In the last decades, migrations and media have greatly determined the global dissemination of traditional, neo-traditional, and popular repertoires of Africa. Musics from Africa are today performed worldwide, in different contexts and genres, and by diverse performers from Africa as well as from other places. Colonialism has surely conditioned the circulation, reception, and performance of musics from Africa in Europe and these have taken various forms according to different countries and times. While important communities from African countries and musical scenes are based in the former main colonial powers, like the UK, France, Belgium, and Portugal, also other European countries host African communities. Despite their (direct or indirect, un/acknowledged or imagined) involvement in coloniality, the interest in African musics and the immigration of African musicians in these countries has largely taken place in the postcolonial era. Building on the long-term research of the presenters, this panel gathers contributions situated in four European countries: Croatia, Serbia, Finland, and Italy. Considering the specific history of each country, the papers deal with different aspects of the performance, elaboration, promotion, and representation of African musics. From the quite peripheral perspective of these countries compared to the main colonial centers in Europe, the panel aims to provide insightful reflections on the relational and creative forms of collaboration between African and European musicians, the role of music in relation to “irregular” migration and social affirmation, and the interactions of official policies, institutions, and musicians in representing Africa in music across time.

Dominant forms of humanitarian governance privilege food, medicine, and shelter as crucial forms of aid. The sponsorship of music programs by humanitarian organizations and donors, then, indicates an expansion of the humanitarian mandate and the increasing reach of its institutional power (El-Ghadban & Strohm 2013, Fassin 2011, Shao 2023). This paper critically assesses varying ideological orientations regarding music and its role in humanitarianism (Beckles Willson 2013, Copeland 2020), with a focus on music programs for Syrian and Palestinian refugees in Amman, Jordan. Drawing on interviews with music teachers and administrators, I argue that humanitarian music programs are sites where humanitarian norms are contested, negotiated, and also legitimated. The discussion considers three approaches to program design: the first, psychosocial support, explicitly attempts to discipline participant behavior through musical training as a measure against a variety of perceived threats, from bullying to terrorist recruitment. Music therapy, the second approach, aims to medicalize musical practices but must contend with societal expectations regarding music as a form of performance. Both of these approaches legitimate the expanding humanitarian mandate through psychological and biomedical discourses. The third approach, professionalization, instrumentalizes music for financial livelihood while participating in local, authorized heritage discourses (Smith 2006, Yúdice 2003). While these practices are largely divergent, they all grapple with material restraints, donor expectations, and, in the Jordanian context, concerns regarding the Islamic permissibility of music. Overall, this paper offers a framework for disentangling the motivations, assumptions, and norms that come to bear on music activities in humanitarian settings.

In 2023, The newly elected Thai government issued a soft power policy as a means to improve the country’s economic situation and compete with other countries in Southeast Asia. Realizing that they can be benefit from using Thai cultures, the government put together the nation’s soft power strategy committee to ensure success in the global attraction of Thai-ness that brings more money to the country.

Eleven selected Thai cultural industries, including music, arts, food, film, fashion, tourism, etc., became tools in exercising the soft power of Thailand. While the end goal is a success, the process and the presentation, however, were built on other’s pop culture that are not Thai, creating an interculturalism of soft power transference, raising the questions of soft power identity overlapping and ambiguity. The research aims to examine and analyze selected Thai soft powers presentations in the performing arts industry that have major impact on a global scale, including Thai singer Laliza Manobal from the Korean group Blackpink; Thai rapper, Danupha Khanatheerakul, also known as Mili, who performed at the Coachella festival; and one Thai contemporary dancer, Pichet Klunchun, who presented a Khon masked dance drama at many famous international platforms. The analysis engages in the following factors: performance and cultural elements and its impact on Thai cultures and economics. The result brings the clarification of identity retention along with pros and cons in each artist’s strategies in creating soft power of Thailand.

In the 1950s, the Chinese government organised a number of unique national and local music and dance performances and tours, including the First National Chinese Opera Festival in 1952, the First National Folk Music and Dance Festival in 1953, the Touring Chinese Folk and Classical Music Troupe in 1954, the First National Music Week in 1956, and the First National Quyi Festival in 1958, the Summer festival of Harbin, the Spring festival of Shanghai and the Yangcheng Music and Flower Festival. My doctoral dissertation is based on these nearly forgotten musical events. I contend that the holding of these artistic events has had a significant impact on China in a variety of ways. Domestically, they played a significant role in the collection and investigation of Chinese music, as well as its processing and adaptation, transmission, and development, and they also contributed to the unity of people from all walks of life and the promotion of art education, and cultural exchange became an important method of diplomatic work. This paper will be based on the domestic and international contexts faced by China in the 1950s, and will employ interviews with artists directly or indirectly involved in musical activities, as well as disciplinary methods such as sociology, anthropology, and applied ethnomusicology.I want to review the history of contemporary Chinese music development, summarise the experiences and insights gained from organising large-scale cultural activities, investigate the pluralistic relationship between music, art, and politics, and promote the development of Chinese music in the new era.

Though the concept of the permanent campaign—the idea that politicians are constantly in campaign mode—isn’t new, the advent of social media has further blurred distinctions between governing and preparing for the next election. Playlists, memes, political songs, and user-generated content constitute and fragment political discourses, extending campaigning beyond the remit of party insiders to social media elites and partisans. This presentation presents a case study of the campaign songs that featured in Canada’s 2019 federal election. Unlike the two previous Canadian federal elections, which saw politicians transform licensed songs into rally anthems, curate Obama-inspired Spotify playlists, and mobilise Web 2.0 technologies to extend the reach of their campaigning, 2019 featured a return to more ‘traditional’ campaign songs, either commissioned or pre-existing, that communicated and contained key political messages. We focus particular attention on the Conservative Party of Canada’s decision to commission an original campaign song, calling upon songwriter Jim Vallance (Aerosmith, Michael Bublé, Bryan Adams) to write “Get Ahead.” While the impetus was to both target and expand their voter base while avoiding legal complications of licensing existing songs, unforeseen challenges accompanied this original work. Through this example we consider how these songs function in an era characterised by rampant partisanship and normalised social media usage. As voters in at least 64 countries head to the polls in 2024, this case study offers context for unravelling the complex interactions of sound, politics, elections, and old and new medias in the negotiation of political discourses.

This panel, comprising four speakers, addresses diverse ways in which Hindu identity is crafted within India and the diaspora through an examination of South Indian music and dance. The first participant explores the performance of tevaram, an ancient Tamil musical canon in praise of the God Siva, in South Africa by the descendants of Indian indentured workers. By contrasting the musical styles of India and South Africa with the same sung skeletal melodies, two different historical narratives emerge on Asian and African soil. Despite the stark differences, the goal is still the same: praising Siva. The second participant analyzes three songs from the Tamil film "Tiruvilaiyadal," highlighting how Hindu ideology is forged in a cinematic production. Following the exploits of the God Siva on screen, the analysis shows how mythology, movies, and the masses meet in unproblematic ways to craft Hindu identity. The third participant demonstrates how the famed dancer, T. Balasaraswati, injected a new level of Hindu identity through her celebrated career of performing Bharatanatyam, a South Indian dance in the United States. While she performed globally, her imprint in academia resonates in the curricula broadly in the United States. Her legacy, continued well past her death, is celebrated through her students. The fourth participant explores the performance of Sopana Sangeeta, a private, Kerala temple music performance for just the Gods and Goddesses, before the devotees are allowed into the temple. By cleansing the area sonically, the space is welcoming to both the divine world and the Hindu devotees.

Following on from definitions of ‘outsider art,’ (Maclagan, 2010; Scherr, 2022) outsider music is broadly understood as ‘self-taught’ or ‘naive’ musicians working outside of normative institutional frameworks, or conversely non-normative bodies attempting (and failing) to work within these frameworks. Largely consisting of self-made recordings from the 1950s-90s in North America, which were lost and rediscovered decades later, outsider music’s recorded archive consists of a collection of ephemeral sonic objects, often once deemed insignificant and without ‘use’ or ‘value.’ Limited existing writings on outsider music (Chusid, 2000; Laraway, 2018) treat it less as a creative practice and more as an object of ridicule which fetishises a certain idea of sonic morbidity; it’s ‘monstrous,’ ‘chaotic,’ ‘weird,’ ‘disgusting.’ What is it precisely about these sonic objects that provokes such a response, and how does this relate to the particular forms of marginalisation experienced by outsider music’s racialised, disabled and queerly gendered musicians? This presentation will set outsider music and its social reception into a broader history of North American popular performance (Brooks, 2005). Here, I draw particular links to the sensationalised otherness found in 19th and early 20th century ‘Freak Shows’, their relation to settler conceptions of national identity (Bendix, 1997) and the identification of ‘problem bodies’ within a population (Schuller, 2017). By incorporating critical, reparative readings of the freak show by queer, disabled scholars (Clare, 2015; Awkward-Rich, 2022) I ask how we might uncover the radical, transgressive forms of humanity present among situations of abjection, and their emergence in outsider musicians’ performance.

For a group of displaced queer and femme punks in San José, Costa Rica, rural Guanacaste, Cartago, and Alajuela remain both idealized homelands and ‘good places to leave’. Though such rural spaces hold romanticized places in the hearts of many San José-relocated punks, a significant number of those who have left cite the danger that accompanies queer identity in rural parts of the country as far outweighing their positives. While queer punks in the city still face the physical and symbolic violences of homophobia, many see the development of queer, femme counterpublic spaces to be notably more feasible there. This brings to the front the roles of colonialism and imperialism in citizens' daily lives. Punk musicians in the scene engage with musico-poetic forms such as bombas y retahilas, poetic mythmaking, and rural landscapes by actively queering them in their music, performances, and activism. Bombas y retahilas, for example, are known for their humor, loaded word play, and informal critique of colonizers, the rich, and the country’s most powerful. Still, they carry with them many homophobic, transphobic, and misogynistic conventions. Musicians in the scene draw on the queer and feminist punk potentials of distorting such practices, while maintaining a connection to their home cultures and engaging the result in decolonial praxis. This paper examines how these bands utilize sonic, poetic, and visual elements to connect with their ancestral lands and cultures, as they disrupt the homophobic, misogynistic, and colonial baggage these forms may carry.

Queer orientations in music and the culture surrounding them challenge societal expectations on what it means to be queer and how joy can be found in it. This paper explores the performance and interaction of the concepts of queer joy and world-building within the work of the American pop band Muna, focusing on how musical and socio-political contexts contribute to the meaning of songs and how they might generate shared sentiment and affect for a predominantly queer audience. Themes of joy and desire are omnipresent in Muna’s output, as they are in broader contexts of queerness. Before performing their hit song “Silk Chiffon” during their Tiny Desk concert in 2023, lead singer Katie Gavin stated: “We love being queer and we find a lot of joy in it.” While their music is a generative site for examining queer joy, it is foremost a place for queer dreams to come into fruition, akin to how their 2017 song “I Know a Place” has become an anthem for chosen families and community-building. In live performances, they even alter the titular lyrics of the song to “Let’s build a place,” which they are effectively doing with their listeners. As Muna’s audience grows into the mainstream, questions of queer identity in their music become increasingly important in how this joy is received and spread, particularly by queer communities. Through performance analysis and ethnographic insights, the paper’s analysis addresses how music can build a place where queer joy is not mere utopian possibility but reality.

Honey Andrews, an illusionist performer based in Corpus Christi, Texas, is known for her Selena performances. In interviews, Andrews has stated that, from a young age, she knew she wanted to be like Selena. As a trans woman, she has gone to great lengths to fashion an image that resembles the slain Tejano singer and has dedicated her performance career to re-creating Selena’s dance moves, costumes, and overall aesthetic. In this presentation, I focus on her interpretation of “Disco Medley,” as it was performed by Selena during the infamous 1994 Astrodome concert. In recreating this moment, Andrews not only conjures the star’s rebellious desire to cross genre boundaries (e.g., Tejano music, ranchera, R&B, and, of course, Disco), but also creates a queer lifeworld that binds Selena to groups that routinely face oppression, violence and hostility in daily life. Blending considerations of Selena’s queer potentiality (Vargas 2007) and Latinx nightlife as queer utopias (Muñoz 2009; Rivera-Servera 2012; 2004) with studies on Disco’s activation of queer identities through music and dance (Lawrence 2016, 2006, 2011; Neibur 2022; Hubbs 2007; Blaney 2013), this presentation contributes to ongoing conversations about the concrete possibilities of performing Otherness and community through subversive musical participation. Listening to Selena’s Disco remixes and Andrew’s embodied rendition of those same sounds decades after her death offers insight into the way the Tejano star’s musical memory imbues the physical geography of the US/Mexico border, often thought of as hostile terrain (De León 2012) with a sense of joy, hope, and futurity.

Migration, forced or voluntary, has been a subject of interest and concern for scholars and governments in local and international contexts. Beyond the negative narratives that the conversation around migration and mobility evokes, scholars have examined how migrants positively shape the social and cultural settings of their host society. In this study, I extend the discussion on music and migration by exploring the contributions of Nigerian migrant musicians to the cultural and musical spaces in Europe. To do this, I reflect on the musical activities of Silas Edwin, a Nigerian-born musician, through his “Singout Mass Choir Project” in Germany. Drawing from ethnography and theoretical paradigms in migration and intercultural studies as well as ethnomusicology, I demonstrate how the music enterprise of Nigerian migrant musician(s) promotes and sustains the ideas of interculturality in Germany. I argue that Silas Edwin and other migrant musicians utilise music as a framework to offer a kind of ‘social remittances’ to their receiving society hence reconstructing the unpleasant narratives about African migrants broadly, and Nigerian migrants specifically, in global migratory contexts.

In recent decades, migration has been a challenge for communities tied to musical traditions rooted in their own culture and borders. There are many studies on music and migration that explore how music moves with musicians and is employed, adapted and recreated (Baily and Collyer 2006; Ranmarine 2007; Davis, Fischer-Hornung and Kardux 2011; Glick Schiller and Meinhof 2011; Kiwan and Meinhof 2011; Toynbee and Dueck 2011, Gratzer, Grosch, Präger and Scheiblhofer 2023). Unable to rely on a wide availability of musical instruments, migrant musicians have had to adapt to different instrumentation. The specific definition of “arranger”, a keyboard musical instrument, emphasizes that the instrument contains a range of automatic accompaniments known as styles or rhythms. The arranger allows to choose different timbres by providing hundreds of preset sounds. It is easy to select different rhythmic patterns that can be varied in speed and combined with chordal self- arrangements. The extensive use of preset rhythmic bases has led to a natural homogenization of the rhythmic aspect of traditional music of different origins, more or less influencing the specificity of the musical performances. My study focuses on two liturgical and one secular context of migration to Cremona (Northern Italy). Specifically, I will examine the use of arrangers in the Ivorian and Romanian communities (in sacred contexts) and in the Albanian community (in secular contexts). The same musical instrument, alien to all three traditions, becomes fundamental and protagonist in a current musical reappropriation.

Having been involved in the lived experiences of South Asian newcomers and second-generation youth in Toronto, who use music to connect with ancestral roots, engage with communities, protest against inequity, and celebrate diversity, my role as an Equity and Diversity Coach in creative industries adds an observational dimension to the challenges faced by South Asian immigrants in accessing the Canadian music and creative industries. My firsthand experiences and community involvement, for example, discerning the struggles of newcomers with an accent in navigating the English vocal music genre, form the basis for the paper. I show the significance of music and creative practices in the lives of young South Asian immigrants, refugees, and international students residing in Canada. Forming allyship as a first-generation South Asian immigrant, musician, and academic, I highlight their resilience, creative resistance, overall well-being, and endeavours to promote empathy amidst the challenges of resettlement and discrimination. Building on the research of Andrea Emberly (2016) and Andre de Quadros (2023), the paper delves into the participants’ observation data that analyze how music and creative expressions foster communal relationships and aid in survival and growth within newcomer communities. Music and creativity serve as sustainable practices for young South Asians to confront systematic barriers and discrimination in Canada. I explain the role of creative practices in generating opportunities within the Canadian creative industries. The analysis extends to how both physical and virtual performing spaces become essential for healing.

My research considers children’s music-making and the role of families in the teaching and learning of diasporic music cultures. In this paper I share findings from my fieldwork with intercultural arts organisations, primary schools and community hubs in and around the super-diverse city of Birmingham in England. A focus of my research is the music-making of children at weekend supplementary schools who partake in singing, instrumental tuition, dancing and circle games. I also explore the facilitation of music-making with children via a learner-led pedagogical approach I call ‘The Convivial Classroom’, employing Paul Gilroy’s definition of ‘conviviality’ as spontaneous everyday interculturality in diverse spaces (Gilroy 2004). Although ethnomusicology is paying increasing attention to children’s music-making, the voices of children and their families are seldom found in ethnomusicological literature. I use a child-centred approach in my practice and research, and this guided the methodological choices for my PhD. Informed by recent scholarship on participatory fieldwork, I utilised first-person perspective technology to document children’s music-making. A research technique more common within educational research, the use of wearable GoPro camera technology is an important methodological innovation for ethnomusicology. This paper features first-person fieldwork footage illustrating children’s musical experiences and knowledge. As my research examines the familial transmission at play in diasporic music-making, I also reflect on the role of parents in the teaching and learning of international music in Birmingham. With this paper I aim to contribute to discussions on the music-making of children and families, intercultural music education and child-centred ethnomusicological research.

Despite widespread public interest in learning more about the Palestinian crisis, many college-level educators do not include Palestine in their syllabi for fear that the topic is too politically sensitive, complex, or difficult to manage. With the conviction that college classrooms must remain crucial sites of unrestrained inquiry and expression, and that expressive cultural practices offer essential opportunities to explore and engage diverse perspectives, this roundtable aims to empower college-level educators with the content, strategies, and resources necessary to teach Palestine through music, dance, and the arts. Short presentations will be followed by moderated discussion on the following topics: Trauma-Aware Pedagogy; Sample Lesson Plans and Topics; Essential Teaching Resources; Tips and Strategies, and Musical Repertoire and Performance. Participants will be provided with detailed lesson plans, sample assignments, readings, and multimedia resources. Roundtable speakers will further present specific case studies that address larger issues such as violence, cultural erasure, censorship, and media bias. The roundtable will then shift to teaching strategies and public outreach. Finally, the roundtable will present strategies for including Palestinian music and dance in college-level ensembles. Throughout the roundtable there will be ample time allotted for in-depth conversation following each presentation. Ultimately, this roundtable proceeds from the belief that incorporating Palestine into an ethnomusicology curriculum provides students with essential opportunities to critically engage aspects of the Palestinian crisis beyond mainstream narratives while mobilizing ethnomusicological coursework toward justice-oriented destinations.

An all-female Carmen for an all-female audience; Verdi’s Lady Macbeth as a puppet; the Queen of The Night sung by five singers; these are some of the work-arounds Iranians have devised as they navigate official taboos on women’s public performance, exploiting loopholes left by the shifting government guidelines.

From its introduction to Iran in the late 19^th century, opera has been caught between Royal fascination with the West and religious conservatism. Khomeini’s 1979 ruling on music as an opium for youth should have resulted in the disappearance of operas; instead it gave rise to a new ‘opera’ (an umbrella term that resists Western translation), which, compared to pre-Revolutionary practice, is arguably more indigenous than Western, more democratic than elitist, and more accessible than exclusive. From pushing the boundaries of gender politics to operatic setting of the Shiite martyrdom, opera in Iran continues to offer a prism through which to examine ideological tensions, and evolution of gender politics in the face of women’s continuous resistance.

This paper draws on historical sources, archives, interviews and oral history, as well as literary (Doyle, 2020) and historicising studies (Abrahamian, 1993), to place the phenomenon of Iranian ‘opera’ within its politico-historical context: from 1960s ‘inter-imperiality’ through to the contested populism of post-‘Khomeinism’ in present-day Iran. Considering such influences as Middle eastern modernity and Islamic/Iranian traditions, I argue that rather than ruptures and disjunctions, the story of opera in Iran is one of concealed continuity and paradox, and a testament to the resourcefulness of Iranian women.

Chaharbeiti is a non-metric sung poetry performed by amateur and professional male and female singers/dotar players. It holds significance in eastern Khorasan, Iran, and all Persian-speaking areas of Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. With roots in the Iranian Sassanid era (224-651 CE), Chaharbeiti serves as a medium where poets and bards of the region expressed oral poetry through music. Recognizing it as a form of lay literature reflecting the life and culture of its people, this study explores the cultural concepts embedded in these songs. Despite various works in Farsi categorizing Chaharbeitis from Iran, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan, a focused analysis on Chaharbeiti as a cultural bearer is lacking. Addressing the gender inequalities in the region, especially since the arrival of Islam in the mid-seventh century, highlights the inevitable cultural disparities between males and females, requiring specific attention to each. Inspired by Veronica Doubleday's insights on female Chaharbeiti singers in Afghanistan and informed by my research, I will investigate what women have been expressing through this literary form across centuries: the shared beliefs and values forming their identities, the social norms and range of acceptable/intolerable behaviors in interpersonal interactions, and their roles in traditions and rituals, social organization and hierarchies. The focus will be on the city of Torbat-e Jam and its rural areas, the most culturally influential part of eastern Khorasan, where I lived for almost a year doing my fieldwork.

Ambiguity is one of the most important characteristics of revolutionary regimes. In the construction of the revolutionary state, one of the primary battles would be to specify the meaning of ambiguous concepts in a way that they can be the subject of interpretation according to the revolutionary ideology. In the Iranian revolution, one of these important concepts is the definition and relation between public and private places that have characterized much of the recent history of music in Iran. The tension between the boundary of these two concepts becomes clearer in the case of solo female singing and its prohibition in public since the 1979 revolution. “Female presence” on the predominantly all-male public stage of Naqqali– traditionally a one-man show, using heightened speech, gestures, and body movements to portray stories of Shahnameh, Iran’s iconic Book of Kings– can be seen as one of the examples of “agency which disturbing and confusing these boundaries” (Born 2013:59). In order to interrogate representations of "female presence" in these solo productions on the public stage in Iran in this paper, I will try to understand the ways in which female Naqqals deployed to transcend boundaries without disguising their female body and voice. Also, I will explore the best way of approaching this cultural and political ambiguity of theorization of the spatial, particularly following the work of Asef Bayat (2013) on the social production of space.

As the winner of the 2024 Calypso Monarch competition in Trinidad and Tobago, Machel Montano claimed that “calypso is soca and soca is calypso” in his song Soul of Calypso. Additionally, his suggestion in the song that “soca is de soul of calypso” points back to Garfield Blackman, the Lord Shorty/Ras Shorty I, who in 1974, purported to have invented sokah. Soca has been criticized as formulaic party music lacking the lyrical and social value associated with calypso. However, it has evolved into the music that drives the festival and fete industries, enriching performers and promoters. Conversely, traditional calypsonians and calypso tents have seen audience attendance drop. This 90-minute roundtable will examine the debate from the perspective of its sounds, artistes, and socio-cultural environment. Each panelist will present for 8 to 10 minutes. The first panelist will examine the rhythms of calypso and demonstrate the musical markers of calypso and soca. Another panelist will discuss the work of Calypso Rose (Linda McCartha Monica Sandy-Lewis), the first woman to win the Road March and the Monarch title in Trinidad and Tobago. The third panelist will consider the influence of David Rudder, who won the Calypso Monarch and Road March in 1986. The fourth panelist will discuss Montano’s contribution who, like Rose and Rudder has navigated both genres. All the panelists will reference the history of calypso and soca its competitions, and the context that the two genres compete yet converge, which reflects the Carnival industrial complex in Trinidad and Tobago.

What is it about nightlife that draws queer/trans people into its embrace? For many of us, nightlife provides a safe haven in which we can be ourselves and take refuge from the cis- and heteronormativity of everyday life. Contributing to recent scholarship in ethnomusicology and performance studies (Barz 2019; Khubchandani 2020; Adayemi, Khubchandani, and Rivera-Servera 2021), this panel discusses the sensorial, musical, and political affordances of queer/trans nightlife on a global scale. Attention to the global as a framework highlights the peripheralization of alternative definitions of queer/trans, performance, intimacy, and temporality. By engaging peripheries, we consider the circulations of racialized and gendered agency in local and global contexts. Global queer/trans nightlives therefore decenter normative subjectivities across economies of music, sound, and performance in our field sites: Tokyo, Malmö, and Mexico City. The first paper explores queer parodies of the Japanese New Year's songfest Kōhaku Uta Gassen, unraveling the connection between embodiment, affect, and memory through popular song. The second paper examines embodied performances of queer diasporic identity in nightlife spaces at the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest, interrogating notions of rainbow Europeanness and transnational belonging. The last paper, rooted in Mexico City's transcuir and anarchist spaces, questions claims of empiricism in ethnographic research using sensorial knowledge from the Global South. By learning from those who party on the peripheries, nightlife affords capacious, multiplicitous, and otherwise definitions of queer/trans, shedding light onto the complexities of identity formation through musicking and performance.

In response to the City of Austin’s call for “Culture and Community Resilience” initiatives, faculty and students at the University of Texas proposed a study of Austin’s live music scene in order to develop strategies for overall cultural sustainability, equity, and resilience. The project received funding during the 2023-24 academic year and had as its central goal the generation of concrete policy suggestions related to musical revitalization through extended discussion with local performers and others in the music industry, a review of academic literature on related topics, and studies of revitalization efforts in other locations. Musicians in Austin currently face a myriad of challenges. Their key concerns include low wages, rising housing costs, a lack of adequate healthcare, a lack of retirement income, and displacement outside of the urban core as a result of gentrification. Faculty and graduate students involved in the study, in partnership with members of Texas Folklife, discuss their research and summarize their proposed policy interventions. The roundtable underscores how studies of municipal support for the arts represent an important new area of research for ethnomusicologists. Such work has the potential to generate both tangible benefit to local communities and significant financial support for academic initiatives.

Late-twentieth century ethnomusicologists and anthropologists wrote against the “self-other” dichotomy by developing feminist critiques of knowledge production, recognizing the agency of their research subjects, and experimenting with new forms of representation. While scholars are increasingly skeptical of a binary between internally constituted, liberal selves and externally constituted, non-liberal selves, this roundtable argues that the conventions of ethnographic writing continue to divide the flexible, neoliberal academic worker from our interlocutors as singular, stable, liberal subjects. We examine how the figure of the liberal subject – an autonomous, rational, and coherent individual (Povinelli 2016, Mahmood 2005) – and the logics of argumentation that accompany it uphold extractivist, colonialist relations foundational to our disciplinary history.

Joining recent scholarship that denaturalizes the relationship between sounding, subjectivity, and political presence (Sykes 2018, Sprengel 2021), each participant considers how the specter of the liberal human haunts efforts to write illiberal, incoherent, and relationally contingent ways of being into legible academic knowledge. We ask how other textual tactics might undo coherence in our argumentation and representation, with profound implications for our claims-making and for the forms of evidence, subjecthood, and divisions between “knower” and “known” upon which we rely. Accepting that our structuring moves and conceptual distillations create fungible units of “intervention” that circulate in an academic marketplace, this roundtable grapples with how ethnomusicologists reproduce racial capitalism’s extractive processes in their texts and livelihoods. We envision moving beyond critique to an exploratory space that opens new ways of knowing - and unknowing - in musical ethnography.

