope with the circumstances of their relocation” (19). Such a nuanced understanding of identities is equally necessary for conservatoire communities, where, as pointed out above, teachers routinely associate repertoire and performers with nations
In this context it is important that cultural hybridity is recognised as a normal result of human mobility and migration. For Bradley (2015), hybridity “represents an important point that today’s educators ought to recognize in order to avoid essentializing cultures in their teaching” (16). The concept of hybridity recognizes the different cultural influences that make up a hybrid piece of music as equal to each other. Recognizing the value of hybridity in this context, Collins and Gooley (2016) noted that “music that circulates around the globe or culturally hybridizes contrasting styles can be international or transnational without being cosmopolitan in the sense of involving a particular viewpoint or perspective” (145–46). Bhabha (2012) also pointed to the importance of hybridity in his theory of a “third space,” which offers a way of “conceptualising an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity” (56). A focus on hybridity normalizes the idea of negotiation of cultural difference, or what Trinh T. Minh-ha (2011) called the “middle ground,” in which multiple fluid identities can interweave (quoted in Stephanos 2019, 12). Hybridity and a nuanced understanding of the importance of migration and transnational mobility for culture is therefore central to a prototypal concept of global artistic citizenship. Despite its inherent flaws, I propose that such a concept can be useful as a utopian idea as well as a critical tool to challenge methodological and exclusionary nationalism in higher music education, especially in institutions with diverse international communities. In the remaining part of this article, I discuss how findings and reflections from participatory action research focused on music and migration at the Royal College of Music speak to this concept.
Foregrounding Migration in Performance Projects
From 2019 to 2023, the international, interdisciplinary project team of the Music, Migration and Mobility (MMM) Project at the Royal College of Music (consisting of the author, co-investigators Nils Grosch and Peter Adey, and Research Associate Beth Snyder) programmed a series of research-led performances of music by previously marginalized migrant composers from Nazi Europe who lived and worked in Britain. These composers were also subjects of the project’s historical research during this time, which included an oral history project, a repertoire survey, and three case studies about migrant musicians in musical institutions. Interdisciplinary discussion with scholars in human geography and mobility studies informed the development of narratives used in the creation of digital story maps and illustrated stories for an extensive online resource and a public exhibition. Theoretical research within the project highlighted the potential exclusion of repertoire by migrant composers because of methodological nationalism and proposed an approach of foregrounding mobility rather than belonging in research about migrant composers, formulated in an article published in Acta Musicologica, the Journal of the International Society of Musicology (Meyn, Adey, and Grosch 2023).
Student participants were invited by the RCM’s chamber music manager to perform in the concerts and become part of a focus group of co-researchers. Participation in the research was voluntary and not a condition for performing in the concerts, which were devised by the project team in collaboration with participants. Participants were given an information sheet and consent form (approved by the Conservatoires UK Ethics Committee), which stated the aims and context of the research, including probing the practical challenges of performing the largely unknown works by the chosen migrant composers, exploring transnational influences in the music and how it speaks to performers today, and considering how the context of the music could best be conveyed to audiences. Participants were encouraged to keep a reflective diary during their work with the repertoire, which they were not obligated to share with the team.
The research process was based on a cyclical model of action research as described, for example, in Tim Cain’s (2008) survey “The Characteristics of Action Research in Music Education.” This cycle consists of four stages, namely planning (aims, ideals, reason for action), action (and data collection), evaluation of consequences (and data analysis) and conclusion. Each planning stage included at least one presentation from the author and members of the MMM research team about the historical context of the music and the aims and ideals of the project. It is important to recognize that the close connection between the historical research and the action research brought with it a danger of imposing fixed ideas on the participants. However, embracing the “messy” nature of co-production (Lenette 2022) also created a rare and valuable opportunity for the musicians to relate practice to theory and formulate the utopian approach to re-evaluating the repertoire through performance in a reflective context. Participants were in no way obligated to take these ideas on board. They could challenge them in the discussions (which some did), and they were free to terminate their participation in the research at any time without consequence.
