Evelyn Osborne

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

ABOUT EVELYN OSBORNE

Building strong creative communities through music for over 25 years in Canada and Hong Kong! Creativity, Community, & Culture is the essence of how I strive to bring meaning to the world. I am passionate about how musical and creative communities can create positive personal and social change. I believe that every person is creative! That personal creativity reaches out to the community and then further out to the culture. Arts are for everyone, not just the specialists. As the new Artistic Director of Soundbone Traditional Arts Foundation I am helping to preserve and promote the traditional arts of my home province of Newfoundland and Labrador. This role merges my lifelong passions and skills in traditional music and education. Check our programs at As an ethnomusicologist/folklorist, I have a strong mandate to mobilize knowledge for the public. My research focuses on how smaller musical traditions are connected to larger cultural pathways through personal and media interactions. Specifically, how NL folk music interactions with other North Atlantic musics from New York to Ireland, and the UK. In Hong Kong, I am just starting to explore and understand the crossroads of complex and intersecting identity expressions. My Fiddlehead Folklore Institute is a multicultural artistic centre bringing a diversity of traditional arts (music, dance, singing, visual arts, storytelling, and more) to people in Hong Kong and Canada through local & global connections (in-person and virtually). It provides high quality music education and community engagement for all ages. My new pedagogical approach: the Musical Village Method creates a village atmosphere in which children can learn from others around them (including being role models for younger children and inspired by older students and adults). We take the best classical music training and infuse it with the ideals of a nurturing environment, the freedom of creative expression through improvisation, and folk musics and arts from around the world. As a music educator I have taught from early childhood through university. I have specialized in Suzuki music education which is family and community focused. Parents and children learn together and make musical friends along the way. I am also trained in Creative Ability Development (nurturing creativity) and Music Together (early childhood world music). I teach violin, fiddle, and early childhood music. I believe in nurturing young musicians to be flexible in their creativity and provide ample new opportunities for performance and learning.