Many music scholars suggest that timbre’s elusive and affective nature is mirrored in the vague adjectives and metaphors people use to describe it. I suggest an alternative approach to understanding the relationship between what timbre is (timbral ontology) and the ways people talk about it, based on my ethnographic research with violin-family luthiers on the U.S. East Coast. For violinmakers and restorers, talking about sound with musician customers plays a key role in their ability to tinker with instrumental timbre. I examine how luthiers’ timbral labor unfolds in audio recordings of sound adjustment sessions that I observed and participated in as a violinist. A sound adjustment session is an opportunity for a luthier to work with a musician to alter their violin, viola, or cello to improve its sound. I contextualize my analyses of these sessions by drawing on interviews I conducted with East Coast luthiers, and on studies of speech about sound in recording studios (Porcello 2004; Meintjes 2004). I argue that violinmakers and restorers do not locate instrumental timbre through individual words and phrases. Instead, they pinpoint timbre through extended interactions with customers that include multiple linguistic strategies as well as non-verbal activities such as tinkering with violins and listening to musicians play them. I demonstrate that studying how people talk about timbre in ways that are adequate to their professional needs can help timbre scholars move beyond the impasse of vagueness, to understand timbre as a sonic parameter that is concrete and socially mediated.

Typically made from a ram’s horn, the shofar remains the only surviving musical instrument used in Jewish religious practice since biblical times (Montagu 2015). On Rosh Hashana, Jews worldwide follow the commandment “to hear the voice of the shofar” during the shofar service. Synagogue attendees listen to patterns of three distinct shofar calls, defined solely by proportional duration and analogy to human vocalizations. Despite tremendous variation of melodic interpretation and articulation among Jews across diasporic traditions, the Mishnah dictates that sounds produced by a kosher shofar and heard with proper intent are considered correct (Rosh Hashana 27b). Notably, the shofar’s significance transcends these calls; scholars (e.g., Saadia Gaon; Maimonides) focus on its symbolic resonance rather than the meaning of specific calls. Thus, I argue the commandment is fulfilled through critical listening to timbre; hearing beyond the sonic realm into historical, spiritual, and personal meaning gleaned from the instrument’s timbre. To better understand what Jews, across the spectrum of Judaism, hear when they hear the shofar, this study engages with over two millennia of Jewish discourse ranging from the Old Testament and Talmud to the present (Gereboff 2017). Additionally, I analyze interviews with contemporary rabbis and shofar blowers, representing diverse diasporic practices, to supplement the written tradition, offering new insights into this ancient practice. Drawing from the disciplines of timbre semantics (Saitis and Weinzierl 2019), sound studies (Shafer 2003), and psychoanalysis (Lacan 2004), I recontextualize this religious practice with a focus on the shofar’s timbre within Jewish religious contexts.

The naubat ensemble, characterized by the distinctive combination of double reeds and drums, resounds from every corner of Asia and from every century of the second millennium. Played in the context of weddings, war, and worship at courts and shrines from Java to Bulgaria, this particular conjunction of timbres has acquired complex acoustemological resonances throughout its long history. In an interdisciplinary study that spans multiple cultures, I explore the nearly global diffusion of the naubat phenomenon, paying attention to timbre, form, function, organology, and musical-historical narratives. I argue that while the naubat ensemble formation spread originally from court to court via the battlefield, it also traveled through trans-Asian Sufi networks, and percolated into various ritual and ceremonial contexts where it may still be found today. The naubat sound and instrumentarium crossed cultural and religious borders as well, entering Western European art music in the Baroque era, for example, through colonial and diplomatic encounters. Building on the work of Erika Supria Honisch, Max Peter Baumann, Walter Feldman, Eric Rice, and Andrea Shaheen, I develop a theoretical approach I call timbral archaeology in which I question nationalist origin myths while listening for earwitness accounts and modern echoes of the naubat’s sonic semiosis.

This roundtable explores the intersections of friendship, motherhood, and sociality and their impact on musical lives and lineages across a range of cultures. We highlight the ways that sonic formation can be an intimate endeavor while also shaping musical communities, national identities, and social memory. Each panelist will present for 5-7 minutes, leaving a substantial amount of time for generative dialogue between panelists and the audience on resonant themes. By prioritizing conversation and engagement, we aim to forge connections that foster new ideas and future collaborations. Panelist One explores auto-archival practices of gospel composer Roxie Ann Moore and the matrilineal preservation of her daughters to understand how sonic histories and memories are preserved through familial connection. Panelist Two focuses on Pakistani folk singer Mai Dhai, emphasizing how she passes on female vocal practices to her sons to keep the traditions alive. Through discussing parental and marital relationships, Panelist Three argues that soca musician Fay-Ann Lyons points to her musical heritage through publicly claiming her father. Exploring the concept of the mamaestra, Panelist Four unpacks how motherhood and teaching intertwine in the pedagogical practices of Chilean folklorist Margot Loyola. Finally, Panelist Five analyzes songs about mothers in the Black Music Continuum and in so doing reflects on their connections to them through their own journey with motherhood. By gathering a range of scholars studying across an array of musical traditions, this roundtable expands current ethnomusicological conversations surrounding communal preservation, methodological innovation, and the oft-unspoken gendered implications of musical transmission.

Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM) will offer a 60-minute workshop on research techniques with focus on bibliography, historiography, online databases and other research tools relevant to ethnographers and practitioners in the field of ethnomusicology, especially graduate students and junior scholars. Depending on participants’ interests, the workshop may include discussions on navigating databases and online resources, reference works as well as locating and working with sources in ethnomusicology and other disciplines and conducting research in languages other than English. The topic of abstract writing may also be covered. Through short research project presentations by participants, guided discussion, and breakout groups, the workshop offers a unique setting to engage in global dialogue and exchange and expand critical debate on recent research within the field of ethnomusicology while bolstering solid research techniques. The workshop will be led by a RILM staff member. Those wishing to participate should send an abstract summarizing their research interests and a short bio via Google sheet by 6 September 2024.

Ska, a popular music genre originating in Jamaica, has idealistically served as a genre that creates spaces for inclusivity and unity. However, researchers have noted that these perceived utopian spaces did not prioritize the inclusion of women (Augustyn 2020, 2023; Black 2011; Sangaline 2022; Stratton, 2011). To further complicate ideas of utopia and unity, these studies of inclusion often exclude ska scenes outside of Jamaica, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Ska music has garnered immense popularity throughout the world, significantly in Mexico. In this paper, I investigate Mexican ska music festivals as a gendered space to address current questions in ethnomusicology regarding intersectionality and gender. I ask: to what extent are ska festivals in Mexico City and Tijuana designed to be inclusive or exclusive gendered environments? Is creating a safe environment a priority for festival organizers? Who is performing? Who is not? How are notions of masculinity like machismo reinforced to serve as barriers? How do women circumvent or operate within such structures of aggressive masculinity? Drawing from digital ethnography and fieldwork in Mexico City and Tijuana, I use these questions as a starting point to examine the similarities and differences of various festivals as they relate to issues of creating gender-inclusive spaces.

Leonard Feather (1914-1994) was one of the first (and only) prominent jazz critics to recognize gender discrimination within jazz and attempt to redress the issue. But even by the 1950s, Feather grew frustrated with his inability to effect meaningful change for women musicians. He could not understand why women like Beryl Booker, Melba Liston, Vi Redd, and others did not receive more attention, even after he arranged tours and produced record dates for them (Feather 1987). The privileged position he held within the music industry—a position he had cultivated and leveraged in support of other musicians he felt had been unfairly discriminated against—ultimately seemed to do little for many of the women he championed.

Feather’s reputation and experience as a critic and record producer made him a consummate jazz connoisseur—a title that suggests the combined knowledge and power to create exclusive canons of greatness, and a title that had long been dominated by men (Straw 1997, Gabbard 2004). In this paper, I investigate Feather’s attempts to leverage his power of aesthetic judgment to advocate for women within jazz. However, these attempts ran up against a fundamental tenet of jazz connoisseurship; namely, that jazz connoisseurs consider themselves to be “objective” observers, as opposed to active participants, in the specialized curation of jazz history. Using Feather’s allyship as a backdrop, I demonstrate how the seeming objectivity and passivity cultivated by jazz connoisseurs both contributed to and was informed by a broader jazz patriarchy.

“Seudati will not survive with women dancing it.” A male choreographer in Aceh, Indonesia, made this startling comment to me. These words speak to the friction among Acehnese dance practitioners caused by female dancers’ recent participation in seudati. Seudati is Acehnese traditional dance in which dancers stand to dance and playfully improvise in singing and movements. Contrastingly, the choreographies of most Acehnese dance forms are pre-determined and performed sitting down. I hypothesize that it is the particular characteristics in seudati–the freedom of improvisation through female bodies and voices–that are seen as dangerous to keeping the cohesive and male-dominant nature of Aceh’s Muslim community today. As most dances in Aceh are practiced by both men and women, this rejection of female practice of seudati is peculiar.

The province of Aceh has gone through thirty years of violent political and ideological conflict with the central government of Indonesia (1970s–2004) and experienced a devastating tsunami in 2004. In this new era, society and religion in Aceh have become increasingly conservative (2004–present) due to the complex interplay between global Islamic revivalism and national policies that promoted patriarchy to Aceh’s traditionally matrifocal society. This contestation to female dancers’ engagement with seudati illuminates one of many cases where the increasingly firm socio-religious opposition that female Muslim dancers experience in Aceh in its “peaceful” era in the past 20 years. I investigate the changing relationship between the Acehnese performing arts, gendered aesthetics and localized forms of Islam within the Acehnese society.

The Sindhi cultural world historically encompassed multiple regions that now straddle the India-Pakistan border. Although connections between these regions have been increasingly hindered since Partition in 1947 and the India-Pakistan wars of 1965 and 1971, Sufi musico-poetic performance in western India continues to map out a transborder cultural landscape through shared melodies and stories, and songs that affirm the unbordered sovereignties of saintly figures. Building on ethnomusicological studies that demonstrate how possession trance practices distill historical and social relations in dramatic form (Friedson 2009; Jankowsky 2010; Perman 2011), this paper works with Bakhtin’s concept of chronotopes (Eisenlohr 2015; Wirtz 2016) to tune in to the historical resonances of an Islamic possession ritual in western Rajasthan called the mauj (wave, surge; emotion, ecstasy). In the mauj, Marwari-speaking Muslim hereditary musicians sing Sindhi-language songs that commemorate locally entombed martyrs of the Battle of Karbala, whose dismembered limbs soared across the battlefield and landed in Rajasthan. This presentation focuses on a mauj in 2018 in which a Sindhi-speaking saint occupied the body of a Marwari-speaking spirit medium (faqīr, bhopo) to offer curative advice concerning a woman suspected to be possessed by a ghost. In view of the gradual decline of Sindhi-language knowledge in western India since Partition, the translinguistic dimensions of the mauj raises questions about how Sindhi music and the non-living beings whose spiritual arrival it engenders traverse across temporal, spatial, and bodily boundaries to maintain the collective memory of greater Sindh.

Although the influence of mysticism can be found throughout India, sarangi (North Indian bowed viol) players developed a profound connection to Sufism. Sarangi players’ association with the “ineffable” developed an efficacy through tasir (spiritual impression) and asr (affect); it could transcend their everyday. In Hindustani (North Indian classical) music, the Sanskritic aesthetic was highlighted by early oriental writers (Jones 1799; Willard 1834) and the revivalist Indian musicology advocated for theory and notation based ideas (Bhatkhande 1963). However, the Sufi phenomena, crucial to sarangi player’s understanding of music, has received less scholarly attention.

Through phenomenological ways, this paper interprets the Sufi concepts of tasir and asr found in sarangi music, particularly, using the works of Edmund Husserl (1969) and Jean-Luc Nancy (2007). On one hand, research on phenomenology constitutes an independent, well-developed area in music and other disciplines. On the other hand, its study on sarangi players is non-existent. I use ethnographic research to uncover affective traces of the ineffable in sarangi players’ music and culture. My research combines ethnomusicological approaches––drawing on relevant literature and original ethnographic data––with reflexive personal experiences gained under my sarangi teacher and grandfather, Ustad Sabri Khan (1927–2015). I argue, while the presence of Sufism in sarangi players may be indescribable, it is not inaudible. Its power derives from its vibrational potential.

In India, Bhakti (devotional Hinduism) in contrast to the more orthodox and exclusionary Brahminical ritual-based practices put the singing of devotional songs and poetry as a primary way of reaching the divine. There are various Bhakti performative traditions such as Ratijoga (night vigil), Satsang (singing congregation), mela (fair-cum-pilgrimage), etc. In this paper, I propose to interrogate the inroads that devotional music has made into a new context i.e. music festivals, especially in Rajasthan, India. Music festivals are becoming an increasingly important site for devotional singing and have enabled Bhakti to venture into a new social space i.e. urban elite population who doesn’t necessarily believe in the ritualistic aspect of traditions. These festivals span a spectrum of musical styles overall and attract a more elite audience that other Bhakti traditions are not been able to tap into. The paper will look at state and non-state actors' participation in organizing these festivals and programs of Bhakti singing and the patterns of funding. As music festivals are becoming a major draw among performers and sponsors, I will look at what strategies are employed by artists and organizers that distinguish Bhakti renditions in music festivals viz-a-viz their traditional counterparts. It will analyze Bhakti music’s dynamism to find a new audience viz-a-viz its vulnerability to appropriation.

No visitor can leave Sanandaj, in Iran’s Kurdistan province, without encountering assertions that it is “The City of Music.” This scene, however, did not exist before 2019, when the city joined the UNESCO Creative Cities Network (UCCN) in the field of music. Since then, the local UCCN secretariat and the municipality of Sanandaj, have tried both to promote music as a brand for the city and to involve the public and private sectors in integrating culture in urban development plans. In this context, some Loties –professional musicians who are usually recruited to play in wedding ceremonies– have made the streets their new performance venue. After the pandemic deprived them of their usual livelihoods performing at weddings, they began performing on pedestrian thoroughfares and in other public, high-traffic locations. These performance settings would seem to align perfectly with the UCCN’s agenda, yet Loties have also faced continued marginalization by city authorities. This paper investigates how Loties have reconciled their practice with the municipality’s strategic plans. I draw on ethnographic research among Loties, their audiences, and local authorities, and on documentation from the Sanandaj UCCN secretariat. This study contributes to ethnomusicological research on interrelations between sound and public space (Abe 2018, Sakakeeny 2013) and UNESCO intangible heritage programs (Schippers and Seeger 2022). I argue that although the UCCN’s partnership with Sanandaj has provided Loties with new professional opportunities, police control on the streets has limited these musicians’ creative abilities they are renowned for, i.e., engaging mere observers in the process of merrymaking.

This paper explores the intersection of Geographic Information Science (GIS), music and sound studies, and spatial humanities, focusing on preserving sonic heritage and the dynamic relationship between music, sound, and space. GIS-based platforms are particularly adept at highlighting the link between sonic environments and human experience, and can be used to map and analyze soundscapes. In addition, the fusion of GIS and traditional musicological approaches can create immersive sonic experiences tightly interwoven with representations of physical environments. In this paper, we will discuss recent projects, methods, and digital tools that reflect the diversity of approaches to the current study of music and sound within the context of the spatial humanities, emphasizing the transformative potential of experiential learning and community-based projects in advocating for environmental awareness and cultural preservation. We will also highlight innovative tools and technologies such as story maps, digital websites, soundscape compositions, and podcasts. The paper concludes by discussing the potential benefits of public musicology in advocating for environmental awareness and educational initiatives, summarizing new perspectives and research platforms for scholars, artists, and educators.

Political theorist Chantal Mouffe offers an agonistic model of public space as a battleground on which diverse hegemonic projects are confronted and contested without possibility of final reconciliation. Positioned in direct opposition to Habermasian deliberative democracy that privileges rational consensus-oriented debate in the public sphere, Mouffe suggests that agonism is an ongoing project that encompasses diverse and impassioned forms of discourse including aesthetic and emotive expression. In this paper, I echo Mouffe’s interest in the potential for critical artistic practice – that which calls attention to entrenched power structures and encourages dissensus in the public sphere – to engender agonism. I am particularly interested in investigating the potential for critical music practice to not only supplement and engender agonism but to concretely accomplish it. My case study is the famed Rebetiki Istoria music club located in Athens Greece. Drawing on years of ethnographic research, I examine how its music culture engendered agonism by drawing attention to hegemonic power structures, outlining plausible alternatives, and creating a forum for participation in impassioned agonistic debate. I suggest that its success in engendering agonism relied on two components: on the participatory nature of the club and the mediating role of the music culture. My central conclusion is that in the context of the global economic recession in which the very integrity of the Greek democratic project was at stake, Rebetiki Istoria served as an important space for individuals to deepen democracy in the civic realm.

Despite the complexity of political relationships between governments, cultural and social contacts between Turkish and Arab communities, especially musical interactions (Özyıldırım 2013), have persisted in their distinct dynamics over the years, including the foundation of the Turkish Republic, which significantly affected the country's public discourse (Bein 2020). As one might expect, musicians operated within these multilayered connections from various perspectives and aesthetic ideals. One of them was the Turkish scholar Rauf Yekta, who was active in the music scene of the late Ottoman and early Turkish republican periods. As a delegate of Turkey, he attended the 1932 Arab Music Congress in Cairo, where he actively opposed the twenty-four-tone equal-tempered scale. In his notes published in an Egyptian newspaper after the congress, Yekta positions himself between "East" and "West," pointing to the deficiencies that the musicians and musicologists of both geographies were guilty of in their approach to Arab music by putting forward his unique views. He represents a "third stance" in that he is capable of comprehending Arab music - unlike some European attendees of the congress such as Hornbostel, Rabaud, etc. - and the significance of a "scientific" approach to music - unlike some Arab participants. In this respect, his notes, representing both official discourse and Yekta's individual voice, can be interpreted as a valuable source to revisit relationships between Turkish music and Arab music – and Turkey and Arab countries.

Islamic Peripatetic traditions offer an understanding of the body-soul relation as one that mediates between the physical bodies of the macrocosmos as well as the subjectivity of the human microcosmos (Chittick 2007). Andrew Hicks (2017) demonstrates the macro-microcosmos analogical argument as one that offsets a Cartesian substance dualism and affirms a unity between subject and object. Furthermore, the view echoed by Islamic Peripatetics enables a resonance in the dualistic split. A resonance achieved through inward listening to humanly organized music as well as acousmatic listening to celestial sound. Whereas previous scholarship has generally eschewed the ontologically salient question that affirms the existence of the body and the soul as logos [relation]; I demonstrate that this relationship is intelligible through musical language. I will begin my presentation by contextualizing the dialectical arguments produced in Ancient Greece and Mediaeval Baghdad surrounding the question of the harmonicity or tuning [harmonia] of the body-soul relationship. After laying the foundational layer, I will address the impact of these philosophical theories on al-Kindī’s conceptualizations of the interdisciplinary relationships between philosophical ethics, cognition, and music theory. This paper offers new approaches towards understanding the body-soul problem through the unique musicological context of the 9th and 10th Islamic life worlds. I argue for a consistent Peripatetic thesis which denies [harmonia] or epiphenomenalist accounts of cognition. In al- Kindī’s case, I argue for authorial consistency in the non-cartesian dualistic understanding of the soul-body relationship, and how his rationalist ethics discovers a self-knowledge manifested in an affective musical ēthos theory.

During the Republic of China era, public entertainment venues were classified as special industries. Under the guise of promoting entertainment that was civilized, noble, and revolutionarily reformed, venues for performing arts were subjected to various regulatory measures. The Nanjing municipal government’s oversight of the performing arts industry covered two primary areas: the management of venues, practitioners, and the content of performances, which was a question of morality; and the taxation of the industry, which served as a significant source of revenue for the municipal government. This paper delves into the creation and enforcement of regulations regarding censorship, investigation, education, prohibition, taxation, and banning. It examines the cooperation and conflict among different regulatory bodies, and the dynamic interplay of censorship and counter-censorship, taxation, and tax evasion between the operators of performing arts venues and the government. Building upon previous studies that have highlighted the government’s regulatory endeavors, this study further scrutinizes the responses of the practitioners and the strategic interactions they engaged in. It explores how formal and informal institutions functioned in tandem, constrained, and occasionally subverted one another, and provides a microcosmic examination of the music industry’s ecosystem during this unique historical period.

This paper examines the ways individuals in the indie music scene have changed their views of the relationship between indie music activities and value. Music, merchandise and ticket prices in the scene have increased significantly during the pandemic, and audiences have accepted these prices allowing gigs to sell out frequently and quickly despite the legal risks. Views of scene members differ regarding money and remuneration for various scene activities. In the past, many members of the scene rejected commercialisation, believing that certain levels of profit-making in indie music activities are an offense to the indie ethos which opposes the highly commercialised culture of the Hong Kong’s mainstream music sphere. However, more and more scene members state that consumption of music, merchandise and gig tickets is needed to achieve a sustainable music scene. The acceptance of these high prices constitute a shift in the way scene members view the role of money in the scene, accepting differing degrees of commercialisation to sustain the indie ecosystem. Through exploring the ways that value is constructed in indie music activities, I explore views of indie music activities are shifting from being merely a hobby to something more, a passion economy.

Ethnographies of popular music often associate local music scenes with a particular genre. This genre facilitates scene participants’ identity formation. By contrast, the contemporary Brooklyn independent music scene houses multiple genres at the same venues, including various forms of rock and punk, noise, other experimental or improvised genres, electronic music, and hip hop. Brooklyn musicians organize around shared affinities for practices, ethics, and tastes, rather than around genre conventions. This paper considers The Mutants: a collection of mostly New York-based artists who make extreme music that borrows from punk, noise, and electronic genres. They associate with nightlife-goers known as “freaks,” who dress in radical garb and cultivate aesthetics from performance art, while celebrating gender inclusivity and racial diversity. This paper utilizes data from years of participant observation in Brooklyn, interviews, and analysis of online discourse on music and social media platforms. I discuss Mutant members Bonnie Baxter, Deli Girls, and Lust$ickPuppy, as well as associated artists like Machine Girl. I consider the relationship between the sonic practice of these musicians and genre discourse, both online and in-person. I observe that digital technology, including electronic instruments, music production tools, and online record distribution sites, has enabled musicians to use genres pragmatically, rather than identifying with a specific genre. I argue that The Mutants have carved out a notion of alternative music culture that focuses on undefined identities, pregnant with possibility, rather than a clear-cut ideology.

In Iraq, the raw, synth-driven, over-the-top ma’zufah genre has emerged as the soundtrack to a vibrant, in many ways irreverent, male youth milieu that has reclaimed wedding parties as spaces for expressive self-assertion through bold fashion statements and outrageous comportment, most especially in Sadr City, a working-class Shi’a suburb of Baghdad that has seen significant influxes of migrants from Southern Iraq. Against the backdrop of an internet tabloid culture and a digital public sphere in which moral-ethical stances and national anxieties are voiced, I examine the agency of celebrity Iraqi wedding videographer Zuhayr al-‘Atwani and high-profile Iraqi singers Sa’adun as-Sa’edi and Jalal az-Zein in using digital media platforms to confront political and economic crises and raise awareness of social issues. The often sensationalized imprint of these cultural actors has met with varied responses from an Iraqi public harboring pronounced sensitivities regarding how Iraqi society, and its mores and decorum, are represented to the outside world. I draw on music videos, wedding footage, digital press coverage, user comments on social media, and interviews on Iraqi internet talk shows such as Ma’ Fares and Ḍeyf Ṭaş to illuminate the kinds of social tensions and ideological debates that have come to surround the ma’zufah aesthetic, the Sadr City wedding scene and prominent personalities such as as-Sa’edi and al-‘Atwani. In this era of digital consumption and truncated, voyeuristic, and manipulated content, I ask how degrees of proximity and detachment shape perspectives and frame representational agendas.

Since the inception of radio broadcasting more than a century ago, its most enduring and enticing feature has been its potential for bringing people together. As Blum and Hassanpour (1996) have shown, Kurdish-language radio broadcasting has successfully worked in this way for decades to promote a sense of national unity among a stateless, transnational Kurdish “listening public.” At the same time, various media scholars have perceptively argued that radio broadcasting can also reveal a series of fault lines demarcating the limits of solidarity (Fiske, 2022; Loviglio, 2022). In this paper, I build on this insight while extending Blum and Hassanpour’s analysis of Kurdish radio, adding nuance to our understanding of radio’s collective power by examining the role of music broadcasting in global Kurdish radio in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Such an exploration demonstrates, first, how Kurdish music broadcasting has ultimately fostered a sense of community on levels besides the (trans)national, such as among radio and music industry professionals themselves. I also show how Kurdish music broadcasting has simultaneously worked against certain forms of community, illuminating or even reinforcing preexisting divisions between linguistic and musical dialects, political affiliations, and urban and rural contexts. Together, these insights not only highlight the affordances of music broadcasting writ large—thereby challenging understandings of music broadcasting as mere entertainment—but also show how the result of radio’s collective potential is inherently complex and, at times, even contradictory.

Twenty-first-century audio media and listening practices are often framed as a threat to traditional radio, an antiquated medium confined to cars and camping trips. Radio scholars, however, have redefined our scholarly understanding of the medium’s meaning and influence, arguing that radio’s aesthetics and practices in fact permeate and structure many of the ways in which we consume music and sound today (Bottomley 2020, Tacchi 2012, Hilmes 2022, Lacey 2018). In this paper, I build on this capacious understanding of radio to explore how the medium is deployed as a powerful metaphor and aesthetic-material framework for contemporary Black musical production. Pianist and producer Robert Glasper’s three Black Radio albums broadcast a collective sounding of Black musical aesthetics, eschewing traditional genre boundaries, and curating a new format out of sounds typically marketed and sold separately. In an allied vision, Beyoncé’s promotional video for Renaissance Act II (due out March 29, 2024) centers around the radio of a yellow taxi skidding down a dirt road in Texas past a Radio Texas sign. The driver, presumably Beyoncé herself, does not touch the dial, and yet the stations scan between a yodel, a blues song, and Chuck Berry’s “Maybelline,” before finally settling on a banjo riff that opens her song “Texas Hold ’Em.” In the video, Beyoncé teases a conceptual framing for her album that resonates with that of Robert Glasper’s, namely radio’s potential for redefining Black musical production, reclaiming whitewashed genres such as country, and broadcasting a new way of listening.