After each cycle, participants’ reflections were gathered through semi-structured interviews, self-reflective diaries, and notes, and all data were anonymized. There were four main “cycles” of the research process attached to different performance projects, all of which are discussed below. Three of these took place at the Royal College of Music between 2020 and 2023, where a total of thirty students, eight recent graduates and four professors participated in the concerts. The project endured many disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic from 2020 to 2022, as teaching moved online, and performances had to be cancelled or filmed without live audiences. However, working online also opened the opportunity to involve students from another conservatoire in a separate cycle of the research. In November and December 2020, a group of eight students at the Anton Bruckner Private University in Austria joined the focus group alongside a seminar on Music and Migration, which was based on research materials provided by the MMM project team and co-delivered by Professor Carolin Stahrenberg and the author. Apart from the research team, most participants were involved in only one of these cycles, while three participants were involved in two.
After each cycle, researchers further refined their actions based on the analysis of each project. While the first two performance projects in London and Linz were attached to activities which were part of the curriculum (the RCM’s chamber music festival in London and a seminar working towards student-led lecture recitals in Linz), subsequent performances were extra-curricular, and student and staff participants received financial compensation for their time from the project budget. Questions for the semi-structured interviews were reformulated in conversation with the participants each time. In total, twenty-three participants were interviewed and two participants shared self-reflective notes. The interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed and then analysed by the author using a process of coding to identify themes, followed by a process of synthesis (Williamon et al. 2021). Theoretical concepts such as artistic citizenship and hybridity were not explicitly referred to at the outset of the project but gained increasing importance in the research as the reflections were related to theory during each cycle.
Thematic Discussion and Excerpts from Interviews
The following section provides examples of the project’s work and continues the theoretical discussion by discussing concrete examples from the interviews. Examples are structured chronologically to reflect the progression of the research cycles. I give particular attention to how the theme of migration influences the discussion of identity, cultural difference, and artistic citizenship.
In November 2020, the project presented a programme of vocal and chamber music by Mátyás Seiber (1905–1960), a composer who migrated several times and moved between multiple musical environments. Seiber studied with Zoltan Kodály in his native Hungary, where he collected folk songs and composed in a tonal idiom. He then moved to Frankfurt in Germany and, after encountering Jazz during his travels on a transatlantic ocean liner, became the first professor of Jazz in a Western conservatoire (Scheding 2006). There he also experimented with Schoenberg’s dodecaphonic techniques. After his forced migration to Britain in 1935 (he was dismissed because he was Jewish and promoted Jazz) he wrote film music as well as ambitious modernist compositions and became an influential figure as a teacher and broadcaster. The concert programme was designed to celebrate the stylistic variety and multiple transnational influences in Seiber’s music, spanning the early “Serenade for Wind Sextet” (1925), the dodecaphonic and playful “Permutationi a Cinque” (1958), a selection of his signature nonsense songs from before and after his emigration, and the two “Jazzolettes” (1929/32) from his Frankfurt period, the second of which includes experiments with twelve-tone technique. Before the start of rehearsals, members of the research team gave insights into recent historical research that had highlighted the relationship between Seiber’s migrant biography and his heterogeneous output (Scheding 2018; Snyder 2020). The performers could also meet the composer’s daughter Julia online, giving them direct insight in the composer’s circumstances and context. In addition, the research team produced a short film about the composer, which they showed to both the performers and the online only audience before the performance.
The wide geographical spread of Seiber’s life and difficulty to associate him with a single nation sparked discussions about the relationship of music with nation and place. The following examples make clear that musicians in the group liked learning where he composed each piece of music, pointing to the power of associating music with place. Musicians also demonstrated a high level of awareness about the politics associated with different national and stylistic contexts. Many members of the group understood national affiliations as crude categories for music, as its transnational nature became obvious.
