Stephen Wild

Biography

Dr Stephen Wild is a Member and former research director of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Secretary-General of the International Council for Traditional Music, Chair of the Study Group on the Musics of Oceania, a former President of the Musicological Society of Australia, and a former Council Member of the Society for Ethnomusicology.

As a Visiting Senior Fellow in Ethnomusicology at the School of Music since 1990, he teaches the course Music in Australian Indigenous Society, contributes to other undergraduate teaching, and supervises graduate student research projects. As an ethnomusicologist, he approaches music as a universal phenomenon embedded in culture and society, rather than as patterns and structures of sounds in themselves. He aims to promote informed understandings of music and ideas through reading, listening, performing, analysing, discussing, presenting, and writing.

Dr Wild’s primary area of research is Australian Indigenous musics with fieldwork experience in central Australia and Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, and subsidiary interests in musics of Asia and the South Pacific. He has edited three CDs on Aboriginal music, two books, and three academic journals (Musicology Australia, Australian Aboriginal Studies, and Yearbook for Traditional Music). He has also contributed to the Oxford Companion to Australian Music, the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music and the Currency Companion to Music and Dance in Australia, and published numerous academic journal articles and book chapters.