In this talk I formulate and apply a network analysis methodology for understanding the history of song on Egyptian radio. Music is a massively relational cultural form, involving interactions among composers, poets, arrangers, conductors, and performers, among others. The reality of music history thus emerges as a complex network of relationships, unfolding and changing over time. Song production, in particular, centers on poet-composer-singer collaborations. Most Arab music histories narrate lives of the biggest stars, presented in historical and cultural context, but neglecting the broader network of productive relationships. However many important musical figures are not celebrities, and the full complexity of the non-linear network can only be grasped holistically, including big-data empirical analysis, not pointillistically through case studies of celebrities. Such holistic analysis can reveal surprising emergent, structural patterns that are not apparent in any single narrative. Social network analysis (SNA) offers a powerful suite of tools enabling such an approach, including metrics for centrality and the detection of cohesive subgroups, analogous to the “invisible colleges” of scientists that de Solla Price (1963) discovered through examination of citation networks. Starting with a large dataset of songs broadcast on Egyptian radio, I extract a network of poet-composer-singer collaborations, then apply SNA algorithms to reveal its social structure. I then interpret that structure in light of wider socio-cultural and historical factors. In this way, my talk both sheds light on Egypt's musical history, and supplies a model and method that may be applied, mutatis mutandis, to other musical domains.

This paper is a methodological reflection on the historical research within the ethnomusicological realm. Currently, the “The Special Interest Group for Historical Ethnomusicology” has produced valuable contributions, and the term “historical ethnomusicology” is widely embraced. Nonetheless, the exact connotation and denotation of this sub-discipline remain ambiguous. By examining all literature involving “historical ethnomusicology” with the aid of “the archaeology of knowledge,” this article argues that the development of this sub-field has not followed a straight, linear trajectory. Instead, due to “misreadings” (in Harold Bloom’s words) among scholars, it has gradually deviated from its theoretical starting point set by K. Shelemay. Such deviations, spawned by various conditions, have led “historical ethnomusicology” to ramify into multiple intellectual paradigms. Throughout this evolution, there is also a potential for “historical ethnomusicology” to dissolve into parent disciplines. Furthermore, the paper notes that the perspectives used to probe the topic “subjectivity of historical construction” differ significantly between “historical ethnomusicology” and historical investigations in ethnomusicology without this sub-disciplinary label. This phenomenon illuminates their overarching methodological disparities when studying the musical past: the latter sometimes draws on the methods provided by Hobsbawm’s “invention of tradition,” whereas the former, “historical ethnomusicology,” rarely exhibits this tendency and leans more towards conventional historical thinking on factuality. Then this paper uses “historical anthropology,” a discipline in which “invention of tradition” is also a watershed delineating the sub-disciplines, as a reference, and suggests that focusing more on the original theoretical point helps preserve the independence of “historical ethnomusicology” and clarify its boundaries.

Throughout the 1930s, the Russian folklorist E. V. Gippius made dozens of recordings of Georgian vocal music using a special technique: three wax-cylinder phonographs operating simultaneously, each capturing the voice of an individual singer. Gippius himself never wrote about these experiments, and a manuscript by his assistants remains unpublished to this day. Despite this archival silence, Gippius’s multiple-phonograph recordings represent a signal moment in the development of Soviet ethnomusicology and its engagement with recording technology. The deep significance of these recordings truly emerges when situated within the rich intellectual milieu in which Gippius worked. In these decades, Russian artists and thinkers developed influential theories of structural linguistics, literary polyphony, and filmic montage, all of which can be seen at work in Gippius’s analytical, multi-perspectival recordings. In this paper I focus on connections with a thinker less well known in the West, the Georgian-born linguist and archaeologist Niko Marr (1865–1934). Once the leading figure in Soviet social sciences, the now-maligned or forgotten Marr pioneered the archaeology of the Caucasus and developed an iconoclastic theory of linguistic evolution. Unlike the structuralists, Marr did not focus exclusively on speech but incorporated writing and non-verbal communication into a larger system of human meaning-making. A media manifestation of Marr’s “linguistic paleontology,” the multiple-phonograph recordings isolated different strata of sound, revealing the interactions and improvisations that constitute a musical event. Gippius’s work thus exemplifies the practice of ethnomusicology as embedded within larger intellectual currents, while illuminating paths not taken in the development of sound-recording technology.

Lullabies are commonly described as a “universal” musical genre among humans and a likely source of insights into the origins of music. This paper explores the validity of these claims through a critical analysis of the ethnographic literature. It starts with a review of the eHRAF World Cultures database confirming the wide distribution of lullabies on a global level, while also identifying counterexamples to the "universality" thesis, in particular in American, Circumpolar, and Polynesian regions. Cases include societies without any known lullabies and societies in which lullabies only exist in entanglement with other genres, such as court music. In conclusion, this study confirms the widespread presence of lullabies on a global scale but calls for caution regarding speculations about their universal or primordial status, and highlights alternative key issues for future research.

Though little can be ascertained from Indic sources regarding Indian Buddhist musical practices during the classical age of the Gupta and Vākāṭaka empires (320CE-550CE), the earlier period of Buddhist musical development is documented in the artistic record of ancient Gandhāra from the 1^st and 2^nd centuries CE and in the extant recensions of the roughly contemporaneous code of conduct for monastics, or vinaya. The evidence from these sources attest to the existence of a rich tradition of theatrics, song, and chant in the ancient Buddhist world, a tradition with theoretical underpinnings drawn from both Hellenistic and Vedic models. When combined with Chinese textual descriptions from the first half of the 1^st millennium and shortly thereafter, Japanese and Tibetan theoretical treatises from the 13^th century on, and extant traditions of Sanskrit Buddhist chant and song from both Japan and Nepal, this evidence allows us to give an historical account for the development of Buddhist musical practices on the Indian subcontinent from the beginning of the 1^st millennium until the disappearance of those practices, along with Indian Buddhist monasticism itself, in the 13^th century. In this presentation, I will give such an historical account, demonstrating the persistence of descendant traditions Sanskrit esoteric Buddhist chant and song in Japan and Nepal.

For decades, Māori activists have strategically used principles from Te Tiriti o Waitangi – the document, that ‘founded’ the territory widely known as New Zealand – to further social causes that protect Māori people and their culture. Olivia Lucas (2021) has already shown, with Māori metal band Alien Weaponry, how Māori Treaty principles of kaitiakitanga – the protection of taonga (treasures) meaning both physical possessions and intangible cultural treasures – and whai wāhi – the right of Māori people to participate in all aspects of society – offer a way of realizing of the band's contributions to Māori cultural preservation as well as a larger global culture within metal music. In this paper, I consider how these principles might also offer a valuable analytic approach for Māori musician Stan Walker. For Walker, kaitiakitanga and whai wāhi present a framework for understanding his contributions to Māori culture in parallel to Alien Weaponry, with particular focus on Māori identity and Indigeneity. My analysis draws from two of his songs, “Aotearoa” and “New Takeover,” and their respective music videos as well as Walker’s own comments in interviews about them. Through further engagement with these principles, I argue that Walker moves via Māori conceptions of participation to a larger engagement within the defense of cultural treasures in dialogue with global indigenous identities.

The hīnaki is a weaved net that has been taught intergenerationally among my people of the

Whanganui River and remains a significant tool in food gathering. The hīnaki is weaved from

the inner fibres of the aerial roots from the aka kiekie (vine), alongside akatea or rātā (tree

with red timber), and through using karewao (supplejack) (Best, 2005; Downes, 1917; Haami

& Tinirau, 2021; Horwood & Wilson, 2008; Young 1998). The hīnaki is an important symbol

for Whanganui Māori (Indigenous peoples of New Zealand from Whanganui), being featured

as a key component of Te Awa Tupua (River Claims) Settlement 2017, which formalised the

legal personhood of the Whanganui River. These elements inform ‘He Whiringa Hīnaki’,

which is Kaupapa Māori ecomusicological framework to analyse waiata (songs). Kaupapa

Māori methodologies draw on mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) with a metaphysical

base that is distinctly by Māori and for Māori focused on using anti-colonial and re-

indigenising frameworks (Eketone, 2008; Pihama, 2015; Smith, 2017; Smith, 1999). This

paper intends to discuss this framework from my doctoral study, which derived from the lived

experiences of Rānana Marae (communal gathering place) descendants to contribute towards

future generations who wish to examine waiata within its environmental and ancestral

contexts.

In 2023, in collaboration with the Ewamian Aboriginal People of northeast Australia, I participated in the initiative to revive their ancestral language through the didjeridu. Research on traditional didjeridu playing styles provides insight into the syllabic and phrasal approach to teaching the didjeridu and its connection to language. In the playing traditions found in the Arnhem Land region of the Northern Territory, Gurruwiwi (2001), Mununggurr (2005), and Dikarrna (2006) demonstrate an approach to didjeridu pedagogy through the use of rhythm words, or a ‘didjeridu language’. The syllables used to teach the didjeridu are directly linked to the language of instruction. While the syllables themselves do not carry meaning in a specific language, they do contain the phonetic characteristics of their respective languages. The aim of this paper is to introduce a newly developed didjeridu teaching method that will assist in the revitalization of the Wamin (Ewamian) language. More specifically, this method utilizes Wamin vocabulary that can be both enunciated into the didjeridu for performance contexts and also used in everyday common parlance. This unique Ewamian didjeridu playing style is executed through articulated vowel sounds which can be distinguished by harmonic pitches above the fundamental drone. Most notably, these pitches, which are produced by different tongue positions corresponding to vowels of speech, mirror the formant frequencies in their spoken vowel equivalents. In short, a communicative approach to teaching the didjeridu will facilitate the revitalization of the Wamin language, its relationship to Country, and the learning of an ancient, yet significant instrument.

In this panel, members discuss music and sound as dynamic socio-ecological archives of the Anthropocene in Latin America. Panel members draw on interdisciplinary sources and current ethnographic research to address case studies from geographically diverse regions—the Brazilian Amazon, Wallmapu (Mapuche territory), and Chilean Antarctica. Nevertheless, these case studies coalesce around themes of environmental precarity and biodiversity as sonically mediated phenomena. The panelists demonstrate how human and more-than-human actors sonically co-construct and destroy territory and aural borders (Kun 2000), showing how environmental struggles create preconditions for sonic placemaking. Accordingly, they discuss how musical practices synthesize knowledges produced through clashing modes of relation with land and water. Pushing back on the homogenization of (traditional) ecological knowledges, the presenters highlight resonances and disjunctures within human-created notions of sonic ecologies and territories. Their papers also center sonic narratives by and about non-animal actors, such as rivers, ice, and mountains, working toward radical interspecies relating (Haraway 2016). The panel members hope to elicit broader conversations surrounding sonic production of ecocentric territory by exploring three interrelated themes: 1) how the sonic and the musical shape and are shaped by ecosystems, 2) acoustic assemblages (Ochoa 2014) that emerge concerning socioenvironmental struggles and territorial transformations, and 3) the ecosystem as a sound archive (Minks and Ochoa 2021) and music as an archive of ontological disputes over the ecosystem. Ultimately, the panel demonstrates how sound and music-making serve as generative sites of adaptation and knowledge inscription within an era of accelerated climate change.

The history of the United States is replete with examples of the intimate relationship between political activism and music. Progressive political activists in the U.S. have been particularly prone to the use of music in their activities. Abolitionists, trade unionists, civil rights activists, and more have all made use of music to great effect, sometimes as a “vehicle for the diffusion of movement ideas into the broader culture,” but often also as a means of “articulati[ng] the collective identity of [the] social movement” (Eyerman & Jamison, 1998). In other words, music has been used to build external awareness of movement causes beyond activist ranks, as well as to consolidate the internal unity of the activists themselves. This panel features papers that cover historical and contemporary instances of the use of music by U.S.-based progressive movements that pursue one or both of these goals. Each paper also highlights the way that the development of a musical text, whether that be an oral tradition, musical print-literature, or musical-visual media, lies at the heart of dynamic uses of music in politically progressive movements and organizations.

This paper discusses how mechanisms of myth-making and the commodification of anticolonial struggle and resistance are used in the promotion of Cabo Verdean popular music and its relationship to musical production on the islands. In recent years, small Western labels have specialized in reissuing African popular music records with extensive bonus material, including interviews and photographs of the musicians. The liner notes provide historical and socio-political background information on the compiled songs. These materials are used to enhance the aura of the records as "lost treasures" and create "premium products" by highlighting their historical and cultural significance, especially in the context of African anti-colonial resistance. In this way, labels actively engage in mythmaking and highlight connections to anti-colonial struggles as a form of commoditization. I focus on Analog Africa's 2016 compilation Space Echo which features modernized Batuku and Funaná songs from the 1970s and 1980s. The liner notes tell the fictional story of a ship that ran aground near São Nicolau in 1968. Allegedly, revolutionary leader Amilcar Cabral ordered the ship's synthesizers and instruments to be distributed among the people, fueling their rebellious spirit. This story took on a life of its own beyond the liner notes, being printed and distributed as a true story in international magazines and newspapers, and even prompting the production of a short independent film and several radio features. In this paper, I trace the various iterations of the myth and the debates about its credibility and its relationship to real historical events.

This presentation investigates the expansion of Western staff notation transcription during Korea’s Japanese colonial period (1910-1945). Before the arrival of staff notation, there was no notation that was used for all genres of Korean music, which had been transmitted orally or through a combination of mensural notation (chŏngganbo), with other notation written in sino-Korean. In the process of integrating Western music into Korean culture, Korean traditional music was transcribed into staff notation. Korean composers Paek Uyong (1883-1930), Kim Insik (1885-1962) and Yi Sangchun (1884-1948) were among the first Koreans who systematically converted traditional music into staff notation. Their work was long overlooked by Korean music scholars who considered them to be experts on Western music alone, until 2018, when Youn Young-Hae published an article highlighting Yi’s musical achievements related to traditional music.

The presenter discusses factors omitted from Youn’s study, namely how the achievements of Korean Western music experts related to their understanding of the field of traditional music. A close analysis of the transcriptions will show how the notators influenced Korean music society during the colonial period. The transcription would bring changes to the concept of Korean musical notation, with metronome markings, the arrangement of instruments according to instrumental family, and the signifying of the different elements of music. Furthermore, the process of recording traditional music using Western notation has enabled all Korean traditional musics, to be transmitted through notation, not just orally. The presentation will highlight the lasting effects of cultural convergence on a colonized society.

In this paper, using selected Gaelic songs created in Nova Scotia, I argue that song makers used songs to simultaneously raise awareness of and resist epistemological and cultural colonization by using the very expressive forms that coloniality sought to repress. Sociologist Aníbal Quijano argues that although much formal, political colonialism has been defeated, colonial domination persists in the form of coloniality, the colonization of the imagination and the repression of images, symbols, and modes of signification of dominated groups (2007: 169), such as language and song. Many Gaels fled British colonization – or were displaced and forced to leave as part of colonizing acts – in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a significant number of whom settled in Nova Scotia. Colonization and coloniality resulted in a dramatic decline in Gaelic language and culture globally. Epistemological decolonization (Quijano 2007: 178) demands a reckoning whereby the processes of cultural colonization and coloniality are recognized and confronted. In Gaelic culture, songs must necessarily be at the heart of this reckoning. Songs are central to both the production and sustainability of knowledge in Gaelic society, encoding Gaelic history and genealogies in language while celebrating people, places, and events of significance. I examine selected Nova Scotia Gaelic songs that explicitly address linguistic and cultural loss to trace in their texts a process of epistemological colonization. These song texts simultaneously resist epistemological colonization by framing language attitudes with cultural values and by rooting them in traditional poetics.

This panel understands the movement, representation, and practice of jazz in Southeast Asia as a complex entanglement within and beyond select sonic territories. Long cosmopolitan histories that include jazz permeate the translocal experiences of musicians making their livelihoods in colonial, postcolonial, and national contexts. The presenters investigate the history of jazz in Southeast Asia as a globally circulating form of popular culture that local agents embed in societies by relating, resembling, and harnessing existing cultural forms. The logics of why jazz was adopted in each context change, as jazz was remade and reinterpreted overtime as artists carefully negotiated their artistic pursuits and musical creativity within shifting cultural, political, and economic discourses. Jazz musicians explored this translocal musical expression and found new opportunities and forms of empowerment in different eras structured by developments in technology, freedom, and education systems. In their research, each presenter draws upon various methodologies including ethnography, archival study, and media critique to highlight case studies from the Philippines, Indonesia, and Vietnam spanning from the 1950s to present day.

This paper addresses historic perspectives on the changing status of the parai frame drum in Tamil Nadu and the artists who have played it for two millennium. I examine Hindu temple iconography from the aesthetic contexts of Tamil empires between the 7^th and 17^th centuries to consider the drum’s relationship to elite Hindu culture as well as how the concept of untouchability developed. I do so using three types of images: Bhuda Ganangal protector attendants in Siva or Murugan temples who are depicted playing instruments in ritually significant locations; South Indian style drummers who accompany dancers playing larger frame drums with their hands (Seastrand 2022, 2024; and Nayaka Islamisized/Persio-Arabic influenced figures that play medium to smaller drums (Verghese 1995, Wagoner 1996). I frame the interpretation of this history from the contemporary struggle to articulate an “unspoken” music history that complicates the parai’s history of degradation while considering its historical changes through culture contact with Western and Islamic sources (Sykes and Byl 2023). I argue this perspective provides Dalit artists a claim to cultural capital beyond a Dravidian/Tamil nationalism currently perpetuated by middle castes in the Tamil diasporas as they appropriate the drum as a symbol of “ancient Tamil culture,” while erasing hundreds of years of untouchability experienced by hereditary artists.

From North American Indigenous nations' spiritual traditions to the Sufi dhikr ceremonies of the Middle East and North Africa, frame drums have served as vehicles for cultural and spiritual expression, storytelling, and transcendence. In North America since the 1970s, frame drums have been popular in women-only contemporary spiritual circles. These circles, predominantly made up of white women facilitators and participants, provide a captivating site for analysis, where drum circle facilitators' and participants' use of frame drums intersects with various aspects of identity, power, and spirituality. Although these circles are created to serve as transformative “sacred” spaces where women seek empowerment and connection through sisterhood, the utilization of “foreign,” “ethnic” and/or Indigenous frame drums in spaces organized and populated by mostly white women initiates a complex interaction between cultural appropriation of practices and drums, dynamics of race, gender, and sonic spiritualities.

This paper offers a comprehensive examination of the Ontario Womyn's Drum Camp, spanning its spiritual, communal, and economic dimensions. Through ethnographic fieldwork methods, it explores [1] how sacred drumming transcends its musical role to foster spiritual experiences and forge stronger bonds among participants and [2] the complex dynamics of race, power, and privilege within the camp, seeking to provide a nuanced understanding of how sacred drumming as a form of sonic spirituality can simultaneously foster empowerment for some and perpetuate exclusion for others within spiritual communities.

This paper explores the rich tradition of frame drumming in Tajik Badakhshan and the unique ways in which the Badakhshani daf serves to mediate both the ritual and social aspects of lifeway celebrations. As elsewhere across Central Eurasia, the daf figures centrally in traditional, joyful ceremonies that mark new beginnings or collective praise of God: yet it is also an instrument that supports social cohesion at times of conflict or loss. Building on studies of frame drumming across Central Eurasia by Poche (1984), During (1991), and Doubleday (1999), this paper offers a native scholar’s perspective on frame drumming in Badakhshan, which has until now received no sustained treatment in any language. Drawing on personal experiences as well as ethnographic research among local musicians and cultural experts, this paper presents an overview of the daf’s many uses in Badakhshani cultural life. It offers an analysis of an exceptional case study in the author’s own village in the Tajik Wakhan Valley, where the daf enabled a wedding celebration to go forward despite a recent death in the community. Although periods of mourning in Badakhshan usually require a temporary cessation of all music-making and celebratory events, in this case, the mourners signaled their consent to a wedding by striking the daf. Such a case suggests that the daf’s significance far exceeds its utility as a technology of ritual musical accompaniment and is open to continued renewal and (re)interpretation, depending on the needs of the moment.

On February 3, 2023, a freight train transporting hazardous chemicals through the Ohio village of East Palestine derailed, spilling approximately forty million gallons of industrial waste into nearby waterways. Drawing brief attention from national news media outlets, the East Palestine derailment was only the most recent in a series of industrial chemical spills, both accidental and intentional, that have ravaged the waters of the Ohio River and the people along its shores for decades. This paper examines musical responses to individual and serial instances of industrial pollution in the Ohio River Valley. Building from ethnographic methods, archival data, and analysis of songs produced in styles ranging from bluegrass to emo, this paper demonstrates how musicians juxtapose rootedness with nostalgia, resignation with anger, and desperation with optimism, amplifying the sophisticated sentiments of the impacted populace. This paper joins a small publication stream, including memoirs (e.g., Bilott 2020) and collaborative research (e.g., Lassiter, Hoey, and Campbell 2020), that attend to the related deterioration of public trust in the efficacy and honesty of both government officials, regulative agencies, and manufacturing corporations in the region.

A soundwalk is an excursion consisting of a combination of auditory and physical exploration of a place. In this paper, I question the boundaries between sound and music studies, employing an ethnomusicological toolset for the study of soundwalks in Tuscany, central Italy. Here this practice is used by local cultural, environmental, and conservation organisations to foster environmental awareness and build in the local communities an empathic understanding and respectful acknowledgement of the environment and its non-human inhabitants. I explore five case studies of soundwalks aimed at listening to environmental sounds and music in various areas of naturalistic interest. The case studies include three widespread festivals: ‘Musica sulle Apuane,’ ‘Dei suoni I passi,’ and ‘Passaggi,’ the everyday auditory activities of the two natural reserves operated by the Italian League for Birds Protection (LIPU) in Tuscany, including their use of musical performances, and the cultural and environmentalist sensorial excursions organised by the ‘In Quiete’ co-op in the Casentinesi forest. Building on a holistic understanding of soundscapes that includes music as one of the many possible environmental sounds, I propose a revised definition of soundwalks that includes musical performances as one of the possible sound sources. While the goals and the rationale behind the events are different, all the soundwalks impact the public similarly, helping to reconnect the visitors with the landscape. In conclusion, I propose a model of ecomusicological analysis for soundwalks dividing them into three overlapping impact levels: the conservationist/practical, the educational/ecocritical, and the empathetic/emotional.

Artists are deploying a myriad of positionalities and approaches to raise awareness about the environmental crises and become more accountable for their music’s multi-dimensional ecological footprint. These positionalities and approaches speak of different environmentalisms – systems of beliefs– that mediate each artist’s engagement with their surrounding environment. The study of these diverse environmentalisms within music related to the environmental issues is still in development. Thus, this presentation will seek to contribute to the ongoing discussion by expanding the kind of musical and sound practices that have been considered so far, and by situating the reflection on a country constantly affected by ecological problems but where the discussion about music, sound, and environment is just beginning. In this vein, the research is located in Chile, and it addresses two musical projects belonging to diverse genres and political-cultural positions: Bahía Mansa (Iván Aguayo), an artist within the ambient music genre who composes his music through field recordings and synthesizers; and Mawiza, a Mapuche metal band within the Mapuche ül metal genre. The methodologies that guide the research are digital fieldwork, archival work, semi-structured interviews, and discourse as well as music analysis. Meanwhile, the notions of “worlding” (De la Cadena 2015), “geological ear” (Ochoa Gautier, 2022), and “performing environmentalisms” (McDowell et al., 2021) will be used as theoretical concepts to scrutinize how Bahía Mansa and Mawiza establish a connection with their surrounding environments through sound and musical practices, and what do these connections tell us about the environmentalisms that guide them.

Societies across the world are currently facing new sets of what can be called “Global Challenges.” These challenges include climate change, intra-ethnic/regional wars, economic, social and racial crises necessitated by the aftermath of slave trade, colonialism, apartheid and capitalism. Ethnomusicologists have made significant impacts in mediating social, ecological, and political crises facing people through music research. However, ethnomusicological approaches (including the so-called Applied Ethnomusicology) have been problematized as they tend to reproduce what Samul Araújo and Cambria (2013) call “forms of symbolic violence”—structural inequality, top-down power relations, and vertical knowledge structures.

How can (Ethno)Musicological research mediate contemporary global crises, particularly among marginalized communities and troubled societies? Drawing cases from projects like the “Palmwine Music and Environmental Sustainability” in Ghana, the “African Art Music Commissioning Project” in Nigeria, “Creative Mediation” in Uganda and the “Wits Festival Study” initiative in South Africa, this roundtable explores emerging approaches, practices and the potential of (ethno)musicological works in mediating social, environmental, political and economic crises. These projects provide insight into practices, approaches, challenges and prospects of (ethno)musicological research in contemporary Africa. Ultimately, this roundtable shares models for how (ethno)musicologists could work /do research with marginalized people while mediating/responding to issues of racial and social justice, decolonization, and social transformation in contemporary times—without reproducing “forms of symbolic violence.”

In January 2024, over 100 Mennonites were arrested in the U.S. capitol building for an act of civil disobedience: protesting by singing hymns. They were part of Mennonite Action, a movement of thousands that uses singing as a central strategy in its call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. This workshop will explore how these musical performances function both as protest and as something beyond the registers of politics, religious doctrine, and lexical experience. The presenters, members of Mennonite communities and participants in Mennonite Action events, will explore how heritage and identity work as affective political forces in ways that transcend symbolic meaning. We follow scholars who have written about the politics of pleasure, mobilization of traditions, and polyvalence in musical protest movements (Garofalo, Allen, and Snyder 2019; Taussig 2019; Abe 2018), as well as affective and embodied registers of political action (Cvetkovitch 2003; Shank 2014). We further argue that Mennonites’ use of hymns in these protests evokes a religious affiliation in a way that flips the common trope of “spiritual but not religious” to “religious but not spiritual.” Through singing, Mennonite protestors mobilize a peace church heritage in the form of affective intensity while not necessarily striving to create a spiritual experience. By sharing personal accounts, footage from Mennonite Action events, and stories behind songs that have become prominent in the movement, we invite participants to observe and discuss how these hymns enact political action through and beyond symbolic, embodied, and affective modes of meaning-making.

The year 1937 met many Soviet people tragically. Imprisonments, exiles, and executions did not discriminate nationalities, stratum, or social position․ The Great Purge referred to folk singers as well. This paper concerns the heritage of an Armenian folk singer named Smbat who lived in Shnogh village of Armenia situated in Soviet Empire, now in the Republic of Armenia. Smbat’s performance was well known in the village and in neighboring places. Each local event was accompanied by his performance, and until now his songs are sung in the village. Being a farmer, Smbat earned rich living by his personal diligence․ While in 1937 he was exiled to Siberia, he was assassinated in the way and never arrived there. Smbat’s heritage is kept in a private archive of his heirs. While it includes poetic texts only, some music materials were possible to find as sung by the fellow villagers. Some songs present political texts with social context, and some are typical folk songs widespread in traditional Armenian folk music. Among them are lyrical songs, joke songs, and duets. My research lead to comparative analysis of those songs and their homologues that have been collected in different regions and are found in different published Armenian folk song collections. It is possible to resume that Smbat was a native of Armenian folklore, and at the same time the creation of definite portion of his heritage was conditioned by the political situation of the purge.