I like to know where a composer was when he was writing the music…. That changes the way we approach it, for example, it is interesting that Rachmaninov’s 2nd Symphony was written in Dresden and not in Russia. P3
Music crosses national boundaries. Music can be related to a country but does not have to be seen like ‘the property of the country’, like the Nazis did with Wagner. P4
It can be harder obviously to put Seiber’s music into categories… like you can put Beethoven Germanic, Debussy French … and it’s obviously not that simple. P2
You can hear different kinds of styles and national traditions in music.… Music is more abstract.… It doesn’t need to fit into categories of “this was made in Germany or made in the UK.” P4 The stylistic hybridity in Seiber’s music, with clear influences from folk music, twelve-tone music, jazz and tonal film music, took many of the performers by surprise, revealing the persisting influence of expectations about homogeneity that have been challenged by the mobilities paradigm and discussions of cultural mobility (Greenblatt et al. 2009; Sheller and Urry 2006). However, participants also commented that Seiber’s diverse output was understandable and interesting in connection with his biography and transnational mobility and described his identity as European rather than national. Furthermore, participants saw the heterogeneity of his oevre as evidence of freedom that may have come from the composer’s transnational perspective as a migrant (see Flusser 2003).
It is fascinating that a composer doesn’t have that one particular style! P2
Seiber was free, not tied to a place; I wonder if that gave him a sense of freedom. P3
Seiber will have had different influences in regard to where his family was from and then where he spent most of his time living; he could feel like a European person. P2
There was a big mix in Europe, a lot of the avant-garde, and late Romantic composers were still doing their thing. Seiber resembles all of Europe. P4
Participants’ reactions to Seiber’s transnational story and music were notable in several ways. They recognised that they habitually associated a composer with one musical style and one place, and they described not being able to do so as surprising. They also showed that greater awareness of transnational mobility or migration makes it easier to accept and value hybridity as a normal quality of music, not as a representation of cultural diversity, but as the result of a process of negotiation and adaptation to cultural difference (Bhabha 2012). In addition, awareness of transnational mobility and the multiple “subgroup affiliations” (Bradley 2015) of both the composer and the music itself prompted participants to connect it with a multi-national, European identity rather than with a national identity; this is similar to the way in which the concept of global citizenship is connected to transnational mobility (Carmona, Guerra, and Hofhuis 2022).
Many participants found the historical contextual information important, noting that it increased their emotional connection with the music. For example, several participants mentioned Shostakovitch’s 7th Symphony, which is movingly connected to the siege of Leningrad and the resistance to it. One participant stated that “knowing the history changes how you hear the music.” (P5). Other participants recognised that a similar emotional connection can be made between music and migrant stories that highlight historical injustice. “It is about context; history is really important for connecting emotions to the music.” (P6) Such emotional connections can inspire listeners to work towards a more just society in the future. and can be seen as an important element of socially engaged practice. This caused participants to show enthusiasm and confirmed the connection between utopian thinking and artistic citizenship as socially engaged practice (Garcia-Cuesta 2024).
In late 2020, a group of undergraduate and postgraduate performance students at the Anton Bruckner Private University in Austria received access to repertoire lists and musicians’ biographies created by the MMM research team, contextualized by an online lecture given by the author. Researchers also invited them to join the focus group and sent the participant information sheet and consent form. They were free to choose their own repertoire for a short lecture recital on the theme of music and migration. Subsequently, they rehearsed and discussed this repertoire in further online sessions before performing those lecture recitals. Six members of the group took part in the reflection through semi-structured interviews. Similarly to RCM students, these participants found the connection of music and the theme of migration both surprising and stimulating, recognizing the transformative potential of research about music and migration (Gratzer et al. 2023). The students highlighted the dominance of repertoire from the Western canon as they often found it hard to get hold of sheet music and recordings of lesser-known migrant composers, which sometimes forced them to work from manuscripts and develop their own artistic approaches.
This workshop introduced me to a totally new perspective. It is really interesting to contemplate the contribution of migrant musicians to music; I had never thought about this before. P10
We only play or sing those pieces which are the most common ones. And why? It’s part of the repertoire and part of the game to be able to sing or play those pieces. And it’s a pity. P9
I think it is way too hard to get to some music that is not that well known. P14
The most stunning part of the whole experience was to see why they were forgotten, getting to know the music and to see how hard it can be to get to it and to hear it. P14
These reflections about the difficulty of procuring sheet music by migrant composers and the frustration of being bound to the Western canon show the challenges as well as the potential of activism and socially engaged practice in this field. This also led participants to reflect about the empowering relationship between composers and nations.
