Music Professor Awarded Fulbright Teaching Grant to Explore Intersection of Music, Culture, and Technology in Indonesia

Pictured above: Andy McGraw, right, performs with Indonesian artist Peni Candra Rini, who recently served as a Fulbright visiting artist-scholar at UR.

UNIVERSITY OF RICHMOND — Andy McGraw, associate professor of music and chair of the music department, has received a 2024 Fulbright Teacher Grant. McGraw is an ethnomusicologist with expertise in Southeast Asian traditional and experimental music, intercultural performance, and rhythm analysis.

Through his Fulbright support, McGraw will teach two courses at the Indonesian Institute of the Arts, Surakarta — one focused on analyzing music recordings using digital techniques and another on analyzing local Indonesian music scenes using digital humanities tools. These courses draw upon previous research trips to Indonesia during which he recorded traditional music performances using a custom recording system.

“This data is still ripe for further analysis, and I hope to teach Indonesian students and faculty the methods and tools they need to work with this performance data,” McGraw said. “I will also be working with students across disciplines to combine music data with demographic and social mobility datasets, so they can develop original analyses at the intersection of music, culture, and technology.” 

McGraw hopes to grow Southeast Asian opportunities within UR’s international education programming and encourage more faculty to pursue collaborative research opportunities with Indonesian and other Southeast Asian scholars. McGraw also facilitates a community Indonesian orchestra in Richmond and aims to learn new pieces in Indonesia that he can introduce to community ensembles at home. 

“This program deepens both my and the University of Richmond’s long-standing collaborations with artists and institutions in Indonesia,” McGraw said. “UR’s Office of International Education recently established a summer internship in Indonesia, and I hope to visit that program while I am in residence in Java in 2024.”

McGraw previously received a Fulbright-Hays grant in 2002 to support his doctoral research in Indonesia, and he has hosted numerous Indonesian artist-scholars and language instructors at UR, most recently Peni Candra Rini, a Fulbright visiting artist-scholar.

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