Musicking is labor (Marx 1857-58). Reperforming technologies mediate the labor of musicians, which is inseparable from dynamics of race and class. A media archeology of the player piano exposes these dynamics, as these instrument-machines were marketed to the white middle class as labor-saving devices, which in the case of race rolls mediated the labor of Black pianists within the white bourgeois parlor room.

Several scholars have argued that the player piano erases the body while mediating the soul of the pianist (Wente 2022), giving the white subject access to the Black soul (Dolan 2009; Ellis 2013). I counter such discourse with observations from Black studies, namely theorizations of the nineteenth-century Black body as a soulless object (Moten 2003; McMillan 2015). In this paper I argue that the player piano mediates the mechanical objecthood of the laboring Black body, situating the instrument within a broader history of racialized automata.

19^th-century case studies reveal how Black pianists reappropriated the player piano as a site of resistance. By tracing the self-depressing keys with their fingers, pianists established tactile, transtemporal contact, reshaping notions of subjectivity, temporality, and community central to Weheliye's Sonic Afro-Modernity (2005). Through reappropriating labor and objecthood, Black pianists assume the role of embodied avatars (McMillan 2015), reframing the player piano as a site of Moten's "resistance of the object" (2003). Situated at the intersection of media theory, organology, and Black studies, this paper highlights the nexus between the history of sound recording and the construction of race within U.S. modernity.

This paper uncovers the lost early history of the terms folk song and folk music in English. Habitually associated with the end of the 19^th century, these terms in fact arose during the 1840s. One person in particular was responsible for this discourse: the prolific author and translator Mary Howitt. I show that folk song and folk music emerged initially as direct translations of the German Volkslieder, though they were not associated explicitly with the work of Johann Gottfried Herder nor with any particular nation or region. Having lived briefly in Heidelberg (a focal point of German Romanticism exemplified by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn), Howitt would have been aware of Herder’s coinage and the lack of an equivalent word in English. I trace these terms as they begin to circulate across the Atlantic, asking how and why there were first employed. I use this material to argue that folk music was neither a repertoire nor an idiom, but an idea. Indeed, it is the concept of the folk that most enchants writers during this period. These terms, then, were a reply or retort to the interlaced revolutions and encounters that defined modernity—used by writers who were never of the folk they speak about. Ultimately, this story exemplifies a long intellectual struggle in the West over the meaning and musical significance of working-class culture, nature, time, and colonial alterity.

This 90-minute roundtable extends from a research project at the intersections of neuropsychology and ethnomusicology. The project involved designing and executing data collection on musical rhythm and cognition in healthy aging adults. The project included creation and testing of audio recordings of musical rhythms, recordings which researchers interpreted differently depending on their disciplinary background. Members included two neuropsychologists and three ethnomusicologists, each of whom will participate in the roundtable. To the neuropsychologists, the recordings satisfied the criteria for “music,” but to the ethnomusicologists, they had a questionable status due to their lack of cultural context. These divergent perspectives highlight the purpose of this roundtable: to discuss the boundaries and definitions of music from varied disciplinary orientations. Presenters 1, an ethnomusicologist, will consider ethnography and cultural context in relation to our project. Presenter 2, also an ethnomusicologist, will consider mentorship in relation to design of our project. Presenters 3&4, both neuropsychologists, will discuss measurement of cognition and brain activity in relation to musical rhythm. By focusing on different methodological orientations to the study of musical rhythm, this roundtable will invite contemplation of the following questions: what counts as knowledge; what counts as evidence; how do we gather information; and how do we draw conclusions? Inspired by the work of Judith Becker (2004, 2009), we intend for conversation to zoom in and out of challenges present when designing and executing projects at the intersections of the humanities and sciences, encouraging curiosity into research designs perhaps misconstrued via limited awareness between disciplinary orientations.

Many contemporary New Mexicans of Native and Hispano ancestries strive to create their identities free from persistent biases imposed by the colonial casta system, including dismissive attitudes toward genízaros, a small population who identify with their indigenous roots and enslavement. New Mexican historian Miguel Tórrez’s recent geneological work has quantified data on bloodlines based on consensual DNA testing, revealing up to 472,000 Native grandmother and close to 5000 Native grandfather ancestors among Chicanx or Indo-Hispanos in the study. Three New Mexican scholars discuss the musical and performative implications of what has become a somewhat “invisible” and suppressed mix of intersecting identities, with focus on the emergence of Indita ballads as a musical means of reconciliation and testimonio, and the music and dance practices Los Dias and Los Manueles that model symbolic practices integrative and generative of community cohesion. The first scholar summarizes the historical trajectory, including the desire to come to terms with multiple intersections of identities and not two essentialized binaries. The second scholar critically interrogates the intersections of class, gender, and race in their poetic analysis of the nineteenth-century New Mexican ballad, la indita de Juliana Ortega. Building on the works of Michel Foucault, Bernadine Hernández, and Pablo Mitchell, the presenter outlines the precarity of a young nuevomexicana (girl) through an analysis of body politics and sexual slavery. A third scholar brings notions of crossing thresholds in performative practices that utilize the house or its threshold as a liminal space for intersecting practices and dialogues to occur.

This paper examines the role and symbolism of vālaga, a double reed aerophone and drum ensemble heard in the Kodagu district of Karnataka in South India. It is frequently heard in conjunction with two other ensembles: chende (centa) drumming groups and duḍikottpāt quartets of male singers and drummers from Kodagu’s most prominent ethnolinguistic group, the Kodava. All three ensembles may be heard at temple-based festivals, the overlay of duḍikottpāt and vālaga characterises other celebrations including weddings and rituals of animism or ancestor worship, and the ensemble may be featured at other secular events. Drawing on the work of Turino, Murray Schafer, and Feld, I show how its presence and audibility compared to duḍikottpāt ensure that its sound acts as a sonic index of Kodagu. Its association with celebration further indexes the notion of ballo (‘live well’), and its distinctive utilisation of popular melodies and rhythmic intensity has facilitated the development of the new genre of vālaga remix, a relatively rare instance of new hybridity in this district. Nevertheless, whilst its sound may reinforce notions of unity and the centripetal role of festivals, careful observation of the spatial disposition of ensembles relative to other ensembles, inner shrines, processing deities and dancers shows a consistent and careful demarcation of space that reflects the lower status of the vālaga players. Thus, whilst sonically indexing unity, total practice may index the tension between the centripetal idealism of festivals and advocacy of a ‘district’ culture, and the realities of inter-group relations.

This paper narrows in on the under-examined intersection between New York City’s avant-garde music scenes and its community gardens – two sites which highlight the roles of migration, gentrification, and community-driven activism within broader processes of urban infrastructure theory. I identify in both spaces a mutual activist struggle not only for recognition and real-estate, but community justice in a more expansive sense. Community gardens have long been the sites of existential activist struggles (Schmelzkopf 1995, Martinez 2010). Similarly, it is increasingly apparent that musicians within New York's rich avant-garde music scenes both directly shape and are shaped by urbanization (Rifkin 2023, Bradley 2023). While these musicians have historically relied upon inexpensive real-estate for performances, the flourishing of unique arts scenes also generates mainstream interest in previously “undesirable” neighborhoods, generating a cycle of constant migration as artists both participate in and are negatively impacted by gentrification. Here, I take the non-profit organization Arts for Art (AFA), an organization dedicated to “the promotion and advancement of FreeJazz,” and their annual InGardens Festival as a case study through which to consider the interdependence of sonic forms of activism and gardens themselves. Through deep ethnographic engagement with participants, audiences, and organizers, I not only interrogate the ways in which gardens have historically relied on sound-based activism, but also how forms of explicitly activist music-making have relied on gardens as accessible venues. As such, this conceptualization of scenes and urban ecologies generates broader implications for music/sound studies in metropolitan centers within the U.S. and beyond.

This paper presents a novel theoretical approach for understanding and comparing ensembles on the basis of the number of musicians employed to accomplish the same (or similar) task. It asks what we can learn about the social and musical priorities of ensembles that appear to intentionally include performer/performance redundancies as a means to guarantee the success of a performance that is otherwise riven through with uncertainties that can affect a musician’s ability to play their part. This paper demonstrates the utility of this theoretical perspective by comparing two ensemble-types: 1) the 10 to 13-piece salsa bands that perform on a weekly basis for dancers in Toronto and 2) the 40-plus and fiercely-competitive Panamanian murga bands that perform once a year during carnival season. Drawing on extended ethnographic research, this paper proposes that redundancies are best identified by observing those moments in a performance when a musician does not play their part—whether it be from fatigue or the seemingly-irresistible urge to take a sip of beer—and taking note of their frequency and overall impact on the success of a performance—e.g., are they commented on by onlookers. As the comparative analysis suggests, when lapses in performance are relatively common among band members and perceived to be unproblematic (as is the case with murga), then the observable performance redundancies are likely of greater relative musical-social importance—and vice versa. This paper proposes that this theoretical paradigm of relative performance redundancies can be applied to cross-cultural analyses of other ensemble traditions.

The documentary Devagan (66 min) was completed in 2024, representing the culmination of six years of fieldwork. Devagan explores the Hindu ritual performance of Nava Durgā carried out by the Banmālā caste of the Newar people in Bhaktapur, Nepal. Originating in 1512, the dancers and musicians, known as devagan, are considered human incarnations of the nine manifestations of goddess Durgā. The annual Nava Durgā performance unfolds over approximately nine months, starting from October and culminating in June of the following year.

The documentary delves into the intricacies of the performance through the narratives of three devagans from the same family. The grandfather, serving as the chief devagan overseeing rituals, narrates the myth of Nava Durgā, brought to life through the performances of his son-in-law and grandson.

Devagan sheds light on this ancient living tradition within a contemporary context, addressing themes such as local beliefs, ritual practices, and the challenges faced by this tradition.

The 20-minute excerpt opens with two significant rituals marking the rebirth of the Nava Durgā and the onset of the performance season. The meanings inherent in the performance are unveiled through a specific dance, narrated by the grandfather, and enriched by visual imagery showcasing his son-in-law’s dance. Additionally, pivotal insights into knowledge transmission are provided through interviews with both the son-in-law and grandson. The excerpt culminates with the funeral rites of the Nava Durgā, symbolizing the conclusion of the performance season.

Three languages used in the film - Nepali, Newari, and English – are all subtitled in English.

Plains Indian Sign Language (PISL), also known as Hand Talk, is a Native American sign language that was a lingua-franca among Tribes who spoke diverse languages throughout the Great Plains. PISL later became an endangered language as settler colonization unfolded. While most Native Peoples currently do not conversationally sign PISL, Native performers, most who are hearing and are not D/deaf, commonly use PISL in their music making practices at intertribal powwows in Oklahoma. This paper compares the ways that singers and participants in the Oklahoma powwow circuit sign PISL in their music making to achieve different goals. Deriving from over eleven years of fieldwork with Southern Plains drum groups Ottertrail and Zotigh Singers, I show that powwow singers both sign PISL and gesture to communicate while singing. In contrast, Tribal princesses, young Native women who serve as ambassadors for their community and/or a powwow organization, showcase signed music of the Lord’s Prayer as embodied reflections of cultural values and traditional knowledge. This paper contributes to ethnomusicological scholarship on signed music making, which often emphasizes American Sign Language rather than Indigenous sign languages, as well as Indigenous music scholarship on powwow that has minimally accounted for the use of PISL in powwow performance.

That music is social is one of the foundational assumptions of ethnomusicology. As John Blacking put it, music-making is “a special kind of social action which can have important consequences for other kinds of social action” (1995, 223). The socialities of music are often understood furthermore to be multi-scalar, with what Georgina Born calls the “intimate microsocialities of musical performance and practice” intersecting with other “planes of social mediation” (2012, 267). While ethnomusicologists have often made reference to work in psychology and cognitive science as part of their theorizations of music and the social (e.g. Turino 2008), emerging brain imaging techniques open up new possibilities for understanding how human minds work in ensemble, and for understanding the collective neural processes underpinning interpersonal musical experience. This paper presents ongoing interdisciplinary collaborative research that explores neural synchrony and interpersonal connection during musical performance. By employing functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) hyperscanning of the brains of up to ten musicians and listeners, as well as ethnographic methods including observation and open-ended interviews, this research puts methodologies and theoretical frameworks from cognitive science and ethnomusicology in dialogue in order to explore music as a social phenomenon in new ways. The empirical research presented in this paper offers insights into ongoing interdisciplinary theorizations of “human musicality [as] a coevolved system for social bonding” (Savage et al. 2021), and furthermore instigates broader reflections on possibilities for future collaborative dialogue between ethnomusicology and cognitive science.

This roundtable delivers a thought-provoking conversation that engages scholars and performers of South Asian music with the post-Independence history of Indian music in the West and its increasingly complex manifestations (Farrell 2013). This forum aims to cover a gap in the field of study that has, on the one hand, established literature about Western pioneers in the colonial era (Sorrell 2013; Linden 2013; Bor 1996) and, on the other hand, growing research on Indian musics popularized in the West by performers of South Asian origins (Lavezzoli 2007; Slawek 1993; Neuman 1984) including musicians of the second and third diasporas (Ramnaraine 2020; Bakrania 2013; Banerjee 1988). Speaking from their diverse generational, gender, ethnic, and theoretical perspectives, the five presenters and the discussant examine a less investigated aspect: the first wave of Western singers and players who carved their space and professional careers in Hindustani and Karnatik heritage music. Through the case study of postcolonial pioneers such as Jon Higgins (1939-1984), Amelia Cuni (1958-2024), and others who in the last decades of the 20^th century paved the way, this roundtable explores their positionalities outside the lineages of hereditary musicians, as well as their critical contributions to establishing the teaching of Indian music in Western institutions. Presenters debate how, rather than a peripheral phenomenon, these forerunners represent a critical category yet to be recognized, not only for their intercultural efforts as performers and educators but also as custodians of the indigenous knowledge they documented and received from hereditary musicians of a bygone era.

Ethnomusicologists and ecomusicologists have long studied the role of nonhuman sounds in human musicking (Feld 1982; Seeger 1987; Baily 1997; Ramnarine 2009; Brabec de Mori 2013; Ochoa 2014; Silvers 2020), often foregrounding the dependency of human lifeways on multispecies actors. There is a danger, however, that the study of inter-species auralities overlooks spaces of human-animal conflict, controversies over physical and symbolic spaces, and species whose sonic presence is deemed unwanted or "pesky". On this panel, we propose to explore unwanted more-than-human “noises” (Attali 1977; Thompson 2017) in their entangled political, biological, and acoustemological contexts. The panel builds on human-animal studies scholarship that dentaturalizes the “pest” in North America—scholarship that critiques dichotomies between wild and domestic; native and invasive; and enemy and ally across multispecies contexts (Tsing 1995; McLaughlin 2011; Biehler 2013; Hartigan 2015; Ahuja 2016; Willoughby 2022)—by asking the following questions: What can the sounds of animals considered to be “pests” tell us about the stakes of multispecies cohabitation? How is sound implicated in forms of multispecies relationality, particularly with creatures whose presence may provoke controversy, fear, or disgust? Working at ethnomusicology’s intersections with ecomusicology, traditional ecological knowledges, and sound studies, our aim is to place sound and listening at the center of co-constituted interspecies displacement, vulnerability, care, and resistance. This task requires attention to the boundary-making practices between species. We thus attend to "pesky auralities" in ways that implicate capitalism, settler colonialism, necropolitics, environmentalism, and gentrification.

Twenty-first century scholarship in ethnomusicology provides fruitful examples of research that illuminates collaborations, generational spiritual connections, and institution building in music and the arts among African and African diasporic peoples. Be it on the global stages of the popular music industry, in the ebony corridors of high education or among faith communities drawing from their African roots to resist post-colonial oppression, diasporic Africans and their distant kin on the continent have been and are driving multivalent dialogs that are bound by an affirming praxis of African consciousness. This panel is a showcase of projects in progress that use archival research, fieldwork ethnography, interviews, and methodologies from the digital humanities to explore contemporary dialogues back and forth across the Black Atlantic and the cultural productions they inspire. The panel includes presentations that document the African presence in the music programs of American Historically Black Colleges and Universities, the unapologetic mainstreaming of Black sound cultures in global pop by superstar Beyoncé, and the political consciousness of musical groups within Xambá Nação in Brazil—a community that traces its cultural and spiritual heritage back to the Tchamba region of West Africa. Research and study of the generational conversations among Africans and the Diaspora featured in this panel are marking new pathways for scholarship as the world becomes more connected via global high speed telecommunication access, social media, interlinked economies, and increased transnational mobility.

This roundtable gathers around historical materialism and socialist modes of analysis and political practice for music, sound and movement. We seek to envision anti-capitalist theorization and praxis that challenge the liberal paradigm as the universal ground for sociopolitical and ethnomusicological inquiry. Panelists examine the ways in which socialist and anti-capitalist projects have structured auralities and corporalities around the globe and offer them as models to confront the current impasses colluding against imagining anti-capitalist futures; both ethnomusicology’s internal ideologies and brushes with socialism; historical and contemporary employment of historical materialist analysis; and past and present socialist responses to the crises of capitalism. Panelist 1 explores the anti-caste musical landscape of modern western India to trace the tensions between caste and class over the 20^th and 21^st centuries. Panelist 2 focuses on the legacies of Yugoslav workers’ self-management in exploring the potentials and limits of music and sound in building productive relations based on social ownership. Panelist 3 discusses the pertinence of two concepts stemming from historical materialism - acoustic labor and sound praxis - to ethnographic research on music and sound in working-classRio de Janeiro. Panelist 4 works on the legacies of commoning and cooperative movements in Reconstruction-era Louisiana to foreground the counter-plantation politics of Black brass bands. Panelist 5 examines how socialist artists in the 1970s drew on labor union folk dances from the 1960s to mobilize public space and create solidarity among workers in Turkey. Panelist 6 examines ethnomusicology’s ideological commitments to liberalism in the 1990s globalization debates.

This panel examines how changes in material cultures and craft practices lead to new social formations. While newly available physical media encouraged Peruvian record labels to re-release obscure albums on vinyl, expanding the available resources for a collective musical history, and new materials for guitar making widened gender participation in South American guitar cultures, in transnational synthesizer gear cultures an increased availability of electronic components and PCB manufacturing led to new forms of hegemonic masculinity. The differences observed across the disparate sites pertain to specific modes of material/object fetishization and practices of valuation (conspicuous consumption, asynchronous valuation, and economic valuation, respectively). While each paper uses a unique approach to examining the creation, sustenance, and change of social formations, our approaches are complementary. Musical instruments, media, and other forms of material, understood for their material properties and through their crafting practices, are fruitful entry points for investigating many of the core problem spaces of ethnomusicological research (identities, histories, communities)—and help to (re)materialize the study of economic ethnomusicology.

In 2019, a video of a Chilean feminist collective’s performance, “Un violador en tu camino” (“A Rapist in Your Path”) went viral; soon after, LasTesis’ performance was re-staged in different parts of the world. In each place, aspects of this performance, including the lyrics, musical elements, or bodily movements were altered to better conform with local practices. During the Women Life Freedom movement in Iran (from 2022), the collective feminists4jina, performed “Motajavez To Hasti,” (“The Rapist is You”) a Farsi version of this performance; notably, the group was made up of Iranian women in diaspora, although it was viewed in Iran through social media. Videos shot in Berlin, New York, London, and other cities in Europe and North America were uploaded and shared widely through global social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter, as well as more intimate Telegram chats and text chains. In this paper, I will analyze how the changes in these performances reflected protesters' demands in Iran. Through a close reading of this network of videos, I explore the performative aspects of words, music and movements and the two-way dialogue of the Women Life Freedom movement with transnational feminisms. In an interview, the cofounders of LasTesis stated how shared stories can bring both empowerment and sadness (Larsson Piñeda, 2023). In my paper, I highlight the situated knowledges that Iranian women’s voices bring to the layers of stories of the performance, showing how storytelling within a women-led movement can become an empowering act of resistance.

Even when our ethnographic work is aligned methodologically and theoretically with ethically framed, locally-grounded projects, our research texts can have unintended consequences, perhaps even outcomes we cannot predict. Based on long-term ethnographic research among Dagara women along the northwestern border of Ghana, West Africa, I discuss the afterlives of several published articles within the community in which the research was conducted. The research itself is grounded in indigenous feminist praxis, and serves to explore and amplify the local feminist projects and modes of empowerment, justice, and solidarity-building that Dagara women utilize. Here, I discuss how this feminist-oriented research was taken up after publication by a male community member who sought to cause harm and disruption to me and to his wife, a research collaborator. I attend to Fassin’s call to “attend to the public afterlife of ethnography,” (2015) by thinking through how research is received by different publics and actors, its purposes in the public sphere, and potential material consequences of research projects. I’m particularly interested in grappling with the dissonance between the feminist methodologies of collaboration and vulnerability, and potential public consequences that cause harm or peril to those same values. Finally, I discuss the ways that gendered violence and regulatory tactics control ethnographic knowledge production. This work opens up conversation about the kinds of violences inflicted upon ethnographers doing feminist research, and upon those with whom we work.

With its propulsive, bass-heavy grooves, emphatic voices singing in call-and-response, and lively choreography, the music of maracatu is a sonic energy that has become a cultural phenomenon throughout Brazil in the last two decades. Primarily heard during Carnival, maracatu is an Afro-Brazilian drumming ensemble that traditionally constituted a male-dominated space, with women’s roles restricted to dancing. I seek to understand how maracatu has recently become a force for social change in the hands of women, physically playing instruments previously prohibited to them while occupying public spaces and taking control of how they want to live. Through an ethnographic case study of Baque de Mina, an all-women maracatu group based in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil, I explore how feminine empowerment and resistência (resistance, endurance) is fostered through the music of maracatu. Most scholarship to date has centered on the traditional maracatu communities in Recife and their significance as symbols of Black resistance. More recently, Brazilian anthropologists have highlighted the gradual inclusion of women in Recife’s maracatu groups. My research is a departure from those studies focusing on the uprooted and re-signified meanings of this drumming style. Based on fieldwork conducted from 2022-2023, I investigate 1) how Baque de Mina’s music-making empowers women living in one of Brazil’s most conservative states; 2) what pushbacks are located in these spaces and how women cultivate resistance toward these strains; and 3) how maracatu’s music shifts meaning as it is heard outside of its traditional context.

In 1986, acclaimed female Pakistani singer, Iqbal Bano, sang leftist poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s Urdu poem-song “Hum-Dekhenge”("That day will come") to rousing crowds in Lahore, Pakistan. The performance was secretly recorded, and a smuggled copy circulated in South Asia, bringing it into popular culture as a protest song. Bano’s affective expression was magnified by her subversive signs: She wore a saree and sang Faiz’s poems, both banned in Pakistan during General Zia-ul-Haq's authoritarian rule (1978-1988). The audience’s response was raucous: Shouting, “Inquilab-Zindabad” (long-live-revolution) and cheering for the lines “Every crown will be flung, Each throne brought down” while also keeping time, signaling the audience's participatory role in expressive culture and protest.

This paper is a feminist social biography of the poem turned protest-song, as it crosses geographies partitioned by colonialism, nation-state formation, and inter-state war: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. As a circulating symbol in popular culture, the poem-song has become a sign of affective expression infused with and without subversive politics in South Asia. All translations of ‘Hum-Dekhenge’ into South-Indian languages Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam, and popular renditions were by women poets/performers, with each topical rendition involving conscious literary, political, and musical choices. The performances of the translated song at pivotal political moments managed to mobilize publics and destabilize dictatorial governments. Thinking with scholars, José Esteban Muñoz, and Jill Dolan’s ‘Utopian Performative,’ this paper argues how Bano’s octave jump in performance, stages an aural utopia, as if, pulling us from the dystopian present to the utopian future.

This study examines the musical heritage of Owode Ketu, a Yewa sub-ethnic group in Ogun State, Nigeria, with a focus on Ponse and Kulumbu music. Ponse music was introduced to the Owode Ketu from Igbunta by the late Chief N.G. Fabiyi, the Akinrogun of Owode Ketu. This importation sparked the creation of Kulumbu music, a derivative form that has since become an important of Owode Ketu cultural identity. Drawing on my 2021 fieldwork as a graduate student in Nigeria, this study delves into the intricacies of Ponse and Kulumbu, which are characterized by their tripartite structure of dance, drums, and singing—a combination that is emblematic of traditional Nigerian music. I discuss the lineage and storied histories of these genres to better understand how both Ponse and Kulumbu music became of significant cultural importance in Owode Ketu, and how these musics, though not originally from the community, have come to be fundamental aspects of Owode Ketu culture. I have therefore investigated the unique factors of the genre, underscoring their importance as a reflection of the community's identity and history. Further themes that emerged in this research relate to the social responsibility and intervention of music in the community, the responsibility of the leader, and the unique communication between the drummer and the leader. Through its focus on the Owode Ketu sub-ethnic group in Ogun State, Nigeria, this research addresses a significant gap in academic literature while adding to previous work on identity and inter- and intra-community relations.

Latinidad is a relational identity marker. First, it emerges as a form of othering on the part of
English speakers toward speakers of Latin languages in the United States; it is about establishing a hierarchical difference. Second, Latinidad is also a response to this othering through the creation of an imagined community. Thirdly, however, Latinidad also arises from the recognition of commonalities and differences within Latin America; in this case, it is about recognizing an othering that is simultaneously a WE. This social process also occurs through the construction of affective bonds where aesthetic expressions are the galvanizers. An example of this is the presence of the musical genre cumbia, which, from its Colombian origin, acquired a presence in the 1960s throughout Latin America and the United States. In the Latin American case, it was adopted by subaltern populations in their own countries. This panel, through the presentation of four case studies —carried out in Southern California, Peru, Mexico, and Chile—explores how Latinidad and the creation of a sense of belonging (or unbelonging) are invented through a concrete object which molds affects. Indeed, the panel’s papers examine how one of the most ubiquitous Latin American popular musics is simultaneously expressive of highly localized identities. At the same time, this panel contributes perspectives concerning the aesthetic political significance of a genre that creates “local bonds” and “Latinidad-bonds” to fulfill distinct national and regional cultural, political, and aesthetic necessities.

This panel brings scholars together to reflect on their critical ethnographic work, representing perspectives trained on diverse topics, such as white supremacy in Scandinavia to religious nationalism in India to gender and sexual exclusivity in some U.S. Black American churches to impacts of systemic racism and racialization in Asian American communities to Zionism in the context of Israeli-Palestinian crisis. The discussion will focus on the ethics, challenges, dilemmas, and importance of doing critical ethnography–that is, ethnography in which “the researcher encounters social conditions that become the point of departure for research” and in which the researcher “takes us beneath surface appearances, disrupts the status quo, and unsettles both neutrality and taken-for-granted assumptions by bringing to light underlying and obscure operations of power and control” (Madison 2019: 4). Tackling issues of fieldwork methods, representational ethics, relationships with interlocutors, and personal and professional risks, this conversation aims to offer practical guidance and strategies for not only intentionally setting out to do critical ethnography but also how to handle the challenging situations that often come with the territory.

