Generations of scholars of Indonesia have carried out research in the shadow of the brutal New Order regime (Anderson ed 2001; Heryanto 2006), whether acknowledged in print or not; generations of Indonesian musicians been physically and expressively constrained by its violence, latent and manifest. In the same period, Indonesian violence interdicted musical studies of East Timor—from 1975-2002, a territory forcefully annexed by Indonesia—for who would ask a victim of a war crime about their listening habits? In the twenty-five years since the the Suharto era, scholars have studied the legacy and mechanisms of violence, moving from political to expressive realms (Baulch 2001; Sunardi 2015; Weintraub 2021). This paper builds on this work to examine the “repertoires of violence” that moved within Indonesian military networks in the 1990s, from Indonesian soil to the island of Timor. Drawing from institutional records and ethnographic fieldwork, I present case studies that show both the expressive tenor of the Timorese experience under duress, and the musical practices of violence and subjugation used by Indonesian actors, themselves formed by their own cultural habits. The musical metaphor of a repertoire, coined by Geoffrey Robinson to describe military habits transmitted by organizations and personnel from Indonesia to East Timor (Robinson 2018), is particularly helpful here: by speaking of the transmission of a musical repertoire of violence, I aim to reintegrate the experience of East Timor under annexation within the larger conversation on music and politics in Indonesia.

The so-called “drug war” is exceedingly difficult to grasp in Mexico. The transnational scale, elusiveness of its actors, and the opacity of news coverage often makes the conflict impossible to understand as simply “state vs. cartel.” And yet, for all its ambiguities, this “drug war” is one of the most mediatized aspects of life in Mexico, recently making its way into a constellation of massively popular media referred to as “bélico” (bellicose).

This paper attends to this media and the musical genre corrido tumbado as ways into problems of insecurity and the everyday experience of the state for largely Indigenous communities in Mexico’s most affected state: Michoacán. Drawing from over two years of fieldwork in Michoacán, I argue that this media ecosystem gives rise to what I call the “bellicose ordinary” experienced by residents. In dialogue with work on music and violence (Daughtry 2015: MacLachlan 2023), this ethnographic study sheds light on related political/social facets of the drug war: the enduring charisma of drug cartels and the bélico lifestyle; perceptions of violence and its different forms; and the ways local communities make sense of armed conflict through the circulation/consumption of popular media. I argue that corrido tumbado signals a more intensely mediatized yet less clear-cut era of the drug war. State and criminal power exist within an epistemic murk that is rendered visible in its everyday dimensions only through mediatized forms. Thus, popular media is at the center of public understandings of quotidian insecurity, violence, and the experience of power.

This paper explores the inclusion of a “gender violence” label in the cataloguing of folk songs belonging to the Fondo de Música Tradicional (FMT) of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) in Spain. The study examines the circumstances that prompted FMT-CSIC director Emilio Ros Fábregas to introduce the label to the cataloguing protocol in 2015 and the ethical implications of leaving the responsibility of determining which songs contain references to gender violence to individual researchers in the project. The specific synergy between personal initiative and peer collaboration that characterizes this process functions as an impetus for reflecting on public musicology, cataloguing practices, and the role of digital humanities in relation to social action. The paper also considers the conception of violence implied by the label and how it differs from the concept of violence proper to the Francoist period, especially of that against women. To this end, the paper contextualizes the ethnomusicological fieldwork that originally led to the transcription of these songs; selected pieces from the platform are closely analyzed through the categories of subjective/objective violence (Žižek) and symbolic violence (Bourdieu) to exemplify the scholarship enabled by this cataloguing tool. The paper argues that the addition of the “gender violence” label to the FMT-CSIC protocol represents a significant accomplishment toward recognizing and addressing this social issue from the study of Spanish cultural heritage, but that is also a clear indication of a shift in the perception and recognition of what is considered gender violence.

The rates of violence against women in South Africa is among the highest in the world. In rural Eastern Cape, there is a particularly covert form of violence on the rise: witchcraft-related violence, with elderly women the frequent targets. Physical features common to ageing, like wrinkled skin, thinning hair, and missing teeth, when associated with a woman, are routinely equated with ‘being a witch.’ These accused women are pushed into social isolation by the community, many beaten, maimed, raped, or murdered.

In 2020, ethnomusicologist De Jong joined Chief Jongisilo, the traditional leader of the AmaZizi Chiefdom (located in north-eastern Eastern Cape, a region regarded as a witchcraft-murder hotspot by South Africa’s Department of Social Development), to organise a music-based intervention for combatting AmaZizi’s rise in witchcraft-related violence. We worked with the elderly women of the region to form a singing ensemble. The women performed traditional songs for which they then wrote new lyrics—lyrics that summarised the ageing process and reflected personal experiences of witchcraft-related violence. Since its founding, this singing ensemble has been invited to perform across the Chiefdom for various events, each performance now an opportunity to educate the AmaZizi community about ageing and dispel the myths currently riving witchcraft-related violence.

In this talk, co-presenters De Jong and Jongisilo argue that musical practices provide valuable mediums for bringing about societal change. With the AmaZizi women’s singing project as a model, we highlight the value of co-creation, cultural embeddedness, and partnership building in applied ethnomusicology research.