Teaching Professor, Music
- PhD, University of California Los Angeles, Ethnomusicology
- MA, University of California Los Angeles, Ethnomusicology
- BM, Boston University, Music Education - summa cum laude
- BM, Boston University, Woodwind Performance (oboe) - summa cum laude
Meghan Hynson, PhD, is an ethnomusicologist, music educator, performer, and sound healing enthusiast. She has spent over a decade living and studying music in Indonesia, particularly the performing arts of Bali and West Java. She is an avid Balinese gender wayang player (music for the Balinese shadow puppet theater) and teaches Balinese gamelan angklung, Javanese gamelan degung, and bamboo angklung. Before coming to USD, Dr. Hynson worked at Duquesne University, The University of Pittsburgh, and Monmouth University, where she taught Western art music history, directed gamelan ensembles, and offered globally-oriented courses such as Musical Cultures of the World, Global Popular Music, Music and World Religions, and Music, Gender and Sexuality. In 2019, Dr. Hynson toured internationally as a vocalist for the Indonesian pop band, the Dangdut Cowboys, under the invitation of the U.S. State Department. Throughout her career, she has developed world music curricula and outreach programs for K-12 schools and worked with major museums and international world music festivals. She is an elected member on the council for the Society for Ethnomusicology and reviews submissions for the International Council for Traditional Music and the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings project on Global Learning Pathways.
Scholarly Work
Dr. Hynson’s research primarily investigates the performing arts of Indonesia. As an author, she has published numerous book reviews and noteworthy articles such as “Indonesian Angklung: Intersections of Music Education and Cultural Diplomacy” (Smithsonian Institution 2016) and “A Balinese Call to Prayer” (Smithsonian Folklife Magazine, 2020). In 2021, she published “From Performance to Pedagogy: Transforming the Role of a Freelance Gamelan Teacher” in BALUNGAN and “Pedagogical Developments for an Ever-Changing Music Industry: Monmouth University’s Music Industry Curriculum in the Wake of COVID-19” in Journal of Business Management and Change. Dr. Hynson’s most recent publication with Religions journal focuses on the Balinese “call to prayer,” or Puja Tri Sandhya, theorizing a sounding of religious nationalism in Indonesia by examining the ways that Muslims, Christians, and Balinese Hindus assert both local identity and national solidarity through daily broadcasts of their religion.
Dr. Hynson has presented her work at numerous national and international conferences. She most recently presented a collaborative work with a Balinese scholar from the ISI Denpasar Arts University titled “An Artistic Space for the Balinese Banci: Comedic Crossdressers in Contemporary Balinese Dance Drama” at the 6th Symposium for the Performing Arts of Southeast Asia, Tainan National University of the Arts, Tawain. She is currently co-authoring an article and a book on Balinese gender wayang development with Balinese scholar and musician Ni Putu Hartini, which will address issues of gender, religious and institutional politics, transcription, composition, and competition. As a performer, Dr. Hynson has played with gamelan groups Burat Wangi, Dharmaswara, and the Mid-Atlantic Chamber Gamelan. She is the lead singer in the dangdut pop band the Dangdut Cowboys and continues to play oboe and a variety of other instruments in her spare time.