Among instruments, the guitar is perhaps the most over-represented in culture and under-represented in academic writing. The guitar in African music engages many of the same conversations as in the global north, but as a "non-traditional" instrument on the continent, it raises many others. Within African music, the guitar can index the local, the national, or the cosmopolitan; it can sound the traditional, the popular, or the modern. Most frequently its sonic and visual presentation engages a combination of these discourses at once. Dawe calls the guitar “an instrument of global performance” (2010, xvi), and certainly this is true of the contemporary African performer within a digitally networked global guitarscape that is both visual and aural. Africanists have long since discarded the trope of the drum as a synonym for African musicianship, and it can be argued that the guitar has been the definitive instrument of the continent in the recorded music era. While there are some studies of guitar-based African music beginning in the early sixties (Rycroft 1961), there are relatively few that deal with the guitar’s iconicity, physicality, or instrumentality. Following interventions made by the new organology, this panel's contributors examine the guitar in Africa through studies of nationalism and decolonization, circulation and the social life of things, ecomusicology, and the materiality of instruments, of sound, and of "tone."

Salvador, the state capital of Bahia in Brazil, continues to attract international recognition as the African diasporic capital in the Americas and largest Afro-descendant city outside Africa. This panel, (consisting of three Bahian scholars and one American scholar ) examines recent Black sonic, musical, and cultural manifestations in Salvador, and one paper on how this emergence is manifesting in the United States. The papers navigate the complex territory of Afro-diasporic musical forces across the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the United States that intersect in Salvador, Bahia--especially among blocos afro within the discipline of ethnomusicology.

In the past few years, the Bahian state capital of Salvador continues to gain the interest of Black American culture in the U.S. In 2023 alone, for example, Black American celebrities Angela Bassett, Viola Davis, Naomi Campbell, and Beyoncé visited the city of Salvador, Brazil. As a collaborative panel, our focus relates to this recent movement in Salvador where Black cultural icons and celebrities—along with hundreds of thousands of tourists—are taking greater interest in Salvador. American ethnomusicologists have recently published on music in Salvador, such as the "tropes of Africanness" in Candomblé and Afro-Bahian classical music (Diaz 2021), or how popular musicians make a living playing music in Salvador (Packman 2021). This panel, however, monitors and evaluates the growth of Afro-Bahian popular music--especially in a contemporary light of Afro-Brazilian Black resistance, sonic Afro-diasporics forces, and intercultural-musical exchanges between Bahia, the United States, and Africa.

What does it mean to experience the construction of contemporary popular music practice in a small, lightly populated North Atlantic island nation? This panel directs the ethnomusicological gaze toward musicianship, participation, and professionality by exploring the granularity of musicking (Small, 1998) activities enacted in an increasingly connected yet remote place. The papers here interface with ongoing work on Icelandic music that has focused on the nation’s ‘sound’ writ large (Hall et al, 2019) and its socio-musical practices (Prior, 2015; Thorrodsen, 2019). The first paper explores the transformation toward and evolution and emergence of a professionalized music industry in Iceland. This move has been accompanied by generational shifts in attitudes toward and embracing of the business side of music – a marked departure from past sentiment which still navigates the distinctive qualities that define Iceland’s music scene. The second paper considers the positioning of the Iceland Airwaves festival as both a locally resonant event and a connection to a broader network of European festivals. By unpacking the “Europeanness” of the festival, it explores how Icelandic musicians participate within broader networks as a host country for European performance, a partner in cultural networks, and a peer festival amongst other well-known and well-attended showcase festivals. The third paper discusses Icelandic music for visual media in the dual constructs of musical practice and organizing activity. These mutual structures, it argues, reinforce a cross-Atlantic and Icelandic construction and reception of the practice of moving image composition maintained by social interaction, compositional structure, and industrial investment.

In this panel, we raise key theoretical and methodological issues regarding the study of K-pop, drawing on insights from anthropology, sociology, and dance ethnography. The three papers collectively pose and explore the following question: how can one study K-pop ethnographically? We pose this question as a counterpoint to a strand of K-pop scholarship that continues to revolve around the marker “K-” and its (non-)correspondence to existing notions of Korean-ness. This approach, which treats K-pop as culturally and ontologically distinct from the outset, risks perpetuating both Orientalist perspectives and nationalist narratives. Through this panel, we strive to show how a relational approach can help construct an ontology of K-pop that does justice to its structures and specificities. To this end, this panel puts in conversation three ethnographic projects conducted in different empirical contexts where K-pop is positioned against other cultural categories or itself understood in varying ways by those who partake in its production. Each project will highlight how different actors make sense of and define K-pop by distinguishing it from other categories of music, dance, or mode of production; this in turn will provide valuable insight into how the very notion of K-pop as a bounded category is reproduced over time and how K-pop is produced and articulated to different audiences. We contend that this insight will yield implications beyond the study of K-pop and into the realm of globalized popular culture, particularly in a world where music genres have become increasingly heterogeneous with diverse cultural influences.

This roundtable will open up a dialogue around ethnomusicologists’ roles within daily lives beyond the normative academic and applied professions. Ethnomusicologists are everywhere. Many years after the groundbreaking work of recognizing the shadows we cast in the field (Barz and Cooley, 1997), we invite conversation around the impact we have, individually and collectively, at home. Does ethnomusicological training shift our being-in-the-world in ways that are worth noting and have the potential to serve in a crisis-laden age on fire with othering? Five scholars will briefly share how they engage in distinctive—and perhaps surprising—ways as ethnomusicologists in their daily lives, asking: How do we activate our training within our worlds, both in our everyday interactions and in ways that resonate in our wider communities? Are there distinctive features of ethnomusicological training and engagement that resound beyond academic contexts? And how might we collaborate, share, and learn from one another and our communities? What is the role of ethnomusicology in our efforts to impact the world(s) around us?

The Irish-language term, ceol, implies both music and activity or vigour (DINN), thereby encapsulating a sense of audible sound as well as physicality, process and (re)creativity. This panel proposes an exploration of embodiment in music and dance that goes beyond a music/dance binary, highlighting instead the intricate interlocking ecology of Irish traditional music, song, and dance practices. Performative gesture, or Geáitse, is a central concept that ties these three papers together in an exploration of the aesthetics of movement and gesture that permeate vocal, instrumental, and dance practices in the Irish tradition. The first paper approaches geáitse from the perspective of its encultured appreciation when ‘listening’ to dancers. Listening in this sense is understood as an ecological event wherein beauty in musical experience is predicated as much on how it ‘looks’ and ‘feels’ as it on how it sounds. The second paper shifts the perspective to the subjective experience of ‘composition in performance’ that defines traditional sean-nós dance practice. In employing artistic research methodology, the dancer’s embodied understanding of the music, and the symbiotic relationship between the musician and the dancer are foregrounded. Continuing with the theme of artistic research methodology, the final paper draws attention to vocality in the embodiment of vernacular instrumental techniques. In focusing on the seemingly paradoxical practices of slow-air and polka playing, the body is situated as the site of a living sophisticated non-literate ‘theory’ of music, traditionally acquired through immersion in a world of embodied sound and movement i.e., music, song and dance.

Latin American dances have played a role in transforming world music and dance cultures for 500 years. Colonialists and capitalists have extracted and exported movements and sounds from sarabande to salsa, chaconne to chachachá, mining the Americas for passion (Savigliano 1995) in parallel to the extraction of other resources – even as Latin Americans themselves have often used those same materials as forms of sonic and choreographic resistance and survival both at home and on their own journeys around the world. As people in distant cultures encounter these dances, they transform them still further and find in them new ways of either asserting or counteracting power, cementing or contesting gender roles, building bridges or erecting walls.

While the circulation of Latin dance music (and to a lesser extent, Latin American dance) in diasporic contexts and in global (post-)colonial power centers is well understood, its presence and impact in the Global Easts – from the Eastern Bloc and the Eastern Mediterranean to East Asia – have so far been little researched. By presenting new research on the travels of Latin American dance and dance music in these areas from the early twentieth century through to the twenty-first century, this panel suggests novel methods and sources for the study of popular dance history as well as new ways of understanding global choreographic circuits. We also propose “Global Easts” as a conceptual tool for understanding and comparing longstanding cultural dynamics and imaginaries.

With case studies based in Bulgaria, Cambodia, South Korea, and Berlin, this panel offers a theoretical exploration of the intensities, relations, and subjectivities that come into being through quiet sounds and the acoustically inaudible. We focus on quiet vocal and music-making practices stretching from whispered chant to subvocal singing and ostensibly silent speech. In what ways are those minor sounds central to group formation, religiosity, multisensoriality, personhood, and individual means of coping with precarity? If quietness “can exert a power that rivals, if not mirrors, that of high loudness” (Heller 2015:48), then how do quietude and loudness interact, how do they differ, and what intensities emerge from humanly inaudible sounds? Building on Eugenie Brinkema’s pivot to near-inaudibility as a way to engage “with formal gradations of intensities and with duration” (2011:213) and Ana María Ochoa Gautier’s call to rethink “the acoustic definition of silence as determined solely by human auditory thresholds” (2015:189), we move beyond normative modes of audition and sounding to examine otherwise worlds of quiet sounds that both include and exceed vibrational acoustics. The individual papers ethnographically illustrate how those alternative sonic and auditory practices pertain to gendered vocal politics and a resituating of history; tensions of religious singing during the Covid-19 pandemic; efforts toward fleeting, subvocal stability amid the destabilization of traumatic witnessing; and deaf subjectivity and sensory ontologies. Collectively, we push for a sound studies that examines the multitude of social worlds that open up when attending to how quiet voices redefine the bounds of audibility.

Afro-Venezuelan tambor is an umbrella term used to refer to many styles of drumming-based music and dance performed traditionally in Afro-Catholic celebrations (Brandt 1994; García 2002, 2005; Liscano 1947; Ramón y Rivera 1971, 1983; Vasquez 2020). Although each community has created a different style of tambor, this panel focuses on active and long-standing histories of Black political, social, and cultural agency emerging from the Barlovento region in Miranda state. In this panel, we employ a transdisciplinary approach that fosters dialogues between ethnomusicology, anthropology, comparative literature and Afro-Latinx studies. We examine issues of (im)mobility and re-makings in contemporary tambor practices from Barlovento vis-à-vis systemic and new pressures on Black life due to the ongoing crisis in Venezuela. Collectively, we discuss how the voice supports and complicates the social and musical aspects of tambor, the way sonic dialogues transform tradition to offer an updated version of the past, the “tambor meets electronica” transnational movements, and the importance of the drums in the rhythm of life be it joy or fear to highlight the presence of internal rhythms carried by ancestral memory. Because of our experiences as practitioners in sacred and secular contexts, this panel contributes to theorizations of tambor as a cultural practice that transcends the strictly musical realm and to its constant reinventions. Additionally, we bring visibility to communities and musical styles that have been severely underrepresented in ethnomusicological debates to evidence the specific ways in which the Afro-Venezuelan experience nuances understandings of Caribbean and hemispheric Afro- diasporic cultural expressions.

This panel offers new perspectives on the substantial literature that has examined how maqam traditions (variously rendered as makam, mugham, muqam in different regions) have been canonized and harnessed to nation-building projects (Davis 2004; During 2005; Hassan 2017; Naroditskaya 2002). Our approach aims to engage with practitioners who are working beyond the boundaries of national cultures, and to explore transnational affective experiences that bind musicians and constitute their emerging subjectivities across geographical borders. We show how transnational and border communities of musicians foster connections that challenge hegemonic ideas of nation through four case studies: musical creativity across the Sino-Soviet border where Uyghur and Tajik-Uzbek maqam traditions are united by Sufi practices of sama’ and hikmat; how the music of a distinguished ney master Niyazi Sayin (b.1927) offers possibilities for alternative post-national musical citizenship; makam musicians’ “feeling of history” (Hirschkind 2020) in Turkey and Greece that opposes the nation-states divides across the Aegean Sea; and the legacy of mugham singer Hajibaba Huseynov (1919-1993) that foregrounds the intimate links between Azerbaijani and Iranian classical music. Through these case studies drawn from different parts of the maqam world, the panel presenters ask how we can productively explore the question of cross-border creativities through methodologies of practice-based and collaborative research. Our approach is grounded in the call for “border thinking” advanced, for example, by Tlostanova & Mignolo (2012), and the increasing ethnomusicological emphasis on transnational musical circulation and multi-sited research (Celestini and Bohlman 2014).

This roundtable examines care as a central component of our interdisciplinary work as ethnomusicologists and sound studies scholars. We ask how an ethics of care, informed by the needs and desires of communities we work alongside, can amplify “just vibrations” in intersecting academic and social spheres (Cheng 2016). The roundtable begins with a theoretical framing of a politics of care, shaped by 21st century calls toward greater equity along lines of race, gender, and dis/ability and informed by a New Materialist view of relationality. Our second participant, drawing on ethnographic research with chronically ill individuals who experience medical trauma, asks how we can balance caring for ourselves and our interlocutors while in the field. Our third participant shares research on music workshops for military-connected community members, considering how care- and/or service-based work can be placed in the discipline to better support ethnomusicologists and the people we support. Our fourth participant, working among war-displaced Syrians in Germany, explores the role of “active listening” and researcher positionality as they navigate the complexities of care for our interlocutors and ourselves. Our fifth participant considers how, in transformative justice work, Black artists are well-equipped to provide trauma-informed care in intensely segregated cities, provided collaboration and care for their health is prioritized throughout the research lifecycle. The roundtable concludes with a reflection on trauma-inflected situations that impact mental health in the field, raising critical questions about the politics of care work in music, health, and well-being scholarship vis-à-vis the research ethics of our academic societies.

On February 11, 2024, Beyoncé surprised listeners when she released her country music single, “Texas Hold ‘Em”, which features MacArthur Fellow and Pulitzer Prize winner, Rhiannon Giddens, on the minstrel banjo and viola. This paper examines the notion of Black music reclamation by placing this single—and Beyoncé’s sentiments to reclaim her Texan roots—within broader discussions which are redefining the borders of Blackness and Black music. By highlighting significant moments in the music careers of Beyoncé and Giddens, this paper demonstrates that Black musicians are not only acknowledging the undeniable presence of Black contributions to country music history, but also, they are reclaiming their space in country music’s present and future. Building upon my research about Black banjo histories, this paper locates ways that the country music industry perpetuates racially segregated music. I also provide a music analysis which compares the clawhammer banjo style of Giddens in “Texas Hold ‘Em” to that of twentieth-century Black banjo player, Elizabeth Cotten. Through this comparative analysis and ethnographic interviews, I show that Giddens pays homage to Cotten and thus shares the popular music sphere with the Black banjo players who came before her. In this way, I demonstrate that Black music reclamation efforts are inspired by previous generations of Black musicians. This paper reflects upon an era of Black musicians disrupting legacies of chattel slavery, blackface minstrelsy, a racially segregated record music industry, and white supremacy through the reclamation of Black music.

This paper proposes that the study of sampling can be used as a methodology in music studies. As a case study, I analyze Beyoncé’s Lemonade (2016), Homecoming (2019), and Renaissance (2022), all of which sample artists that pull from the Black community and its intersections with other minority communities such as the queer community. By sampling such artists, these albums create an inclusive conversation between intergenerational cultural contexts, further exploring how music can create a sonic archival record, in this case, of the Black community itself and all who exist at its margins. In practice, sampling as a methodology uses production equipment to examine the historical backing behind the composition process. Rooted in the toasting traditions of Jamaican masters of ceremonies (MCs), American sampling practices are deeply connected to Black diasporic forms of disk jockeying (DJing). Exponentially growing from its early stages of the hip hop genre, sampling has since evolved into a signifying citational practice, referencing influences of past music to create new musical motifs and expressions (Tillet 2014). Further adopting this citational practice as an analytical lens, I demonstrate how production equipment such as MIDI controllers, samplers, and DAWs can serve as crucial tools for understanding musicological historiographies, blending cultural context with the usage of 1s and 0s (Katz 2010). Using sampling as a methodology emphasizes the process of musicking as opposed to solely valuing the polished recording, and studies the ways in which sampling can give new meaning to the genre of popular music (Small 1998).

This paper presents a case study on the "In the Sanctuary" meme trend that swept TikTok in the latter half of 2022, exploring the digital transmutation of a specific gospel music vamp into a widespread memetic phenomenon. Drawing on Braxton Shelley's concept of the Gospel Imagination, the analysis elucidates how the repetitive nature of gospel vamps, particularly in the gospel song "In the Sanctuary" by Kurt Carr, not only enlivens belief but also catalyzes user participation in Black Technoculture. Shelley's framework underpins the argument that such repetition within memes can evoke a similar spiritual resonance in a virtual context. By synthesizing Richard Dawkins's meme theory, Limor Shifman's perspective of memes as a form of digital folklore and humor, and Andre Brock, Jr.'s critical analysis of memes in Black internet cultures as instruments of representation and resistance, the paper argues that the memefication of "In the Sanctuary" on TikTok is not a mere happenstance. Instead, it represents a deliberate and complex continuation of gospel music's profound role in the Black community.

In 1963, Plainfield, New Jersey barbershop proprietor George Clinton drove 10 hours to Detroit to audition with his doo-wop group, the Parliaments, for Berry Gordy’s Motown label. The group was rejected, but Motown signed Clinton on as a staff songwriter. Following the Detroit Rebellion of 1967, the Motown Corporation would leave the namesake city it had pushed to the center of the pop universe for Los Angeles, and Clinton’s doo-wop group would set up shop permanently in the Motor City, blossoming into a psychedelic funk collective known variously as Parliament, Funkadelic, or simply P-Funk and dominating the R&B charts throughout the 1970s. As Motown Herein I examine Clinton and P-Funk’s sometimes-fraught relationship with Detroit and with the Motown label, drawing on interviews with band members and analyses of the band’s expansive body of work to detail how Clinton’s hyper-referential postindustrial soul functions as both tribute to and critique of the Motown dream - and also as a nexus point for an alternate Afrofuturist universe that sprang up amidst Detroit’s civic decline, from J. Dilla’s fragmented beats to Bryce Detroit and Ingrid LaFleur’s Afrotopian art happenings.

While scholars have criticized the extractive dynamics of sampling ethnographic recordings, such as using them as raw sonic materials without considerations for their original contexts and performers (eg. Seeger 1996, Théberge 2003, Zarza 2021), sampling has also been considered as a way to repurpose cultural materials among the communities where they were originally made (eg. Lobley 2020). In 1954, ethnomusicologist Klaus Wachsmann made around 200 recordings with Acholi musicians from Northern Uganda which, addressing recent debates on archival sound curation[1], I circulated in the region during the last two years with my associate Leo PaLayeng, an Acholi traditional musician and producer who pioneered acholitronix, an electronic genre based on Acholi traditional music. Integrating the recordings in his production, I discuss in this paper PaLayeng’s use of the recordings and its relation to current debates in archival sound curation.

[1] Under the umbrella term of ‘repatriation,’ a growing number of projects in the past 20 years have focused on the circulation of archival materials in the areas and communities where they were originally made. See for instance the 38 case studies collated in the Oxford Handbook of Musical Repatriation (2019), or the special issue of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology (2012) dedicated to this topic.

In 2019-2020, a survey was conducted of over 528 practitioners of Irish traditional music across North America. This was the first survey of its kind to develop a comprehensive understanding of the musical landscape in this region and to collect feedback about engagement with digital archive audio files. Insights emerged about the broader musical landscape and a diversity of cultural practices with archival audio. This is grounded by a publication (February 2024) that analysed some of these survey results, demonstrating overall trends, practitioner backgrounds, and their experiences with a wide range of media formats and materials. In this paper, I build upon that work and focus on demographics within the survey and follow-on interviews to examine three ways that respondents may relate to archival materials. Drawing upon participant-observation and narrative responses, this research engages deeply with participant insights. The evidence presented will demonstrate: 1) respondents' descriptions about their attitudes towards archives of Irish traditional music 2) resources that they shared and how those resources break down within different demographics and 3) suggestions that were presented by these practitioners on how material could be made more relevant to performers in North America. The description of an extended period of participant observation by the author served to contextualise participant responses and experiences.

From the inception of the Turkish Republic to the contemporary era, a pervasive trajectory of elimination, discrimination, and proscription has characterized the treatment of the Kurdish language, music, culture, and media within Turkish Kurdistan. Confronted with the absence of a sovereign state and a substantial media apparatus, the Kurdish community has preserved a noteworthy segment of its folk and traditional musical heritage through the efforts of foreign collectors, ethnomusicologists, researchers, and diasporic radio stations like Radio Yerevan in Armenia. Additionally, individual collectors within Kurdistan have played a crucial role in safeguarding and perpetuating Kurdish musical expressions.

My scholarly endeavor is dedicated to investigating the media encounters of the Kurdish population in Turkey, a demographic that has endured prolonged censorship and political persecution at the hands of the colonial Turkish state. My study concentrates on the documentation, circulation, and archival practices surrounding Kurdish music, predominantly recorded on audio cassette tapes from the 1970s to the 2000s. Examining connections between media materialities and technologies and diaspora, nationalization, and borders, my project will serve as an integrative nexus that enriches fields like ethnomusicology, media studies, and history, in a captivating and underexplored scholarly domain. Grounded in ethnographic research, my research elucidates how a community, previously hindered in its unity and conceptualization through written means, has achieved a sense of cohesion and collective identity through oral and auditory expressions.

Since its establishment in 1976, the National Museum of Anthropology (NMA) of Angola has played an important role in promoting traditional music in the capital Luanda. Not only does the Museum display a rich collection of Angolan musical instruments, but it is also known for having long been the main performance venue for players of the madimba, the famous xylophone from north-central Angola. While, in this way, the institution has provided a source of livelihood, albeit limited, to madimba players for decades, it has, however, facilitated their "museification," or objectification, borrowing Giorgio Agamben (2007)'s words.In an attempt to restore the memory of these musicians as active participants rather than static objects, my article explores a number of their songs recorded at the NMA in 1979. These recordings were made by the renowned Austrian ethnomusicologist and African music specialist, Gerhard Kubik, during a visit to Luanda, at the invitation of the Angolan Government's Secretariat of State. The analysis of the songs illuminates the agency of the madimba players who were part of the NMA staff at the time, challenging the objectifying gazes that still haunt the practitioners of this tradition. Moreover, it provides new insights into the capital's soundscape in the post-independence period: it questions dominant narratives of the Luanda music scene of the late 1970s, which emphasize musicians' self-censorship and ideological alignment with the socialist agenda. In the songs, the NMA's madimba players make the revolutionary messages of the time their own, without abstaining from criticism of social reality and political power.

The suling (bamboo flute) is indispensable to the sound of Balinese gamelan; a performance without suling is described as “a dish without salt.” Whereas the sound of suling represents the bhuana alit (microcosmic or human world), the sound of the sunari, a towering bamboo pole instrument erected for high rituals and played by the wind, represents the bhuana agung (macrocosm). Despite their aural and philosophical importance, suling is rarely represented in musicological literature (Sadguna and Sutirtha 2016, Suharta 2019) and sunari only in religious literature (Donder 2017); no source examines their role in “sounding the universe” in Bali.The paper examines how sunari and suling embody Balinese Hindu philosophy and practices. We illuminate the bamboo cutting, making, and blessing of sunari and suling in accordance with the intricacies of the Balinese calendar system (Eiseman 1990, Lansing 2012), which requires auspicious days for certain activities. Next, we connect the physical shape of the suling, its playing posture, and its breath patterns to Hindu theories about bodily energy (chakras). Our sources include interviews with bamboo growers, instrument makers, suling players, and priests; unpublished Balinese archival manuscripts; and decades of immersion in Balinese Hindu ritual and performance life. In connecting the material and philosophical lives of suling (a musical instrument) and sunari (a spiritual tool; Heimarck 2022), our research expands on literature on instrument-making from within and beyond Bali (Dirksen 2019, Kafumbe 2018, Yamin 2019), yielding new insights into Balinese culture and soundscapes, and into broader relationships between instruments, the environment, and philosophy.

This paper is a critical reflection on the role of the ethnomusicologist who goes beyond passive observation and active participation. As part of my research, I adopt an innovative, problem-solving approach to fieldwork as an instrument maker. Having researched the musical practice of the angklung, an Indonesian bamboo instrument, for more than a decade (Author 2014; Author 2024), it dawned upon me recently that I have not taken the initiative to create the instrument myself. Despite the instrument’s status as a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, my field interlocutors in the Netherlands face a challenging task in procuring new instruments and have relied on biodegrading ones imported from Indonesia more than three decades ago. The original material of the angklung is sourced from bamboo, which is itself rare in the temperate region of Western and Northern Europe, where I am currently based. As part of a research agenda to create more sustainable musical resources, I attempt to create a prototype of the instrument via 3D printing, that is, through the method of additive manufacturing. 3D printing has been applied to the making of wind instruments – flute, recorder, and saxophone - and advance research are ongoing at the Royal College of Music in the UK. For my purpose of building a plastic angklung, numerous trials and errors have been conducted at the Ångström Laboratory at Uppsala University, Sweden, over a period of two months. This paper is framed as an auto-ethnography that recounts the successes and failures of innovative instrument making.

Post-quake Haitian migration to South America in the 2010 decade constitutes one of the most compelling new migratory phenomena of the early twenty-first century (Audebert and Handerson 2022). The remarkably dynamic expansion of the Haitian migratory system to the subcontinent has had notable sociocultural and musical consequences that span the transnational space between Haiti, receiving societies (notably Brazil and Chile) and pre-existent spaces of the transnational Haitian diaspora (Audebert 2020; Handerson 2015, 2017; Cogo 2018), the study of which assumes substantial relevance in the face of the literature on Haitian diasporic experience (Zacaïr 2010, Jackson 2011, Glick-Schiller and Fouron 2001) and music making (Averill 1994; McAlister 2002, 2011; Mason 2011; Cela et al. 2022) in North America, Europe, and the Caribbean. This paper considers the songwriting and songs produced by some of the most prominent Haitian migrant artists in Brazil as the culmination of migrant epistemologies, a way of knowing and being-in-the-world prompted by their individual experiences as Black migrants and diasporic Haitians searching for a living in Brazil. Seeking to contribute to ethnomusicological discussions on music, migration, diaspora, and race (Slobin 2012; Stokes 2020; Toynbee and Dueck 2011) I draw on fieldwork, interviews, and lyric analysis to foreground how their songwriting binds together autobiographic storytelling (Jackson 2013), diasporic consciousness (Hall 2017) and Gramscian organic intellectual reflection in novel manifestations of the critical and socially engaged discourse which characterizes the songs of the Black Atlantic (Gilroy 1993; 2022) and the Haitian notion of mizik sosyal (Dirksen 2020).