Composers tried to make national schools; they tried to fit in in this national context, like Dvorak or others that tried to make national music. After this course, I don’t really think that music belongs to the nation, but I have felt that way. And if you talk about Mozart, I personally think about Austria. But I don’t think that it belongs to a nation. P14
The good thing with music related to the nation is that people from that country will love to play that music; they might feel that it will represent them and their nationality. P7
Some music can make a name for a certain nation; national music can represent the nation itself. But for me, it’s like worldwide; it connects nations. It’s for everybody to hear. P12
These reflections show how taking part in the action research increased participants’ awareness of the entanglement of music and nation and the dominant national containers inherited from the “national Romantic period” (Folkestad 2002) as well as the continuing influence as individuals and nations benefit from the enactment of national identity through repertoire (Bohlmann 2011). Participants also contemplated the absence of the theme of migration from the Western music canon and the dynamics of exclusion faced by migrant musicians within a national musical context:
The support of a nation and the country is important so that someone gets well-known and recognised. And maybe the migrant musicians weren’t so recognized because of that, because they were not supported enough. It was not so easy for them to get recognized. P12
I think it is definitely more difficult for migrant musicians to be accepted in a new country, but it also depends on how the country welcomes migrants in general. P10
The focus on migration and identity in the project prompted many participants to reflect about their own national or cultural identities, especially if they had lived experience of migration themselves or in their families. Such personal reflections emerged quite naturally from discussions otherwise focused on historical context and the music itself. This confirms the transformational potential of socially engaged work in group activities, where group members’ identities come to the fore (Gaunt et al. 2021). It also revealed a high level of awareness of the intersectionality of cultural differences as individuals recognize multiple national affiliations within their own identities:
I’m Spanish, but I study in Austria. What kind of music do I do? Spanish music because I’m Spanish, or I do Austrian music because all my teachers are from Germany or from Austria? P11
I’m Chinese, and I cook a lot. I buy food from a supermarket in Austria. And what I cook, is it Austrian food or Chinese food? So I think it’s more about what I want to cook. If I want to cook Wiener Schnitzel, then it’s Austrian food. If I want to cook hotpot then it’s Chinese food. If they are homesick, then they may be composing music about their homeland. And if when they experience something new in the new place, they learn a bit from that culture, and then maybe mix a bit, and then it’s a combination. P8
Developing a high level of awareness of the fluidity and intersectionality of identities is an important step towards developing global artistic citizenship in diverse communities of practice, as the presence of lived experience in the room becomes apparent (Wenger 1998; Garcia-Cuesta 2024). Fostering such awareness in conservatoire practices more widely could help to make learners more comfortable engaging with global perspectives.
The final concert of the MMM project involved both students and staff members in a varied programme of music by thirteen composers, eleven of whom were migrant musicians from Nazi Europe (the other two were Ralph Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten, who both had multiple connections with the other composers). Again, the researchers provided musicians with ample information about historical context, and all participants came together in a pre-rehearsal meeting with the research team to discuss the theme of mobility and migration. One of the professors noted in that meeting that even much of the mainstream canonical repertoire studied in conservatoires is defined more by mobility than national belonging, and that contextualizing it through mobility could offer new perspectives for more well-known repertoire as well as give a more specific context to music often otherwise thrown together in the same box. It could also offer opportunities for engaging audiences through stories of mobility and travel rather than patriotic sentiment or national affiliation, which is increasingly uncomfortable for many people, as Bohlmann (2011) has pointed out. Others noted the prominence of Jewish identity in the context of the project, as most of the refugees from Nazi Europe had Jewish backgrounds. The history of antisemitism all over the world means that many Jewish families have experienced migration, and Jewish performers in the group mentioned their special affinity for the repertoire and the theme of the project, without wanting to identify the music as primarily Jewish.
