Stephen Wild

Biography

Dr Stephen Wild is a Member and former research director of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, former Vice President and former Secretary-General of the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM), former 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 ANU School of Music from 1990 to 2011, he taught the course Music in Australian Indigenous Society, contributed to other undergraduate teaching, and supervised graduate student research projects, as well as working as Graduate Convenor from 2000 to 2011. In the earlier years of his career, he held academic appointments at Monash University, City University of New York, Indiana University, University of Illinois, and University of Washington.

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 continues his aim 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, the latest of which is in Dance Cultures Around the World (2024).

For his services to Aboriginal Studies he was awarded a Centenary Medal by the Australian Government in 2001. In 2017 a festschrift was published in honour of his lifelong dedication to ethnomusicology, presented at a world conference of the ICTM. Dr Wild was made an Honorary Life Member of the ICTM in 2019.