Participatory Action Research (PAR) privileges approaches in which researchers and the people and communities central to their work collaborate to address problematic situations and change them for the better. Care ethics prioritizes mutual responsiveness, reciprocity, restorative justice, and the acknowledgment of power inequities in the context of relationships built upon the unique contributions, capacities, and limitations of all participating parties. This roundtable explores and critically interrogates the possibilities and horizons of care ethics-grounded, PAR-driven methodologies in the ethnomusicologies of Deaf culture and neurodiversity. Presenter 1 is an autistic singer-songwriter, author, and neurodiversity rights advocate whose alternating experiences of agency and dependence as a featured performer in large-venue concerts sponsored by the Doug Flutie Jr. Foundation for Autism is the focus of her presentation. Presenter 2, a self-identified hard-of-hearing music education professor and Deaf music studies scholar, offers a reflexive, experiential perspective on the important distinction between “caring/working with” vs. “caring/working on” in his research and applied work, advocating for the former. Presenter 3 provides a case study of a caring/working with methodology drawn from her Deaf culture studies-based work on the ethnomusicology of dip hop. Presenter 4 concludes with an at once retrospective and forward-looking consideration of the ethnomusicology of neurodiversity, paying special attention to the potentialities of care ethics and PAR-centered approaches. At once modeling and accounting for the PAR and care ethics turns in Deaf culture and neurodiversity studies and advocacy, this roundtable aspires to generate lively discussion and responses that advance interdisciplinarity and critical ethnomusicological inquiry.

In this paper, I situate presentations of Asian femininity in Western popular music within the broader discourse of Asian transnationalism to challenge the construction and propagation of the so-called “yellow woman” (Cheng 2019): the Western representation of Asian femininity formed by colonial and transnational flows of power. Asian women have been historically framed as both hypersexualized and submissive in popular media; East Asian music popular music and media in its current and historical global spaces have also served to propagate and enforce the same gender expectations and standards (Seabrook 2012). Japanese-British singer-songwriter Rina Sawayama challenges and contradicts the perceived submissiveness, exoticism, and ornamental treatment of the “yellow woman” in popular music using feminist rage (Lorde 1981) and explicitly non-normative queer representation in her work. This paper examines Sawayama’s musical and visual artistic output to discuss how Sawayama’s public position as a person of Asian descent and her musical work point to and challenge dominant ideas and expectations of Asian American femininity and gender while situating itself within the “genre” of Asian diasporic music and its standards. Drawing on transnational Asian feminist critique (Bow 2022; Cheng 2019; Kang 2020), Asian diasporic music studies (Wong 2004) and global popular music critique (Taylor 2012), I argue that Sawayama’s complication of the rhetoric surrounding Asian American femininity provides a framework for understanding the construction of the yellow woman as a historical product of gendered racialization and how its legacy still informs current perceptions of Asian feminine aesthetics in popular music and media.

Chol Soo Lee is a Korean American whose unfair incarceration for alleged murder of a San Francisco gang member in 1973 incited activism. While Lee’s case has been covered extensively in the media, there remains a lack of attention on the music in the “Free Chol Soo Lee” campaign among the Korean American community. In addition to playing the Korean national anthem on the radio, Lee’s defense committee released folk rock and ballad versions of “The Ballad of Chol Soo Lee” (1979). This song served to raise awareness of Lee’s wrongful imprisonment in 1973 and arrived not long after the 1965 Immigration Act, which loosened policies toward Asian immigrants, and the Third World Liberation Strikes of 1968-69, in which pan-Asian students demanded greater academic representation in admissions and curriculum. Given this context, this paper asserts that “The Ballad of Chol Soo Lee” represents an Asian American anthem that not only challenges a single act of injustice, but also reflects broader societal unrest among Asian Americans at the time. I examine media presses, documentaries, and digital archives that record efforts of pan-Asian political coalitions and analyze how such efforts parallel the rallying cries surrounding Lee. My investigation joins a conversation among scholars who have illustrated the diversity of “Asian American music,” ranging from jazz to taiko to pop (Wang 2001; Wong 2004; Wang 2015). Rather than illustrating the heterogeneity of musical practices, this paper highlights a specific song during a time of solidarity among members of an inter-ethnic, inter-generational Asian America.

The 21st century has witnessed Asia’s growing influence on American contemporary music, marked by collaborative compositions blending experimental American elements with traditional Asian sounds. This paper explores this trend, focusing on Korean musicians in America through the lens of deterritorialization – a concept by Deleuze and Guattari. This term signifies the disruption of fixed structures and norms, empowering indigenous communities through a critical reevaluation of imposed traditions. Two case studies: A Ritual for Covid-19 (2021) by Korean geomungo player Jin Hi Kim, and Do Yeon Kim's 2023 NYC Roulette performance, illustrate this phenomenon. Through contemporary discourse analysis and ethnographic interviews, I argued that these collaborations reveal deterritorialized music-making through entangled musical identities and exploring global experiences. Kim's work combines the Korean shaman ritual with American art technology, symbolizing the release of pandemic-related suffering. Do Yeon’s performance highlights her musical journey beyond traditional boundaries, symbolized by her arrangement of the Buddhist seungmu. The study also examines Kim’s solo performances, showcasing her immigrant experiences from Korea to the US in her artistic development. Moving beyond sound-centric approaches, the study amplifies the performer’s role, fostering interdisciplinary music-making (N. Rao, 2023) that promotes communication and highlights the potential for racialized Asian women to reclaim their voices in American modernity. Ultimately, the paper proposes a new aesthetic paradigm for trans-Pacific collaborations, transcending orientalism and nationalism in contemporary music discourse.

The official account of Singapore’s history, commonly referred to as the Singapore Story, serves as a crucial unifying founding myth for the state to promulgate peace, harmony, and productivity amongst its multicultural citizens. The state not only invokes the Singapore Story in history textbooks and speeches, but embeds it in the very fabric of daily life in Singapore, from place names to popular media and music. “Telok Blangah Song: Our Bicentennial Version” (2019) is a song that communicates the Telok Blangah region’s history and strategic significance in the colonial entrepôt of Singapore since the nineteenth century, while urging youth to sustain the momentum of the nation’s progress. Blangah Rise Primary School's reworking of Singaporean singer-songwriter Kevin Mathews’ original song “Telok Blangah” (2017) writes over Mathews’ reminiscence of his childhood in Telok Blangah in the 1960s with a more explicitly nationalist account of the place, transmitting and reifying the Singapore Story for a new generation of Singaporeans. The palimpsest of stories encapsulated by the song negotiates various nostalgias, from Mathews’ personal nostalgia to the broader national nostalgia enshrined within the Singapore Story. This culminates in the manifestation of a phantom nostalgia (Emoff 2002) that creates for this new generation a transhistorical relationship to place in the service of nation-building. The story of “Telok Blangah” adds a new perspective to the important and growing body of scholarship concerning (re)constructions of memory in postcolonial nation-states. It also has broader implications for music’s function as a key apparatus in engendering nationalism in Singapore.

This paper will analyze performances by three aging female langgam Jawa singers in Central Java, namely Waldjinah, Nurhana, and Sunyahni, to examine the distinct ways that the staged performances these singers are a potent site for invoking nostalgic meanings among Javanese musicians and listeners. These three women are connected through their performances of a repertoire called langgam Jawa across the genres of kroncong and campur sari. Many Indonesians closely associate Waldjinah (b. 1945-) with langgam Jawa, particularly in kroncong arrangements (Skelchy 2015, 6). Although Waldjinah also performed campur sari arrangements of langgam Jawa later in her career, Nurhana (b. 1978- ) and Sunyahni (b. 1976- ) are better known for their performances of campur sari. Nurhana and Sunyahni occupy a generation distinct from that of Waldjinah and each woman has navigated aging, of both the body and the voice, in a unique way. At present, most of Waldjinah’s performances are lip-synced while she is seated in her wheelchair. Nurhana performs in public very rarely, preferring to stay away from media gossip. Meanwhile Sunyahni has continued to be an active performer and has started her own record. This paper joins a small but growing set of studies investigating the intersections between popular music and aging with an aim to continue expanding these studies beyond the United States and Europe (Bennett 2006, Bennett and Taylor 2012, Forman and Fairley 2012, Jennings and Gardner 2012, Twigg et al. 2015).

In 2023, during two evenings in November, Jeolla Gamyoung (Joseon Dynasty Provincial Government Complex), a newly restored historical site, and Gyeonggijeon Shrine, erected in 1410 within Hanok Maŭl (Traditional House Village) in, Jeonju, Korea, became bustling spaces; this had been in stark contrast to their usual image of tranquility. Local residents and visitors gathered at these sites, where these presentational ruins had been transformed into living museums, urging more active participation during the event titled “Night of Jeonju & Heritage Story.”

Most local festivals target visitors for economical purposes, by utilizing geographical characteristics, promoting locally produced products, or organizing cultural performances. However, during “Night of Jeonju & Heritage Story,” participants not only physically immersed themselves into the past by walking inside of the historical buildings, but also allowed themselves to emotionally engage with narratives created by the surrounding cultural producers. This study explores how and why these producers creatively develop cultural scenes and expand the implications of 'K' in K-culture, particularly in the music field, encompassing both popular and traditional genres.

Therefore, I argue that this narrative event not only modernizes traditional culture but also presents an invented form of culture through a contemporary lens, adapting to the creative industry and appealing to nostalgia. Thus, the narrative strategy of combining historical heritage with traditional music has been instrumental in developing the identity of these young cultural producers, as well as re-inventing the identity of Hanok Maŭl as another form of K-culture.

Developed in the 19th century, the sociological theory of generations (or birth cohorts) is omnipresent in its everyday application today as Karl Mannheim’s seminal formulation of the theory approaches its centennial, the world’s great many Millennials enter the workforce, and the ill-defined Gen Zers begin to come of age. Although the theory has been widely critiqued on multiple grounds, notably for its lack of applicability to non-Western cultures, it retains considerable currency in our arguably evermore-homogenized global popular culture, and it prevails as a taxonomic given in writings on youth culture and popular music. This paper sheds ethnomusicological light on the work of Mannheim and others by focusing on the case of India’s Millennials and the changing mediascape of the Hindi language film and its music. Through analysis of musically significant scenes and songs like “Lazy Lad” (Ghanchakkar, 2013),“Wake Up Sid” (Wake Up Sid, 2009), “Radha” (Student of the Year, 2012), and “Jaane Nahin” (3 Idiots, 2009), it explores how Bollywood has attempted to cinematically and musically define, portray, and shape this generation even as it has adapted its formulas to better cater to it. The paper, while engaging with native classifications of generation, argues that by tapping into Rock, Hip-Hop, and R&B to mirror the Millennial plight of reconciling individualism with the pressures of education, career, family, and tradition in neoliberal India, Bollywood ultimately has become a cultural force (a social event in the Mannheimian sense), and has aligned India’s younger generations with their Western/American counterparts.

In early talkies, pre-partition, a handful of female playback singers dominated film songs, and forged distinctive sonic properties for culturally iconic characters. Out of this early mélange of singers emerged a single Hindi film female vocal aesthetic with distinctive sonic properties pitch, tonal quality, and tessitura associated with culturally iconic characters which still reverberate today.

Although there are studies on popular and film voices, a thorough analysis of Indian (Hindi) film voice is lacking. In this paper, I turn to Amanda Weidman's (2021) seminal work on South Indian film singing, and Victoria Malaway's (2020) research on the popular singing voice. Weidman’s ideologies of the voice and its constructed nature draw attention to character, gender, and other social categories help contextualize the voice within an Indian aesthetic, while Malaway's focuses on the parameters that convey a pop song's meaning, including Barthes’ examination of the “grain” of the voice (the pleasure, performativity, embodiment, and eroticism). Both frameworks signify the popular singing voice with identity markers and vocal realizations based in music theory model that interprets vocal delivery in popular music.

Beginning with classical and folk vocal aesthetics, I focus on vocal sonance (phonation, intensity, resonance, timbre), pitch, register, range, vibrato, situating the film voice within Weidman's idea of "aural public culture" and the subjective consumption of gender and film charactierisation. Separating the acoustic from the constructed properties, I analysis musical influences shaping female aesthetics, socio-cultural preferences for a dominant sound embedded in ideologies, and the stylistic sonance that satisfied the voyeuristic listener.

“Schizophonia” —the splitting off of a sound from its source— has been an enduring term in ethnomusicology for decades. Schizophonia is the site where musical utterances can be captured by modern recording technology (Schafer 1969, 1977), and, (particularly relevant for instances of cross-cultural borrowing), the beginning of a process where musicians can increasingly lose creative control over, and the ability to profit off of, their own sounds (Feld 1994, 1996). For the African contributors to Black Panther, this may have changed little. But with the introduction of Black Panther In Concert, a live stage adaptation of the blockbuster film, many of the original musicians were called back in to perform their parts. Drawing on participant-observation as an artist representative for one of those contributors, this paper demonstrates how Black Panther In Concert recentered the original African musicians from the Oscar-winning score, foregrounding their contributions and opening up new career possibilities, to an extent that the film itself never achieved. Starting with the film and reverse-engineering it to be performed live reveals what I call “enophonia”—the reuniting of the sound with its source— which counteracts the schizophonic process, repatriating the borrowed sounds back to the original creators, and increasing the amount of artistic credit and financial remuneration they could receive from them. It suggests that, though most critical attention is generally paid to mechanisms like copyright and royalties, live performance may continue to be the most empowering space for “sub-altern” collaborators, even on large-scale mass-mediated releases like Black Panther.

In Hungry Listening (2020), Dylan Robinson (xwélmexw) explains that the listening normalized within Euro-American classical music spaces is specifically settler listening, a teleological, single-sense, and regulating listening. This paper considers not only settler listeners (listeners who are settlers) but also settler listening regimes that are foundational to Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania political and socio-cultural spaces. I begin by articulating the sonic traces of the colonizing (so-called “civilizing”) project in this region. Through collective public forgetting, an emphasis on heroic narratives of settler conquest, and the desire of elites “that the throb of industriousness of human activity should be inscribed on a wilderness that was both silent and howling” (Smith 2001, 10), Pennsylvania became a blank slate for settler imaginings, sonic and otherwise. Historically and contemporarily, the distinctions between sound and noise—between permitted, necessary, and desirable sounds and those that are unappealing, unacceptable, and “other”—constitute the settler colonial state’s desire and ability to hear Indigenous Peoples as human and sovereign. From Pittsburgh to Carlisle, PA, from the Kinzua Dam to the Seneca Nation of Indians’ Allegany Reservation, the past, present, and future of Indigenous sonic sovereignty confront the limitations of settler listening, which mediates civic and academic activities. In addition to treaty histories, ethnographies of Indigenous-led sonic disruptions in Pittsburgh, and a sensory re-telling of my visit to Carlisle, I facilitate a collective, networked improvisation that invites attunement to our listening regimes, which, for many attendees, is likely to include settler listening logics.

This paper explores obscured narratives and haunting histories within ruinous landscapes, focusing on the US camptown near the South Korean border. Through an ethnographic examination of the soundscape of Korean borderland, the study delves into the uncanny auditory environment of the camptown, employing a concept termed “ruin-listening” to unveil the significance resonating within its silence. While the contemporary ruin scholarship has emphasized ruins’ potential for productive possibilities (DeSilvey and Edensor 2012), the focus has predominantly been on the visual aspect, highlighting what ruins have been “seen” rather than exploring what they have to “say” or what can be “listened to.” In the aftermath of the Korean War, the narratives of individuals in camptowns have been systematically marginalized, notably concealing women’s experiences within a collective silence. This paper provides a concise overview of how engaging with ruins through listening serves as a bridge, connecting human/non-human, real/imaginary, and nature/culture dynamics within the Korean borderland. The research focuses on diverse modes of ruin-listening, from Rainbow 99’s 7th album project Dongducheon (2019) to shamanic listening at abandoned sites, investigating how modern immersive listening technologies contribute to envisioning and mediating (post)wartime experiences and memories. By offering immersive sound experiences, the study argues that these projects not only substitute for physically inaccessible memories but also foster affective engagement through empathetic listening for spectators. Consequently, the paper reexamines the potential for an embodied re-membering of the past, challenging established dichotomies, and advocating for a more accountable and just approach to the victims of ecological destruction and colonialist practices.

This paper considers how climate-concerned singer-songwriters in Melbourne are utilizing music in attempt to contribute to a climate crisis response. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork with young people who are developing careers as singer-songwriters, as well as members of a support group for musicians who are concerned about climate. I bring into focus the types of stories these people tell through song in relation to their motivations for telling them. This includes stories that are intended to provide a call to action, stories that offer space to grapple with difficult emotions, and stories that attempt to reinforce cultural change. In exploring the perspectives of these singer-songwriters and the music they make, I examine the ways in which they presume music works, their assumptions about the political efficacy of music and its capacity to influence the world, and the creative decisions they make based on these assumptions. This involves highlighting participants’ emphasis on the affective dimensions of musical production and reception, locating political action at the level of bodily experience. Understanding how and why singer-songwriters in Melbourne are telling these stories at this particular moment in time reveals important insights into music’s entanglement with the politics of the climate crisis and contributes to moving ideas forward in existing research around the functions of music in social change.

Among the dump trucks, bulldozers, dogs, and vultures in Oaxaca, Mexico’s garbage dump, the workers’ union known as Los Pepenadores, practice multisensory listening and sound-making. As frontline recyclers, they earn their living with pride. For these descendants of the Zapotec, listening is an active, multisensory practice used to daily mine discarded waste. Combining my fieldwork in Oaxaca with literature on listening (Kapchan 2017), materialism (Bennett 2010), and the “coaxing”, or organic emergence of a corrido (McDowell 2010), I argue that Los Pepenadores’ multisensory listening and engagement, combined with the corrido’s dominant regional presence as a cultural genre, resulted in a collaboratively and multisensorially written corrido – a song that now serves as a proud connection among community members and their environment. In this paper, I offer an example of how Los Pepenadores’ listening practices gave rise to a collaborative songwriting process that produced a corrido – a song form and genre ubiquitous throughout Mexico (Madrid 2013; McDowell, Glushko, and Fernández 2015). Situating this corrido within the community’s 42-year embodied working history emplaced in the dump, reveals an organic progression from multisensory listening to collaborative songwriting. This corrido expresses Los Pepenadores’ shared memories, history, and collective voice, just as the corrido – as a wider genre – expresses diverse stories. The dump was closed without notice in 2023, disrupting the community’s labor and day to day unity, and prompting Los Pepenadores to record and share their corrido in a way that binds, honors, presents, and empowers their long-lasting community.

Women throughout the Sahara Desert make music about water, near water, using water. As water grows scarce deeper into the desert, women’s ad hoc instruments, made from water receptacles, incorporate less and less water as sonic and lyrical depictions of water develop and increase. Women’s social music parallels water’s centrality to life and artistic expression in Tuareg communities from Niger to Morocco. Water is space, source, and subject in women’s participatory music across the Sahara desert. I examine women’s sonic depictions and uses of water in participatory song and ad hoc instrumentation in Tuareg communities throughout North and West Africa. First, I describe how, depending on the availability of water, women incorporate water and water receptacles into the instruments which keep the beat for participatory songs. I draw on field recordings from my 2024 ethnography of Saharan women’s songs in Guelmim, Morocco, and commercial recordings by Tuareg artists Tartit and Les Filles de Illighadad to share hermeneutic analyses of the rhythmic, formal, and lyrical features of musical examples which incorporate water. This presentation contributes to a growing oeuvre on women’s participatory song traditions in the Sahara, which, like water, lack significant scholarly attention due to perceptions that they are unremarkable. But, like water, women’s social song traditions may seem quotidian until they disappear. I finish by showing how desertification due to the climate crisis parallels the disappearance of oral traditions like guedra and tende. As the rivers of Guelmim dry up, young Tuareg women stop singing songs about water.

When scholars and cultural promoters alike speak of the Huasteca and its music, overwhelming attention is afforded to local repertories of sones, huapangos, and danzas, which are upheld as markers of regional identity and tradition. However, the sonic environment of the Huasteca is largely defined by musical genres that are at once commercial and regionally-bound: these include wewa, a style of keyboard-forward tropical cumbia, and the trío versátil, a group that adapts popular styles such as ranchera, norteña, corrido, and canción to the instrumentation of a trío huasteco. While wewa and tríos versátiles both boast a decades-long history of popular reception in the region, official state-sponsored cultural programming has actively resisted their inclusion into framings of Huasteco identity. An emergent class of new traditionalist performers, referred to tongue-in-cheek as the “policía del son,” identify these styles as indicators of a culture under assault and in decline. This presentation provides an overview of the cultural-ideological landscape among Huasteco musicians. It demonstrates how performers who are linked to the formal cultural sector are more likely to align with the “police”, while performers who depend on playing private events have fewer qualms playing popular styles. This presentation challenges assumptions about tradition and heritage, exposing how ideological purity among musicians hardly correlates with other widely-celebrated markers of Huasteco authenticity, such as age, geographical remoteness, indigeneity, or hereditary musicianship. Indeed, as in all forms of policing, those who seek to regulate repertory ultimately rely on certain social privileges to establish and maintain authority.

Musical performance and participation have long been central to the social life of Irish-language communities in Ireland and abroad, serving as both a pedagogical tool and a linguistic soundtrack, particularly for new speakers of Irish. In recent years, hip hop has emerged as a powerful genre that empowers new Irish speakers by providing a platform for cultural expression while also serving as an educational tool and community builder. This paper examines how Kneecap, a Belfast-based Irish-language hip-hop group, has fostered interest in Irish and reshaped cultural identity as an Irish-language speaker. Since their debut in 2017, Kneecap's tracks have garnered over two million streams each on Spotify. Although not the pioneers of hip hop as Gaeilge, Kneecap distinguishes themselves by innovatively integrating Irish into a genre typically dominated by English, challenging traditional linguistic norms and making the Irish language more relevant to younger, cosmopolitan audiences in Ireland as well as the global Irish diasporic community. The paper will analyze Kneecap's lyrics, music videos, live performances, and interviews to understand their impact on the Irish language community and aims to show how hip hop as Gaeilge influences Irish language revitalization and redefines aspects of identity for Irish-language speakers.

The consumption of Persian music among Iranian Jews in Israel is often intertwined with the dynamics of the kitchenspace, the ritual and gendered space of cultural and social production where food is prepared and consumed. In a diasporic society like Israel where different cultures compete to be codified through ritual practice, the music and food consumed at religious celebrations officiated at home like Erev Shabat and Pesach blur the lines between public and private selves. However, studies on the multi-sensorial dimension of such celebrations and its impact on the experience of Jewishness and Iranianness are scarce, leaving a significant gap in our understanding of this liminal space of expression and the interactions between food and music. In this paper I demonstrate that these gatherings enable the negotiation and display of multiple aspects of identity, as Iranian Jews find a sense of community in the act of remembering performed through sensorial stimulation and the consumption of cultural symbols. Providing ethnographic evidence from fieldwork conducted in Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv throughout 2023 analysed through the lenses of ethnomusicology and anthropology of food, I describe a multi-sensorial kitchenspace that simultaneously reinforces and is created by gender roles, providing women with power and agency as the bearers of cultural tradition. In doing so, I argue that in Israel, whose national identity is defined by ethno-religious belonging, these rituals assume further importance as liminal sites of counterpublic citizenship, as the sensorially elicited images of an imagined homeland inform alternative modes of being Jewish and Israeli.

During the last two decades of the twentieth century, Chinese musicians indigenized global popular genres including rock and electronic dance music in ways that ostensibly reflected “Chineseness” (Yen 2005, Wang 2015), chiefly by including Chinese traditional instruments. In the 1998 experimental electronic album Mountain River, Dou Wei opts for an alternative technique: instead of using Chinese traditional instruments directly, he simulated their sounds electronically. For example, he used synthesizers to simulate the sound of a sheng in the song “Spring in March,” and the sound of a guzheng and dizi in “Green Bamboo Leaves”—a remarkable choice given that Wei is an expert dizi player. Furthermore, Wei deliberately emphasizes the artificial, simulated nature of the instruments by adding an electric buzz to the track and writing flowing melody lines that could not be accomplished by real instruments. Although Wei’s use of simulated rather than direct sounds of the dizi reflects a need to minimize production costs, I argue that it also expands notions of what Chinese music can be; claiming that music with “Chineseness” can be electronically produced. In this paper, I apply Brian Kane’s (2014) framework to examine sounds in a tripartite source, cause, and effect model. I supplement this sonic analysis with liner notes, song lyrics, online comments and news, and personal interviews I conducted with audiences. This research contributes to the study of how musical identities are digitally mediated to create a sonic evocation of 21st-century Chineseeness that both connects to—and separates from—the traditional past.

Northeast China has a distinctive regional cultural identity, marked by the integration of matrilineal nomadic cultures, particularly the Nuzhen, with Chinese Han patriarchy. The presentation takes errenzhuan, the most prevalent traditional folk comprehensive art in Northeast China, as the perspective of exploration. Errenzhuan originated as a form of begging performance in northeastern rural areas, integrated with music, dance, and acrobatic performances. The presentation explores how errenzhuan evolved from a rural begging performance to express and shape the social, gender, and sexual narrative of the Chinese northeastern rural communities, as well as becoming a catalyst for the cohesion and cultural identity of the communities. It also engages with the ancient Chinese yin-yang philosophy to examine the representations of gender roles within errenzhuan as mechanisms for societal transformation and the continuous negotiation of traditional gender expectations. Additionally, within the context of northeast China’s former industrial stronghold, the presentation examines how errenzhuan serves as a manifestation of the tension between grassroots cultural practices and the prevailing official culture, negotiating between tradition and innovation. The study endeavors to address the existing gap in Western academic research on errenzhuan and augment the scholarly dialogue within Chinese ethnomusicology. Specifically, it seeks to illuminate the underexplored areas of errenzhuan performance practices and their cultural significance, contributing to a better understanding of global music traditions and the specificities of Chinese musical heritage.

This paper explores how the theatre of a Chinese regional opera as an actor and embodied-knowledge-making process enunciates stories, ideals, operations, and imaginaries of local communities. Meanwhile, it problematizes the stereotype of Chinese opera theatres as “static sites” by unfolding how theatres constantly resonate with individuals through converging personal stories, activities, memories, demands, and desires to the very place. The materialities and material presence of theatres ensure the continuities of cultural activities of traditional xiqu in Chinese society today. As one of the regional operatic genres, Shandong lüju opera was involved in the national xiqu-campaign reform (the 1950s) and cultural heritagization (the 2000s) of the P.R.C.In this aspect, the institutionalized-opera activities have molded the xiqu theatres toward an “enduring site” for constantly revamping regional cultures into the rubrics of national culture and memories coherently. However, to the lüju communities, the lüju theatre intertwines with pluralistic stories and embodied meanings in their quotidian practices. As theatre-going audiences, they participate in recirculating the theatrical things and onstage/offstage actions, facilitating embodied knowledge to carve the contours of the group identity and imaginaries as a whole. Drawing on the ethnographic observations of the Lüju Baihua Theatre, this paper illustrates that Chinese xiqu theatres traffic the shared past, multigenerational narrations, and regional stories through resonating with the local communities. Taken together, it explores the perception of theatres as cultural activities and memory sites that always facilitate connective memories, regional knowledge, and personal stories in Chinese societies.