For the final concert, the research team worked with a video designer to represent historical context in the concert itself by projecting photographs, short explanatory texts, maps and video clips, while avoiding lecture-like explanations and making sure that the musical performances remained center stage. In the subsequent reflections, several performers commented on the difference this made for their performances, as well as the importance of contextual information for audience engagement:
Knowing why the piece was written, when it was written, what the composer was feeling when it was written, helps a lot for me. Knowing that it’s got this melancholy and pain underneath it; it alters the way I produce the sound. P22
Knowing the context changes the way I prepare, mostly due to the emotions I try to imbue my singing with. P22
All of the visuals behind the performers meant that I was razor-focused all the way through, learning about the composers and the pieces as we went, which made each performance more meaningful. P23
Representation of context in a concert is a massive step. This is something all concerts should have; it will help to engage with the audience. P21
I think when people take a piece and don’t give a context, they’re not doing what musicians agreed to do. And this is not a purely musical rationale. P19
There is something where I’m more interested in the bigger picture than in only the music and its performance. P19
These statements clearly point to the empowering nature of global artistic citizenship as performers have a clearer and more ethical motivation for the performance and can connect their emotions to the repertoire more easily. The utopian nature of the endeavour, giving voice to previously marginalized voices and aiming to change audience’s thoughts and perceptions about migration, made it more meaningful than a “regular” performance. The academic rigor of the historical research behind the performance also gave performers confidence and a sense of enthusiasm for a “realistic utopia” (Kertz-Welzel 2022). The action of celebrating cultural contributions of migrants or immigrants, based on sound historical knowledge, is widely relatable and achievable.
However, this enthusiasm was not shared universally. One of the performers stated that for them the music and the quality of the performance remained more interesting than the context. This participant also pointed to a stigma they perceived in connection with the performance of lesser-known music.
It’s like in an art gallery where the small labels are secondary to the works themselves. If I spend more time reading the plaques than looking at the art, then something has gone wrong. P20
I usually attend a concert to hear the performance; historical info is downstream from that. P20
There is a certain stigma among performers who perform little-known repertoire, because it implies that you could not make it performing the standard repertoire. It is important to get the best possible performance for lesser-known music. P20
These comments reveal that the aesthetic is still sometimes favoured over the social in conservatoires, as a focus on rigid models of performance “excellence” and employability can sideline reflection about the wider meaning of the artistic practice, limiting the potential for social engagement. This is exactly what creators of the concept of artistic citizenship and the proposed conceptual framework ‘Musicians as Makers in Society’ (Gaunt et al. 2021) aimed to address. It is important to emphasize that these models do not advocate for a lessoning of the standards of technical proficiency and artistic ambition in higher music education. By positioning “musicians’ artistic identity and vision” as central and “musical craft and artistry” as a means for engaging with “needs and potential in society,” Gaunt et al. (2021) aimed to empower performers to “own” their practice and engage with society more confidently (13). This puts new demands on higher music education, which is challenged to incorporate reflection about wider cultural issues in the curriculum. Admittedly this can be hard to achieve in already pressured environments that are often short of sufficient professional time or resources.
However, most of the participants viewed artists’ social engagement and responsibility as important in this context, showing that global artistic citizenship can serve as a significant motivator and contribute to a sense of professional pride. One of the participants noted how much social justice issues already reflect widely in students’ work. Other participants expressed a sense of agency and enthusiasm for making a difference in society through musical activism (Coutts and Hill 2023).
The benefit of hearing these composers’ pieces, seeing their faces, and reading their life stories, is that we instantly get a personal connection with them. They are no longer a statistic, so we find it easier to empathize. P23
It is absolutely our responsibility and even our duty to engage with issues that are important to society. The role of a musician is really evolving now. P21
In college life we were champions of underrepresented composers. Out of twenty flute recitals last year, three-quarters had a female composer. P17
Going forward the whole country and other parts of the world need to see this project and others like it, so we can become a better, more inclusive, and ultimately safer world for those that are forced to leave their homes. P23
Combining the theme of migration and a global perspective of transnational mobility with the concept of artistic citizenship can be a powerful tool for facilitating reflection and change.
