With full-blown climate and biodiversity crises, not to mention geopolitical upheaval, there may seem to be very little that individual artists can do to create change. But is that really so? What can artists, musicians, songwriters do to keep music making front and center to try to impact and humanize the world?

To try to grapple with these and other questions by way of an example, we at Folk Alliance International introduce performing singer/songwriter Martin Høybye. He took 5 years out to develop co-writing with participants as an ethnographic research method. Here he investigated challenging moments in relation to the climate crisis (South Africa) and the Covid-19 pandemic (Scandinavia), working with co-writers who mostly had no prior experience with songwriting.

He will share the basics of his collaborative method and give us a glimpse of the transformative power of give-and-take-conversations that turned into collaborative songwriting encounters. 35 songs were written in South Africa, the DRC, Zimbabwe, Somalia, Ghana, England, Sweden and Denmark in the project “Songs in the Key of Collaboration,” which earned Martin Høybye a PhD in 2023.

The musical result of the PhD – a full length album of co-written material – has just been released May 3rd 2024. More here: https://www.songcrafter.dk/singersongwriter/songs-in-the-key-of-collaboration-a-new-landmark-album-from-martin-hoybye/

Bio

Martin Høybye is a performing artist and researcher working at the intersection of popular music formats, artistic co-creation and research methods development. His PhD thesis “Songs in the Key of Collaboration: Engaging with Anthropocene moments through personal and collaborative songwriting” (Aarhus University, 2023) produced an album of co-written material (https://hoybye.lnk.to/songs). The peer-reviewed research article "Working in the Key of Collaboration: Songwriting and alternative ethnography as research practice" detailing the novel research is out now in the International Journal of Qualitative Inquiry: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/10778004241250069. A music industry veteran and co-founder of the label Songcrafter Music, Høybye is currently a postdoc with the Movement, Culture, and Society research unit, Department of Sports Science and Clinical Biomechanics, University of Southern Denmark.
www.martinhoybye.dk