The oldest native instrument of China, the guqin is a seven-string plucked monophonic instrument known for its ornamented melodies and nuanced performing style. Despite its long association with the literati, its musical form remains undertheorized as relevant discussions tend to be descriptive rather than analytical. Contextualized by perspectives on performance practice, organology, and Chinese culture, this presentation proposes a hierarchical framework for understanding guqin’s phrase structure with examples from the eighth to the seventeenth century, to be performed live. While the native tablature notation (jianzipu) does not directly communicate such information as rhythm or phrasing, the interpretive practices by various guqin Schools share enough common features to inspire a formal framework. Extending from ancient treatises, I define guqin’s phrase components as basic articulations, compound articulations, and elaborative gestures, which are congruous with the timbral qualities and pitch content they generate such as motives and elaborated notes. Invoking the Chinese philosophical and literary idea of “harmony,” and taking the qin-song (singing while playing the guqin) practice into account, I propose that the reiteration of pitch classes realized contrastingly in musical parameters such as articulation, register, timbre, and ornamentation is the fundamental organizing and developing principle both within and between phrases in guqin music. In addition, phrases can be complicated by transformations such as elision and expansion. I hope this framework can assist the rendering process (dapu) of many uninterpreted ancient scores and the idiomatic composition of new pieces.

Upon receiving a commission for a new Passion from the International Bach Academy commemorating the 250th anniversary of J.S. Bach's death, composer Sofia Gubaidulina was exploring a maturing interest in different kinds of time. Her compositions of the 1990s experiment with the rhythm of time in its vertical and horizontal vectors. Among these, the St. John Passion especially asks for temporal analysis: it stitches together narrative texts from different timeframes, though all traditionally written by St. John the Evangelist, playing with their relations musically. This analysis supports a reading of Gubaidulina's Passion as a sonic icon, with the nondiegetic orchestration functioning as lines of inverse perspective, pulling the listener experientially into the mystery of the Passion in its plural timeframes. Drawing on concepts and methodology from musicology (Tamara Levaya, 2017), music theory (Jonathan Kramer, 1988), literary criticism (Mikhail Bakhtin, 1981), film theory (Michel Chion, 2021) and biblical studies (Scott Hahn, 1999), my paper brings these traditions into conversation to explore the chronotopes intersecting in the narrative and musical setting of Gubaidulina’s Passion, connecting compositional techniques to the interweaving of various excerpts from scripture. Through the crossing of timeless/time-bound, life/death, divine/human, spiritual/physical, Gubaidulina makes an orthodox profession of faith, gesturing ultimately towards the intersection of the Cross, on which is located Christ Himself. To that end, this analysis focuses on the eighth movement of Gubaidulina's St. John Passion, "Way of Golgotha," her depiction of the Crucifixion–and, traditionally, a moment tightly linked both to the Apocalypse and to the Divine Liturgy.

This paper analyzes the musical genre known as “nigunim”—a music system closely associated with Hasidism and believed to facilitate mystical transcendence—and the ways that these songs collapse temporal distance between Hasidic leaders of the past, singers of the present, and the imagined Hasidic community of the future. Based on an examination of Hasidic texts, videos of Hasidic gatherings in New York and Israel, and events that I have attended in Brooklyn, New York, I propose that this music system disciplines the Hasid’s religious life as one comes to live with a more immediate connection to holy people of the past. Building on Braxton Shelley’s analysis of the gospel vamp and T.M. Luhrmann’s use of the “faith frame,” I argue that nigunim creates a “flexible timescape” in which singers have the benefit of drawing on holy people of the past to place themselves in an eschatological arc and experience the imminence of the Divine. This experience of God’s imminence translates to a more acute recognition of God’s presence in the daily life of the Hasid. To make these points, I analyze musical practices of two different Hasidic communities, namely the yahrtzeit seudah in the Modzitz Hasidic dynasty and the Seder Nigunim of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement. Through this examination, I offer a close look at the social, psychological, and spiritual ways that music offers an alternative formulation of time for the singers of nigunim.

I presented on Further Approaches to Musical Periodicity at SEM in 2001 and Musical Time Categories in 2010. Initially, using analysis of music structure, I critiqued parochial academic tropes on musical temporality, which to that time had been Eurocentrically portrayed in terms of a Western/non-Western, dynamic/static binary. The critique pointed toward a view within which all human musical temporalities are individuated. In 2010 I tried to represent this diversity with graphic arborescences and other schema. Here, with a mixture of hindsight and speculation, I reconsider what is parochially humanist in light of accumulated posthumanist and evolutionary perspectives. The aim is to situate music subsumed in periodicity understood as a hyperobject (Morton 2013). Periodicity is equally seen as natural law mediating information flow, which enables the description of continuities encompassing human perception and production as well as both (humanly observed) animate and inanimate phenomena. Following Tomlinson (2023) this involves a consideration of meaning or its absence, and manifestations ranging among the merely informatic and fully semiotic. Consistent with the hyperobjective premise, there is a vastness to the purview that for now is best shown at a meta-perceptive level, ie. the perception that there are perceptions to be had. In search of initial dots that can be connected eventually, I consider periodic behaviors among several eukaryote kingdoms: the photosynthesizing protozoan euglena obtusa, the fruitfly drosophila mergonaster, a 10x-slowed recording of the Carolina wren thryothorus ludovicianus, a homo sapien song from Malawi, plus a few other ancient and future possibilities.

The migration of professional Chinese instrumentalists to North America often places them in a cultural conundrum, compelling them to transition from the realm of “classically trained musicians” to that of “folk musicians.” In the late 20^th century, a new paradigm of Chinese music emerged, heavily influenced by Western conventions. Within this framework, students studying traditional Chinese instruments were groomed in a “classical” style conducive to concert performance. However, upon relocating to North America, many immigrant musicians have found themselves adapting to local musical traditions, modifying their performance practices to align with a more “folk” aesthetic suitable for the multicultural Western music scene. This paper delves into the nuanced landscape of diasporic music-making, employing autoethnographic methodologies and ethnographic fieldwork to explore the transformative journey of professional Chinese instrumentalists in North America. Music serves as a fertile ground for examining complex social dynamics, cultural intersections, and power structures (Born, 2012). As John Street (2011) states, “music does not just provide a vehicle of political expression, it is that expression.” The historical power differentials between China and the West in the twentieth century precipitated substantial reforms in Chinese musical traditions. The transition of immigrant Chinese musicians from “classical” performers in China to “folk” artists in North America represents a manifestation of this asymmetrical power dynamic, illustrating the process of “ethnification” within the context of musical diaspora.

From October 2022 to April 2023, the Pacific Island Ethnic Art Museum (PIEAM) in Long Beach, California, hosted Jam Sessions, a monthly concert series featuring island reggae performances by six diasporic Pacific Islander groups. Collaborating with Island Block Network, a Samoan-owned concert company, PIEAM, the only Pacific-Indigenous-themed museum in the continental US, aimed to celebrate ancestral wisdom within temporal cycles. This initiative coincided with the museum’s exhibition, Te ‘Iti Nei Te Marama: The Moon Is Rising, challenging Western perceptions of time through the Pacific ancestral lunar calendar. Participated in the moon phrase of the time, the Jam Sessions concerts marked as a rest time and a reunion party for Pacific ancestors and descendants in the exhibition. These concerts, showcasing island reggae—a musical genre combining the island reggae roots from Hawai‘i and urban island music from Southern California—became a practice of the Pacific-Indigenous time in the continent. By engaging with Black popular music, particularly reggae, these diasporic Islanders narrate their stories on the continent within their own historical timeline. Incorporating Mark Rifkin’s concept of temporal sovereignty (2017) and the affirmation of the diaspora’s Indigeneity by Native Pacific cultural scholars (Diaz and Kauanui 2001), I introduce the concept of “continental islandness” to contextualize Southern Californian Islanders’ Indigneity within their temporal framework of islands. I argue that, despite their proximity to Hollywood and reliance on the entertainment industry, diasporic Islander reggae artists resist settler temporal framework, asserting their island heritage and continental roots through music and performances in their Pacific Indigenous time.

Following the 1979 revolution in Iran, many musicians migrated abroad due to the restrictions imposed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, particularly on cultural activities, including music. More recently, migration has significantly increased due to censorship and political issues. Regarding the diaspora and Iranian music, the focus has often been on Iranians in Los Angeles, United States (Hemmasi 2020), while insufficient attention has been given to the diaspora of Iranian musicians in New York City, especially women musicians. This shows the need for a more extensive examination and description of women's musical activities in this city. I argue that the impact of female musicians on Iranian culture and identity, the challenges they face in the New York music scene, and their experiences of success and failure in this industry underscore the importance of studying and analyzing this subject. The method of this article includes interviews with women musicians living in New York City and attending their concerts. The research findings prove that women's musical activities in New York City have distinct characteristics and challenges. I explore how the role of women musicians in preserving and enhancing Iranian cultural identity, their impact on the local community, and their contributions to cultural exchanges between Iranians and non-Iranians.

Mapuche presence in Santiago, and its modes of sounding and listening, is often presented in diametrical opposition to life on their historic territory, Wallmapu, which comprises an extensive stretch of south-central Chile. Without negating the tensions, peculiarities, and intelligibility with which the urban Indigenous experience is perceived, in this presentation I aim to reflect on Mapuche sound and listening practices in Santiago, even as they continue Indigenous modes of being, knowing, and doing. At least three concepts are typically used to refer to the urban Mapuche reality: mapurbe (a neologism that unites the terms mapu and urban), champurria (referring to that which is mixed), and wariache (person of the city). With diverse nuances, the three concepts are used to refer to, analyze, or explain the experience of Mapuche migration to Santiago, and of their descendants who continue to live there. My intention is not to argue for the analytic advantages of these categories. The various preferences for one or another term, and the diverse proposals for their definition, are evidence of debates that connect to contemporary discussions about indigeneity in Latin America, in particular, and in the Americas, in general, and with ethnomusicological attempts to explain the relevance of sound and listening in these processes. Through ethnography and the collaborations that I have developed during the past two years with the musicians Ketrafe, Daniela Millaleo, and Vñvm, I prefer to, instead of listening and reflecting about differences and interruptions, attend to diverse registers and continuities within Mapuche indigeneity.

This working paper explores the influence of the radio program, Radio Free Alcatraz during the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz by the Indians of All Tribes and its contribution to broader Indigenous activism. I present my preliminary findings of the thirty-nine episodes of Radio Free Alcatraz. All of the recordings were transcribed and then coded through NVivo. Additionally, interviews with Indigenous activists and radio DJs were conducted to triangulate themes from the radio archive. Radio recordings from the occupation and interviews help showcase what the occupation sounded like and how it was mediated through the radio, mapping out the connections radio host John Trudell made as he transmitted across settler colonial borders. This working paper explores three preliminary themes 1) education and the importance of centering Indigenous ways of knowing for youth, 2) the importance of Indigenous culture and music, and 3) transnational Indigenous coalition building. Preliminary analysis of the radio recordings and interviews suggests that radio played and still plays a vital role in facilitating connections, sustaining Indigenous culture and music, discussing broader Indigenous issues, and countering false narratives. Through conducting content analysis of archival material and interviews, I examine the reverberations and influences of the occupation on Indigenous technology, music, and self-determination today.

Indigenous music traditions have been frequently conveyed and represented through essentialized and static tropes. Performers within these traditions are most often showcased don in regalia and costumes that serve as markers of their ethnicity and 'indigenousness.' While certain representations echo historical perspectives, they overlook the foundational reality that the cultures and traditions of a community are dynamic, adaptable, and susceptible to change. This study investigates the way musicians from the Kenyan Coast leverage music to articulate their indigeneity within the complex intersections of a postcolonial and globalized world. This paper focuses on the musician Patoi Katoi, famously known as Katoi wa Tabaka. It explores ways in which Katoi wa Tabaka uses musical material (genres, instruments, sound system, and body movement) as an instrument/technology to articulate the identity, values, customs, and traditions of the Mijikenda. Katoi wa Tabaka’s music entails dense structures articulated within a fusion of genres. The density of his music is encoded in musical genres such as mchechemeko trap and mbumbumbu rap ooze with meaning from the fusion of musical material to the corporeal aspects embedded within the genres, and to sociohistorical contexts. This paper attempts to unpack the dense layers and provide an alternative description of the ‘indigenous’ that showcases the ‘traditional nature of being contemporary’ as articulated by Perea (2021).

This panel concerns the cultural construction of religious and socio-political spaces by Egyptian citizens in Cairo through music. Focusing on the repertoire that is performed in weddings and dhikr practices, secular and religious music contexts, Sonic Cairo examines the influence of urban spaces upon a range of Arab musical aesthetics, ritual practices and socio-political spheres in contemporary Cairo. This research resonates with recent debates in sound studies (Labelle 2010, Frishkopf, Spinetti 2018) and other sonic city projects (Daniel Steele, Catherine Guastavino 2013, Nooshin 2020). Through the investigation of trance practices and their mediated digital sound, the panel will analyse how musical exchanges among local communities shape and are shaped by their urban spaces. We trace the sonic paths of healing practices, from the Sufi saints’ tombs, and beyond, to Mahraganat streets weddings and neighborhoods. The papers will juxtapose sound/wave analysis and archival sources from the past with ethnographic accounts in the present to explore the reconfiguration of city spaces and community borders (ethnic, gender-class and religious divides), and to highlight what remains fixed, and standardized and therefore open to transnational connections towards a common globalized Islam.

European Christianity’s historical characterization of African divinities as demonic has engendered an injurious theology that persists into the present. Scholars and practitioners of Afro-Brazilian religions have labored to undo these colonial mythologies. In this presentation, I build on this literature to offer an account of a Pentecostal cosmology of Afro-Brazilian religions. Drawing from on-site research with members of the Christian Congregation in Brazil (CCB), I take as an entry point the perception of Candomblé as “the obscene macumba.” I focus on a site in the periphery of São Paulo where two roads meet, bringing into proximity a terreiro (Candomblé temple) and a CCB church. This intersection provided the space for sonic warfare to unfold when the drumming sounds from the nearby terreiro permeated the congregation’s walls during a night of worship. This sonic permeability undergirded the worship leader’s disapproval of a CCB sister’s seemingly sensual manifestation of the Holy Spirit. Accompanying this suppression was an uncertainty regarding which spirit was taking hold of the woman’s body. What might this sexual and spiritual ambiguity tell us about the ongoing evangelical war against Afro-Brazilian religions? In the context of a church founded on myths of white virtue yet predominantly constituted by mestiças and Afro-Brazilian women, I argue for the need to identify the different investments in this rejection of Afro-Brazilian religions without losing sight of their colonial underpinnings. In doing so, I emphasize the tension between a strategic adherence to a politics of respectability and the networks of marginalization this politics reproduces.

Lahu，one of the oldest ethnic minorities in China, are mainly distributed in the Lancang region of Yunnan, China. Since 1904, Western Christianity began to spread in the Lahu regions of China, leading the Lahu people to incorporate Christianity into their religion. As a result, their music also changed under the influence of religion. Subsequently, the Lahu people began to divide their music into two musical different embranchments (“Likuo Song” and “Gamekuo Song”). Among them, “Likuo Song” is a new component, which mainly includes Western Christian “hymn” music, and uses the four-part chorus singing form in the performance. The Western polyphonic texture form gradually formed in the music of the Lahu people.

Based on six months of fieldwork in the Lahu music of Lancang region, Yunnan. This ethnographic study explores how Lahu music has been influenced by the western religion in the past, which has resulted into two different types of contemporary Lahu music. How did the “Likuo Song” with the characteristics of Western polyphony texture come into being and develop in Lahu music? Revealing the cross-religious and cultural process of the negotiation and coexistence between “Likuo Song” and “Gamekuo Song” (the local ancient song) of the Lahu people. Moreover, I will use a new musical compared analysis to examine how two different music cultures are able to play together. This close musical analysis sheds light on how the cultural identity of Lahu People has been constructed and expressed through a process of musical integration.

This paper concerns the effects of the UNESCO policies of intangible cultural heritage (hereafter ICH) in the Pontic momo(y)eria. Momo(y)eria are Christmas customs of the Pontians—the descendants of the 1922 Black Sea Greek refugees. Similarly to other carnivalesque Christmas Balkan traditions, momo(y)eria involves masqueraded troupes, that under the sounds of traditional music, perform feverish dancing and satirical theatrical sketches as a kind of blessing for the new year. In 2016, the Kozani variant of the momo(y)eria custom, entered the UNESCO ICH international registry, becoming the first Greek tradition of such status. In this paper, I examine the outcomes of the 2016 recognition, for the custom and for its communities. Premised on extensive fieldwork, I offer an analysis of the momoyeria poetics and of its special music processes in relation to Kozani socio-economic realities and the Pontic politics of memory. Drawing from this analysis, I further investigate three major aspects: (1) how the 2016 ICH registration has affected local economy and community life; (2) whether the registration has contributed to the goal of sustainability as defined by UNESCO; and (3) the dialectics between UNESCO understandings of intangibility and Pontic visions of culture as living tradition. Ultimately, I demonstrate that while the 2016 recognition has indeed contributed to awareness about momo(y)eria and its music, it has also supported heritization practices that oppose Pontic sensitivities.

Of the 130 articles of South Korea’s Constitution, adopted in 1948 and last revised in 1987, the final article among the General Provisions, Article 9, provides that “the State shall strive to sustain and develop the cultural heritage and to enhance national culture.” In Article 69, the oath the President must take at the time of inauguration includes “endeavoring to develop national culture.” But what “national culture” is has remained amorphous and has left “national music and dance,” or gugak, largely ignored by lawmakers over the years. However, in June 2023, the National Assembly passed the Gugak Promotion Act, aiming to “conserve and transmit,” “foster and promote,” and “invigorate” the “gugak cultural industry.” In August, the Traditional Cultural Industry Promotion Act, designed to lay a foundation for a traditional cultural industry, promote economic development, and enhance the cultural lives of citizens, also became law. Together, these two Acts aspire to transform gugak from traditional performing arts in need of preservation into dynamic competitive cultural content suitable for entry into the international performing arts market. Building on the work of Seo Inhwa (2023) and Lee Dong-Yeon (2023) in relation to the proposal of a Gugak World Expo, this paper looks at the effects of these new laws on “old music,” and gayageum sanjo in particular, and how, especially under the pressures of AI and new media, older laws like the 1962 Cultural Property Protection Law are fraying along with the institutions and genres they once sought to protect.

In December 2023, the "practice of opera singing in Italy" was officially inscribed on the UNESCO List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. In its final resolution, the UNESCO Committee stated that this practice was worthy of inscription because of the central place that opera and opera singing occupy in contemporary Italian culture. However, the slippery terminology used to identify the object of UNESCO’s recognition calls for further investigation: What exactly is Italian opera singing? Are there any sets of pedagogical rules that distinguish it from foreign styles of opera singing today? And what is the specific contribution of Italy and Italian musical institutions to the promotion of its current practice internationally? Based on about forty interviews with Italian music historians, singing teachers, theatre managers and opera singers, this paper explores how musical pasts are constructed in today’s Italy. I show that opera artists and theater administrators are committed to promoting what they believe to be the authentically Italian musical tradition of opera singing, and they rely on opera scholars to back up their claims. Italian musicologists, for their part, are often aware of the cultural sustainability issues involved in UNESCO’s support of musical practices (Chocano, Grant, Seeger, Schippers, Titon) and remain skeptical about the possibility of even arriving at a univocal definition of Italian opera singing. Nevertheless, many of them, along with opera artists and Italian music institutions, endorsed the UNESCO nomination, hoping to gain direct and indirect support for their discipline through state funding and international tourism.

The Islamic revolution of 1979 in Iran caused considerable changes in the Iranian arts and culture. The former supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, described music as ridiculous and inappropriate. He banned music in almost all of its forms of practice. Nevertheless, during the war between Iran and Iraq from 1980 till 1981, Iranian authorities believed that music and film could be advantageous propaganda media to reinforce the power of the Islamic state. Therefore, music was incorporated into television programs, but under strict surveillance conditions that still exist. Among those programs, puppet shows with musical performances started to become widely popular. While human actors and actresses are not allowed to perform music and dance on television, puppets with their funny voices enjoy more freedom in such performances. They can dance, sing, make music and even sometimes refer to sensitive topics that cross red lines. One of the reasons for this freedom is the puppet voice. The quality of the puppet’s voice paves the path for musical performances on the Iranian television. My research focuses on the post-revolutionary Iranian puppets and how they overcome government-based restrictions against music and dance based on their voices. I analyze and reflect on this sonic element based on a comparative approach and shed light on one aspect of overcoming censorship in a theocratic country, where music is an unwanted and critical form of arts.

The Wayang Kulit Kelantan, a form of shadow play practiced along the east coast of Peninsular Malaysia, is a traditional performance form that has withstood the challenges brought on by Kelantan’s cultural and religious politics. In 1990, following a proscription on cultural performances by Kelantan’s state government, the Wayang Kulit Kelantan was banned due to its purported pre-Islamic elements not aligned to Islamic practice. The proscription would only be lifted in 2000, but by then, the shadow play had experienced a significant decline in practitioners and cultural relevance. Examining the practice of Wayang Kulit Kelantan pre- and post-proscription, this paper begins by drawing from the metaphor of a tree, comprising of roots, trunk, branches, and leaves often utilized by Wayang Kulit Kelantan practitioners to describe their large collection of Ramayana stories governing their performances. These metaphors are then extended to include innovations in performative elements such as musical repertoire, the introduction of new characters to the Wayang screen, and the incorporation of new technologies prototypical to Wayang performances that have emerged because of Kelantan’s cultural and religious contestations. By delving into these external elements, this paper seeks to uncover grassroots-level methods Wayang Kulit Kelantan practitioners have utilized since the proscription to preserve and innovate their artistic practice and space, branching and growing out in attempt to secure the viability of Wayang Kulit Kelantan.

In Cambodia at present the spread of mass media and the Internet is fuelling popularity-focused processes of transformation and changes within traditional ritual music and theatre genres. Lakhon bassac theatre as well as ritual music genres are performed on television and remediated online via social media, live streaming and YouTube uploads by artists and TV channels with the aims of “refashioning” and extending old media. By mediatisation, following some scholars of media studies, I mean a meta-framework which observes the dynamics underlying the social construction of reality as increasingly influenced by media, understood both as technologies and sense-making processes. Consequently, TV and the Internet do not simply reproduce or reflect music traditions: they play an important role in their shaping and reception. By examining performances on TV and social media of a well-known lakhon bassac theatre troupe since 2015, this talk shows the role of television as a vector of modernity in shaping traditional art forms and the role of social media in disseminating and advertising traditional genres, artists and ensembles mirroring new socio-cultural trends such as the role of artists as entrepreneurs, the professionalism of artists and musicians within the media system and in Khmer society. These processes also show how artists use their creativity and talent, through the use of some remediation strategies argued by Bolter and Grusin, such as the hypermediacy, to embrace demands for national representation and promotion of individual creativity while being subject to current sociopolitical trends and audience-patrons’ interests.

This paper investigates the evangelistic tactics of Welsh Baptist missionary Timothy Richard (1845-1919) in late Qing China by focusing on the Tune Book in Chinese Notation (1883). This work, a collaboration with his wife, Mary Richard (1843-1903), merged Christian hymnody with traditional Chinese musical elements, embodying a strategic inculturation approach (Franzen 1988; Shorter 2006) that respected local cultural norms in order to advance Christian conversion. Simultaneously, the Tune Book exemplifies Homi Bhabha's concept of hybridity in its intricate dynamics of cultural blending and colonial power, highlighting the resilience of Chinese converts in navigating the complexities of embracing Christianity while maintaining their cultural identity under colonial influence. Previous studies (Liu 1988; Gong 2017) have praised the Tune Book for its merits in cultural syncretism without fully addressing its colonial implications. This research revisits the Tune Book, critically examining its integration of Tonic Sol-fa and staff notation with the Chinese gongche notation. This synthesis subtly enforces a narrative of cultural superiority, echoing colonialist views that non-Western traditions required Western refinement. I argue that the Tune Book reveals a complex relationship between inculturation and hybridity, where cultural exchanges can both empower local identities and serve as vehicles for cultural imperialism. This duality underscores the ambiguous nature of such exchanges, where cultural resilience and the mechanisms of dominance coexist. This study contributes to comparative religion and postcolonial studies by offering a nuanced understanding of power dynamics in colonial-era cultural engagements, revealing the role of music pedagogy among missionary activities in Sino-Western encounters.

The purpose of this study is to explore how indigenous songs have been adapted into hymns and the challenges encountered in the process. Let the Hills Sing: Hymns of the tribal Christians in Taiwan was a music score jointly published in 1986 by the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan and the Asian Institute for Liturgy and Music based in Philippines. It includes 25 hymns adapted from indigenous songs, representing six ethnic groups, accompanied by a cassette recording, aiming to introduce contextualized indigenous hymns to all believers. This highly experimental practice not only embodied the ideal of developing contextualized and indigenous Christian music in the Asian churches at that time but also held particular significance against the backdrop of the indigenous movement in the 1980s Taiwan. The research utilizes interviews and music score analysis to investigate the compilation process, song selection, origin tracing, and recording process. It seeks to clarify the methods used in adapting indigenous songs into hymns and reveals significant discrepancies between the musical notation and recordings of some hymns. In certain cases, the complexity is so high that musical scores cannot be printed, with only lyrics and reference notation from other hymnals being provided. In the context of Taiwanese hymn research predominantly focused on the tracing of lyrics and song origins, this study represents a new attempt by incorporating historical recording materials to witness the process of hymn contextualization.

Training in classical music is essential when mastering classical dance forms of India. “Music comprises song, instrument, and dance,” this Sanskrit aphorism dates back to the 13th century treatise Sangeet Ratnakar by musicologist Sharangdev. As richness and complexity grew in the Indian classical music system, it influenced the content and repertoire of Kathak classical dance. This is not limited to technical dance innovations, but also the instruments, lyrical compositions, raga modes, and tala rhythm cycles. These components played a large role in the variety and depth of the kathakaar’s (story teller’s) presentation. When following the lineages, it is evident that not only were members of each family well versed in dance, they were fluent in vocal and percussion, propagating each part of the tradition. Even in modern professional dance institutes such as The National Institute of Kathak Dance in New Delhi, pupils study voice and percussion along with dance. In this paper, I draw from more than a decade of training in Kathak dance and Hindustani music, as well as historical sources, participant observations, and interviews with students and professional dancers and musicians to demonstrate that intimate knowledge of music heightens and accelerates a dancer's grasp of nuanced expression and innovation in Kathak. Although, in this day and age, students often focus on a singular artform, those who engage in the traditional tutelage system receive diverse exposure of complementary subjects thus developing a deeper understanding of the artform.