The project’s work clearly inspired participants to register diverse and fluid identities more consciously, both in the community of practice around them and in connection with the music. For example, after making a recording of Seiber’s “Fantasia for Flute, Horn and String Quartet” in 2021, a member of the ensemble noted the diversity of nationalities within it. Others contemplated the importance of humanizing the issue of migration.
In the ensemble you had a Scot, an Englishman, a Vietnamese Australian, a Portuguese, and a Korean; you have all that migration mixed into all the performers! P17
My whole family has migrated somehow, mainly my mother’s, but my father’s a little bit too. P19
Migration is obviously a huge, huge talking point in most Western countries. This kind of lens really does humanise that issue. P22
Almost all of us will have close family relatives that have had to emigrate for one reason or another, so the empathy for people who are forced out of their homes shouldn’t be so hard to find. P23
There is a sense of optimism: With migration we get to experience so many cultures today. P17
This enthusiasm for a global, intercultural perspective was perhaps the most common response to the project’s work, pointing to a real appetite for understanding and celebrating cultural differences and normalizing human mobility and migration by highlighting transnational influences and hybridity in music. Their participation in the research and its utopian endeavour inspired the musicians to expand their repertoire and engage with diverse and fluid identities through their professional practice, underlining the potential of further developing the concept of global artistic citizenship. A nuanced approach and awareness about the limits and dangers of utopian thinking are important for such and endeavour, recognizing that the concept of artistic citizenship can be both “critical and utopian” and “a tool for social change or a sanctuary to escape from the world” (Garcia-Cuesta 2024, 96). However, despite its ambiguity, the concept has significant potential as a motivator for artistic action towards a “better, more inclusive and ultimately safer world” (Participant 17).
One of the limitations of this research is that the migration at its center took place between Western nations with many cultural similarities, reducing the challenges that arose from the negotiation of cultural differences (Bhabha 2012). However, I hope that musicians might apply the overall approach of foregrounding migration and mobility to migration from many other cultural backgrounds, potentially empowering further development of intercultural understandings, which may lead to a greater acceptance of migrant communities and fluid identities all over the world (Crooke et al. 2024). The theme of migration can help to highlight music’s entanglement with methodological nationalism as well as emphasize music’s potential as “bridging social capital” that “reaches across social divisions to establish alliances which are mutually beneficial” (Camlin 2023, 99).
In simple terms, the prototypal concept of global artistic citizenship shifts the idea of making music “for the good of the nation” to “for the good of the world.” While a truly shared international understanding of what that might mean may be hard to reach, the concept can nevertheless emphasize musicians’ potential to bridge and negotiate cultural differences, which takes added importance considering the possibilities of exclusion, violence, and destruction resulting from hardened cultural boundaries. This research has shown that at least some inroads to such a negotiation can be made by embracing the theme of migration and the concept of cultural hybridity in music. By confronting their heritage of methodological nationalism and engaging with the theme of migration in teaching and musical practice, conservatoires can train musicians that are historically informed, culturally responsive, and ethically aware.
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, grant number AH/S013032/1. The author would like to thank all participating musicians for their openness and willingness to share their reflections, as well as the members of the Music, Migration and Mobility research team, for their invaluable help. A special thanks goes to Helen Kuby for supporting the group work and data collection during the final stage of the project.
About the Author
Norbert Meyn is a Research Fellow and Repertoire professor at the Royal College of Music in London, where he has been teaching German Lieder classes since 2005. Norbert has been involved in practice-based research in British conservatoires for many years and served as Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded research project ‘Music, Migration and Mobility’ from 2019-2023, exploring the legacy of migrant musicians from Nazi-Europe in Britain with an international and interdisciplinary team. Norbert was born in the German city of Weimar and first came to Britain in 1990 after the fall of the Berlin Wall, later completing his studies at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, where he also teaches. As a concert soloist and member of leading vocal ensembles he has appeared in many international concert halls and on CD recordings. Norbert was made a Fellow of the Royal College of Music (FRCM) in 2022.
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