While ethnographers have experimented with creative writing as a form of representation for decades, tools offered by fiction writers have yet to be fully explored. In this intervention, I consider some of the possibilities afforded by experimenting with separating narrative and authorial voices, on the one hand, and letter- and diary entry- writing, on the other. In both conventional and experimental ethnography, the author usually writes in the first person (combining authorial and narrative voice), whereas in fictional writing, first, second and third person (singular or plural) narrative voices may be assumed. Drawing from research with danzón practitioners and rappers in Mexico, this paper interrogates possibilities afforded by giving research participants the ‘I’, the first-person narrative voice, rather than the author-researcher. It also examines some of the ethical issues raised by dividing authorial and narrative voices, that is, by depicting research participants and author-researchers in alternative ways. Specifically, it addresses the privileged, colonial gaze and the ’me-search’ that sometimes pervades ethnographic writing, on the one hand, and the decentering and destabilizing of ethnographic authority on the other.

Although the relation of ethnomusicologists with biographies has been ambivalent, influential paradigms in history and anthropology in the second half of the twentieth century—such as the turns to microhistories and life stories—left a mark on their work and reaffirmed epistemological creeds based on small-scale approaches and the study of everyday life. The recent work of Kay Kaufman Shelemay on musicians from the Horn of Africa and of Jocelyn Guilbault on the Trinidadian calypso saxophonist Roy Cape, have not only been fundamental in re-assessing the role of biography in ethnomusicological research. They have also provided grounds for a productive rearticulation of musical biography as a scholarly genre. Following on their lead and on cues from Actor-Network Theory, this paper proposes an approach to biographical writing inspired on transhistorical understandings of human agency and dialogical understandings of researcher-researched relations. By way of two case studies, those of Linda Ronstadt and Joe Arroyo, we argue that the writing of a biography must account for the many lives—and versions of those lives—that make a single life as well as for the afterlives that color our understanding of the past in the present. Life trajectories do not only signal to “what happened” but also to what could have happened, or the futures that never were. Rather than an ethnomusicological detour into science fiction, what we propose is a way to embrace the dense collection of angles, episodes, fantasies, and dramas embedded in a life, and, by extension, the multidimensional scope of musicking and everyday living.

When ethnomusicologists and music theorists analytically approach how musicians improvise, some scholars utilize concepts drawn from linguistics and linguistic anthropology. In this area of scholarship, it is common for ethnomusicologists and music theorists to make analogies between musical improvisation and forms of extemporized spoken language. One lacuna in this scholarship is connections between musical improvisation and written language. To address this gap in the knowledge I analyze one form of musical improvisation with concepts pertaining to elegant writing. In Karnatak music of South India, melodic improvisation of rāga in free rhythm is known as ālāpana. I argue that underlying principles of ālāpana are coherence, cohesion, and rhetorical climax. I seek to bear out my argument through the analysis of coherence, cohesion, and climax in four ālāpana performed by Karnatak mandolinist U. Srinivas (1969–2014).