This paper provides a three-part structure for positioning the anthropology of dance in the United States—from its emergence in the early 1900s to the present—as an applied practice. Section one begins by identifying Boasian influences through the efforts of Ella Cara Deloria and Zora Neale Hurston. Their field research explored how cultural knowledge among the Native American (Deloria) and African Diasporic (Hurston) communities with whom they were part revealed strategies of adaptation and survival. With an emphasis on language preservation, another important contribution demonstrated emic views of individual and collective experience. Section two investigates Gertrude Kurath who helped pioneer the discipline of dance anthropology with fieldwork largely focused on documenting Native American groups. Inspired by presumed cultural decline, she generated grounded theories and methods or etic frameworks for comparative dance study. Discussion of Kurath’s 'outsider' approach considers how socio-economic and political developments parallel Deloria and Hurston’s 'insider' motivations. It is this point that leads to section three, which offers a springboard to articulate a model of applied dance anthropology for the twenty-first century. Unifying these scholars was their commitment to recognize issues impacting quality of life—putting ‘anthropology’ to use. Current research directions that combine emic and etic perspectives to solve practical problems and improve human experience offers new insights about the primary function of dance culture to navigate change. The paper concludes by describing the author’s investigations grounded by principles of social engagement, embodied awareness, and environmental relations, which substantiate the significance of applied dance anthropology to advance cultural studies.

Motivated by a desire to reclaim punk’s anti-establishment roots, youth of the hardcore punk subculture sought an outlet for their social and political disillusionment through a new music style that was harder, faster, and louder—for them, angrier. The collectively-produced live show, a manifestation of hardcore’s DIY (do-it-yourself) ideology, is the crux of the scene, and moshing, the movement practice that accompanies the live music, is the show’s main event. This dance practice epitomizes the music scene’s extreme aesthetic, where moshers must “dance hard or die” (Warzone, 1988), as they forcefully carve out an open pit with roundhouse kicks, floor punches, and cartwheels. While the movement reads as untenable, even violent, to outsiders, participation in this fury is that of communally protected consensual risk and demonstrates a dancer’s understanding of the scene’s brand of angry rebellion. Thus, at the core of hardcore’s identity lies a tie between the performance of anger and subcultural authenticity. Yet, there is an ambiguity to the performance of anger as it flirts with the borders of violence and dramatization (Meintjes 2017). In this ethnographic project, I address this ambiguity, employing dance scholar Judith Hamera’s framework of technique to examine how the hardcore scene uses moshing to negotiate itinerant social understandings of authenticity within the blurred lines between anger, violence, and spectacle. Rather than seek clarity around the categorizations’ nebulousness, I center how one community mobilizes anger’s ambiguity as a mechanism for boundary maintenance, and more broadly, I illuminate the stakes of protecting underground illegibility.

Ethnomusicologists have recently been called to recognize how our work reinforces raced and classed power differentials between institutionally located scholars and the community members upon whom our scholarship and livelihood depends (cf. Brown’s 2020 open letter, and Robinson, Reed, et al.’s 2023 SEM Seeger Lecture). This roundtable offers that community-engaged music scholarship can model the socialities and solidarities of a reimagined scholarly practice. Drawing from Moten and Harney’s The Undercommons (2013) and la paperson’s A Third University is Possible (2017), our roundtable participants – both institutionally located and community-based – will take turns storytelling about the radical potentials of community-engaged ethnomusicology. The roundtable’s first pair will discuss the evolution of their ethnomusicological partnership, and how it affects not only themselves but also their local Cape Verdean and Cape Verdean American communities. Its second duo will reflect on the challenges of working to empower Somali youth in southern Minnesota through creating intergenerational learning opportunities and building public-facing cultural resources. Our final pair will engage in an open and sincere conversation in Spanish around the question: whose community? Speaking critically about the negotiations that must be made in a transnational collaboration that intends to be horizontal. The second half of the roundtable, facilitated by our discussant, will provide an open-ended opportunity for our panelists to engage with one another, and with the audience; together, they will ask whether community-engaged practice can consist a “third” ethnomusicology “in the world with others and making the world anew” (Halberstam, in Moten and Harney 2013, 6).

What Jennifer Post has called eco-ethnomusicological research has moved the study of people making music to the more inclusive study of living beings relating through sound. Similarly, the ethical dimension of eco-ethnomusicology has shifted from the anthropocentric category of social justice to the more ecocentric ecojustice, wherein justice is no longer only for and between humans but is instead inclusive of both humans and more-than-humans. Eco-ethnomusicology is informed by ethnographic fieldwork; Indigenous, traditional, and Western ecological knowledges; bioacoustics; soundscape ecology; and environmental activism. These influential impacts and multifaceted influences have come about relatively recently. How else might eco-ethnomusicology shift our thinking, and what other confluences might it stir up? Rather than predict the future, this roundtable offers reflections from five scholars who have influenced and been impacted by eco-ethnomusicology: Panelist#1 addresses eco-ethnomusicology and its environmentally focused sonic research in multispecies and more-than-human communities. Panelist#2 relates Indigenous songs, the land, and long held spiritual and cultural ecosystems. Panelist#3 engages music’s potential for ecological analogizing and increasing awareness of relationships that extend beyond sentient life forms. Panelist#4 emphasizes the importance of skillful listening in cinematic sound design and the challenges of representing more-than-human voices. Panelist#5 reflects on the sound commons and ecojustice, particularly sonic communication in the world of plants and animals. After these remarks and comments from a discussant in the first hour, the audience will have the second hour to discuss the future of the subjects for eco-ethnomusicological work: music, sound, and justice in multispecies environments.

Amidst competing forces of musical mobilities, dislocations, and contestations of space in many African societies arises a need to critically interrogate the interplay between music and the evolving African soundscapes and imaginaries. Drawing on multi-dimensional approaches and theoretical influences, this panel explores a range of subjects including articulations of power and the reimagination of spaces such as the harem in the music-making praxis of Nupe women in Nigeria, music and visuals as signifiers of human and environmental devastation in natural resource extraction in Nigeria, Zambia, and South Africa, the use of the sung practice of sikkar (from the Arabic zikr/dhikr) among the Layène community in Senegal’s oceanside to make spiritual sense of industrialization, globalization, and climate change, and the appropriation of the Arabo-Islamic anashid from its peaceful proselytization of Islam into one that calls for lesser jihad (armed struggle) to create the modern-day Sokoto Caliphate and advance the Boko-haram insurgence in Nigeria. While exploring the entanglements of music, (dis)placement, violence, and gender politics, this panel also offers varied approaches for thinking through ideas of music orthodoxy, religious fundamentalism, and the processes of creating counter-musical cultures and spaces in Africa and transcontinental contacts.

Ethnomusicological knowledge production is predominantly grounded in interaction between members of academic and non-academic spheres, although this interaction takes place on a multidimensional spectrum that can be delineated by several conceptual axes, including “(non-)reflexive”, “(non-)collaborative”, “(non-)engaged”, or “(in-)direct”. This interaction is a particularly sensitive issue in ethnomusicological minority research, where the power imbalance between researchers and their non-academic partners is usually pronounced, while at the same time an explicitly dialogical and/or engaged approach is often pursued. Drawing on experiences from various current and past research projects, and extending existing discussions (e.g., Lassiter 2021; Silverman 2018), the roundtable reflects on the complex dynamics of academic/non-academic interaction in music and minorities research, and ethnomusicology more generally, regarding various aspects of research practice. After a brief introduction by the roundtable host, there will be five short statements on the following topics: (1) “Changing Ways of Collaboration in Planning, Fieldwork, Analysis, Publication, and Application over 40 Years of Minority Research”; (2) “Researching (with) Individual Musicians after Forced Migration: Chances and Limits in Collaboration”; (3) “Reversing the Gaze: Questioning Roles and Control in Research”; (4) “Ethical Dilemmas When Facing Political Interference in Music and Minorities Research”; (5) “Who to Ask? Dealing with Death in Fieldwork”. The host will then facilitate responses and discussion among the presenters and will invite the audience not only to comment on the statements but also to share their own experiences and approaches, thus ensuring a rich exchange of knowledge and critical insights.

How does sound help communities cohere? What dynamics underlie the temporary, yet powerful, sonic cohesion of crowds and collectives? Bridging several types of large-scale cultural events, this panel contributes to sound studies' ongoing interest in the sonic politics of identity, affect, and emergent social formations in crowds (Garcia-Mispireta 2023, Guillebaud 2017, Lentjes 2021), particularly within sporting events (Bateman & Bale 2009, Herrera 2018, Rogers 2011) and festivals (Duffy 2014, Gardner 2020, Hayes 2010). Embracing Ochoa Gautier's call to expand sound studies' core theoretical terms through grounded ethnographic engagement (2019), the papers apply diverse theoretical lenses (including phenomenology, semiotics, queer theory, ecocriticism, and affect theory) to their ethnographic sites, revealing the heterogeneous meanings that sound can hold in distinct cultural and historic contexts. Panelist 1 explores the embodied sensations of regional belonging through fireworks unique to València, Spain. Continuing a focus on physical sonic intimacies, panelist 2 shows how queer temporalities generate spaces for joyful resistance and differentiated engagement with the past in collegiate “battles of the bands.” Panelist 3 foregrounds a different sonic ritual, one that sounds across the conventional boundaries of virtual spaces to engender an “affect of liveness” that pervades geographically dispersed e-sports communities. Panelist 4 centers recycled musical instruments as a means to democratize engagement and convey community presence at a Portuguese music festival. Taken together, the papers demonstrate how the vectors of identity that crosscut cultural spaces are critical to understanding how sound comes to mean and function (Crawley 2017, Martin 2019, Stadler 2015, Stoever 2016).

Summer music workshops interrelated through the modal and orally transmitted musical practices of the expansively conceived Balkan, Ottoman, and Persianate cultural spheres form an integral part of folk music revival projects in Türkiye, Greece, and the United States. This panel explores how summer music camps exert significant impact on such music revival projects, by means of imagining alternative forms of community and fostering new models for music transmission. Papers engage with panelists’ intersecting field research at Müzik Köyü (Music Village) in Türkiye as an illustrative example of this worldwide phenomenon, while also drawing on fieldwork at related events elsewhere in Türkiye, Greece, and the United States. They complement each other through explorations of community-building across dividing lines, of the sustainability of folk music revivals, and of the impact of transmission at music workshops. The first paper explores the representation of the Ottoman Ecumene’s ethnic and musical diversity within the Müzik Köyü space from a symbolic anthropological perspective. The second examines transnational links and cosmopolitan attitudes evident in music workshops, contextualizing Müzik Köyü within the larger history of regional musical exchanges while deconstructing the postnational ideological tenets expressed by its leaders and participants. The third paper positions the summer music workshop as an environment where transmission and revival intersect in a manner that cultivates specific aesthetic values, redefines the culturally contingent concept of devotion, and induces pleasure as a defining characteristic of the summer music camp experience and thereby the folk music revival scenes in which summer workshops exist.

Guichu (鬼畜) represents a distinctive form of musicking on Bilibili (a popular Chinese video platform with 326 million monthly active users), where the technique of auto-tune remix is employed to recreate existing songs and gather materials from various audio and visual sources. Owing to its burgeoning popularity, guichu has captivated the attention of scholars from mainland China (Chen, 2019; Li, 2021; Yin, 2020; Zhang, 2018, etc.). The prevailing focus of these scholars revolves around the adverse effects associated with consuming guichu videos, often branding them and their audience as “vulgar” (disu 低俗) and “sick taste” (equwei 恶趣味). This perspective has prompted suggestions for legal regulations (Li, 2021; Yin, 2020) and the implementation of “professional guidance” (Chen, 2019) to refine this genre. Meanwhile, other scholars (Lei, 2020; Li, 2017) critique guichu for its transgressions against copyright and portraiture rights. In contrast with these viewpoints, this project undertakes a comprehensive examination. Initially, it unravels the historical trajectory of guichu, tracing its evolution from a mere musical genre to a thriving virtual community on Bilibili. Subsequently, this project delves into the multifaceted challenges that confront guichu as a subculture, exploring how this virtual community resists both the homogenizing forces of commercial culture and the overarching narrative of the state. It further investigates the ingenious strategies, including “budang” (补档, or “re-uploading”), that this community employs to evade censorship.

2020 ushered in an era of unprecedented virtual and mixed/augmented reality (VR/AR) technology consumption. 13 October marked the release of the Oculus Quest 2 headset (renamed Meta Quest 2 following the 2022 rebranding of Facebook, Inc. as Meta). An accessible base price of 299 USD saw Quest 2 sales vastly outperform other VR/AR systems, accounting for some 18 million units by the first fiscal quarter of 2023, thus spearheading a significant increase in the mainstream adoption of VR/AR technology. The VR/AR marketplace is ever-diversifying, however, with Meta and other brands—including some new to VR/AR (e.g., Apple)—continually unveiling new systems.

Games rooted in multifarious rhythmic and/or dance elements constitute a large segment of the VR/AR gaming market—catering to manifold musical tastes and motivations for gameplay (e.g., dance, physical fitness, socialization, and/or competition)—and are especially popular introductory apps for new VR/AR users. VR/AR developments are dramatically transforming boundaries between a player’s physical body and onscreen avatar, complicating notions of public vs. private performance, expanding machine evaluation/feedback capabilities, and enabling increasingly complex and immersive forms of virtual interaction between human players. Drawing on discourse surrounding social play in non-VR games, including rhythm/dance franchises such as Guitar Hero (2005–) and Dance Dance Revolution (1998–), this presentation examines VR/AR rhythm/dance titles Beat Saber (2019–), Synth Riders (2019–), and Ragnarock (2020–) as comparative case studies in an exploration of multiplayer modality in the rapidly developing “metaverse” and the dynamic (meta)cultural implications of this new frontier.

In this paper, two researchers present findings from an ongoing duoethnographic study into musical and spiritual/magical affordances of telematic music making and its potential for increasing access to music making. The presenters – a drummer and a guitarist/singer/bassist – have met for one to two hours most weeks for since early fall 2023 to play groove music such as pop, rock and blues using free, web-based software designed for low-latency audio and collaborative music making. To date, the success of most remote, telematic musical collaborations has relied on avoiding a firm, percussive pulse (Smith et al 2020) and required prohibitively expensive hardware LOLA that also requires Internet 2 and a team of technicians to operate it. Drawing on Boyce-Tilman’s (2011, 2020) writing about Spirituality – construed by Smith (2022) as magic – the presenters describe conscious connection across the four elements comprising spirituality: Materials, Construction, Values, and Expression. They demonstrate that, although qualitatively different from prior contexts and discussions of spirituality in music making (e.g., Randles, 2021), the experiences were comparable in terms of poiesis and transcendence (Pignato and Begany 2017), worth repeating and sharing. Construing the online environment as a real, alternative space, a de facto “third room” (Moir et al., 2019), the researchers found accommodating to jamming online akin to learning to play in any other new space. This type of software presages a new frontier in collaborative opportunities for musicians, with reduced financial entry point and substantially lower time commitment compared to commonplace practices of traveling and renting physical rehearsal spaces.

Online music communities are a vital method of genre formation in the 21st century. In a Web 2.0 (or 3.0) virtual space which transcends geographical boundaries, a multitude of artists, audiences, musicians, producers and performers come together to negotiate subcultural capital in a collective capacity. With new subcultural styles, rituals, practices, and cultural disseminations, how can we assess the activities of an online community and their role in the formation of a genre? Synthwave, a 21st century style of music which both privileges and reimagines 1980s musical and cultural aesthetics, formed online in the early 2000s. Through a 5-year and 6-month (2017-2023) ethnographic study, this online music community’s ecosystem was examined. With an emic viewpoint, the research made visible tacit knowledge of the synthwave creative process, as well as providing rich and experiential subcultural detail about the online community. The research concluded that the synthwave community is an active community of practice with a defined set of musical, stylistic, technological and subcultural rules. By examining the tensions observable within the outputs, interactions, and discourses of this community of practice, as well as through the author’s participation as a creator, the research addresses how online music communities (including creators and audiences) construct and negotiate parameters of an emergent musical style. The research is (to date) the first ethnographic account of the online synthwave community and provides a first-hand telling of its ecosystem as a community of practice.

American Protestant churches are home to so-called music ministries, which consist of one or more music ensembles that provide accompaniment for congregational singing. These music ministries explictly welcome both men and women, and indeed, both men and women volunteer in great numbers to sing and play in ensembles such as church choirs, orchestras and praise bands. There is an evident gender diparity in the leadership of these ensembles: men overwhelmingly predominate as leaders of church music ministries. In addition, as I will argue in this presentation, church music ministries enforce a sexist double standard that applies to the volunteer musicians. Leaders never say that women are held to a different and higher standard than men, and may not even be consciously aware that they are maintaining a double standard; in this sense, the double standard is disguised. Rather, church music leaders argue that singers must be confessing Christians, but instrumentalists need not be. However, because of the deeply gendered context of American Protestant churches - where women are much more likely to sing, and men are more likely to play instruments – women musicians are generally required to meet a spiritual standard that male musicians are not. This presentation is based on interviews of twenty-five American church music leaders, and contributes to the burgeoning scholarly investigations of Christian church musicking by ethnomusicologists (Myrick and Porter 2021; Stueuernagel 2021; Mall, Engelhardt and Ingalls 2021; Ingalls, Reigersberg and Sherinian 2018).

In 2004, multi-instrumentalist Sufjan Stevens released his fourth full-length album titled "Seven Swans." Shot through with swooning, whispered vocals and lush banjo-centered arrangements, Stevens and producer-collaborator Daniel Smith were among the first artists riding what Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings jokingly called the "banjo wave" that followed the release of the Cohen Brothers' folk-noir classic "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" in 2001. But among the folksy indie rock at the time, Seven Swans was notable for its overabundance of confessional evangelical Christian language. Especially among teenagers and college students at the time, the album, along with similarly devotional tracks from his previous release, made Stevens into the leading musical voice for a new expression of Christian faith. Worship leaders began to incorporate Stevens's songs into their setlists and his spare Americana-inspired arrangements became standard in youth gatherings and campus ministries.

In the years since, the banjo has continued to chart a course outward from this epicenter, working its way into ever-new corners of popular and evangelical religious music. On the one hand, Stevens and his music came to epitomize what Brett McCracken called "hipster Christianity," which encouraged a studied, eclectic approach to Christian culture marked by aloof upper-middle-class white smugness. But in other ways, Stevens represents a kind of shadow side to Bush-era evangelical grievance politics. In this paper, I draw on recorded exemplars and new personal interviews with musicians to explore the banjo's symbolic role within on-going intra-religious negotiations around whiteness, masculinity, religiosity, rurality, and sincerity in evangelical worship.

When a new ideology or cultural practice is introduced into a society, it evolves from foreign to local—a natural process of contextualization or syncretization. This can be seen in an African context where Christianity and its musical traditions were introduced and have evolved to the point of becoming part of the local African identity (Krabill 2013; Kidula 2013). In this paper I will follow the evolution of Christian Deaf song as I have observed it over the past 30 years in Spain: it follows a pattern described by Krabill in his study of indigenous African hymnology. Deaf Christian song in Spain began with sign-for-word interpreting in a hearing church, followed by more skilled and adaptive interpreting, then using the same songs in an all-Deaf environment without sound. Later new songs were created in a similar style, and then, composers began experimenting with songs that exuded a distinctive Deaf flavor. Finally, these songs were shared at international conferences and workshops. I examine formal changes such as adjusting and regularizing rhythms, adapting the dynamics of the signing to fit the feel of the song, and altering discourse structures. I touch on the incorporation of drums or other auditory inputs that can be felt (and often heard) by the Deaf audience, and I discuss how the new expressions reflect a visual rather than auditory focus, including elements adapted from theatrical genres.

Singer Misora Hibari (1937-1989) is undisputedly one of Japan’s central figures of postwar music culture. As a child star, she excelled on the movie screen and in live performance settings, ending her career with 1,500 recorded songs in genres ranging from jazz to boogie-woogie, French chanson and Latin pops. Today, she is often lauded as ‘the queen of enka’, a genre linked to Japaneseness (Yano, 2002). Given Misora’s status, broad skill-set, long career and connection to nation, she has been the subject of a number of scholarly and popular texts, concerning her deification (Wajima 2010, Takenaka 2005, Yamaori 2001), status as ‘diva’ (Yano 2018), and star image (Shamoon 2009). This paper brings a new perspective to the literature, by examining how technology assists in sustaining Misora’s star image and national status in the decades following her death, via video montages and posthumous duets. We do this through an examination of lyrics, costumes and staging in the televised Japanese year-end song contest Kōhaku utagassen, where Misora made song performances during her lifetime (from 1954-1979) and has been repeatedly ‘resurrected’ after her death. We also present a case study of the “AI Misora Hibari” hologram which was created using Vocaloid technology and performed at the 70th anniversary Kōhaku (2019). Informed by ethnographic fieldwork at Kōhaku rehearsals, we show how AI Hibari’s rendition of the custom-composed song “Arekara” (Ever Since Then) serves to perpetuate a sense of her immortality.

Dementia, a syndrome involving memory loss and physical decline, results from underlying medical conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease. A dementia diagnosis affects more than the brain, including personal identity, relationships, and status in local communities. Yet, even as speaking skills deteriorate, musical knowledge remains relatively preserved. As a result, both scientists and community-based programs have become interested in the use of personalized music playlists to improve well-being for people living with dementia. Corresponding resource toolkits describe how to build personalized playlists. But how personal are these playlists? Playlist curation aims to identify preferred music, yet many people living with dementia lack the capacity to easily describe their favorite, or most meaningful, moments in music engagement. This paper draws on 6+ years of ethnographic data from community and nursing home settings to argue that the contents of a personalized playlist hinge on the music knowledge of family members, friends and above all, the person compiling the playlist. With limited training, playlists can be inadvertently limited to popular songs of a certain decade, rather than the music that is most important to the playlist recipient. In this presentation, we discuss how ethnomusicologists are well-positioned with the tools needed to co-curate, and to help train others to co-curate, deeply meaningful playlists, reflecting not only important moments across the life span but also the multifaceted elements that comprise personal, relational and social identity. By reframing playlist making as a co-creative process, we also address how this practice can model relationship-based approaches to dementia caregiving.

2023 marked the 70th anniversary of the ceasefire of the Korean War. Chinese anti-American songs from the 1950s were performed and broadcast through state-run media and social media in China to commemorate such event. Known in China as the “War to Resist the US and Assist Korea” (hereafter WRUAK), the Korean War was the very first international conflict involving the newly founded People’s Republic of China (PRC). Therefore, Chinese songs associated with the Korean War are a crucial part of the PRC’s special musical memories of the past. Drawing upon my ethnographic research concerning the Chinese audience and singers (including several Chinese veterans of the WRUAK) of anti-American songs, this paper analyzes the new appropriation of anti-American songs from China’s protean mobilization for the WRUAK in the present day. After constructing the historical context of Maoist attitudes toward music and exploring various models for Chinese revolutionary songs, the paper arrives at the Korean War via an analysis of song tunes and texts from the Chinese home front during the 1950s, emphasizing the role of devil imagery in anti-American song propaganda. From student amateurs to conservatory-trained cultural workers, song composers and contemporary music arrangers used music and lyrics to satirize China’s American enemies, suggesting that Chinese songs from the Korean War extend beyond buoyant patriotism, evoking past trauma and pride of “hard-won victory”.

In her blog, Feministkilljoys, scholar Sarah Ahmed states, “to hear with a feminist ear is to hear the different ways a complaint can be expressed” (June 1, 2022). In this panel, we use Ahmed's approach to think through female musical practices in contemporary Iran, Bolivia, and 20th-century Spain. We argue that even though geographically and temporally distant, female musicians in these three musical contexts used subtle, insistent, but effective strategies to complain through music-making and express their musical identities in reconstructed paradigms. In the vein of Ahmed’s work, we also reflect on our role as researchers and strive to listen to and tune in to the shades of musical complaints. With these papers, we aim to contribute to the study of music and conflict from a feminist perspective. The first paper considers the process of re-interpreting a banned pre-Revolutionary Iranian musical archive by contemporary Iranian women musicians’ representation of social aesthetics and identity via social media. Paper 2 understands the contemporary use of “música popular” as voicing socio-political concerns by female Paceño musicians in the streets of La Paz, Bolivia. The final paper maps the development of socio-political strategies used by inmates to create, perform, and later archive banned songs within the female prison system in the early decades of Francoist Spain. Through this comparison, our panel spurs a discussion about politics, global music trends in transnational structures, and globally accessible social media platforms as reconstructed identities.

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.

In our increasingly mediated world, digital technology is a near-ubiquitous aspect of our reality. As the internet, social media, and AI are integrated into our daily lives, these technologies present novel challenges to artists and fans navigating questions of self, humanity, identity, and authenticity. Socially constructed notions of authenticity and realness remain crucial to artist and fan experiences of popular music, even as digital interventions disrupt and confront commonly accepted views on the genuine vs. the fake. This panel approaches authenticity in popular music at its intersection with mediating technologies, considering how artists and fans negotiate authenticity constructs through community, identity, representation, erasure, labor, and humanity.

“Soaked in ‘Verb: Onboard Effects in the Pursuit of Authenticity in Local Ann Arbor, MI, Music Venues” explores how artists and engineers in local folk and hard rock venues perform authenticity and genre-specific identity through the use of reverb and delay vocal effects. “‘A Self-Replicating Pop Star?’ Grimes, AI, and Voicing Humanity” considers Grimes’s AI voice simulator from the perspective of the humans who sing into it, through the erasure of their vocal labor and timbre as well as the audible vestiges of their voices that remain in the AI’s virtual, hybridized one. Finally, “‘If You Squint Your Ears’: Queer Community and Representational Politics on TikTok” follows the Gaylor community, who interpret sonic artifacts in Taylor Swift’s work to ascribe LGBTQ+ identity to the pop star; this paper engages with community meaning-making, representations of (in)authentic queer identity, and the politics of visibility on GaylorTok.

In historical moments of deep pain, uncertainty, and mistrust, how might centering “vulnerability” in our work allow researchers in ethnomusicology to forge deeper connections and resist impulses toward guarded scholarly distance? Even as contemporary conversations highlight ethnomusicologists’ ethical responsibilities toward collaborators and interlocutors, the narrow path to professional marketability requires ironclad confidence and an unassailable sense of mastery in teaching. How does the position of a vulnerable observer, who is open to unpredictable experiences and embraces their position as a learner, sit in tension with the authoritative confidence that is crucial to success in the higher education job market? And how might a greater capacity for engaging with discomfort, disagreement, and tension of various kinds point toward new possibilities for communication in times of significant discord? The four presenters for this proposed panel take “vulnerability,” a key concept in Ruth Behar’s (1996) The Vulnerable Observer but also highlighted in the recent Ellen Koskoff prize-winning volume At the Crossroads of Music and Social Justice (Romero et al. 2023), as a jumping-off point for discussions of a variety of scholarly approaches, communities, institutions, and musical traditions. Each of the four presenters highlights the ways in which openness and flexibility do not end with “the field” - an increasingly difficult-to-demarcate temporal and geographical span - but are of vital significance throughout one’s career, as well as in historical approaches to ethnomusicology and in all musical communities with which we engage.

Portugal is Europe’s longest-lasting colonial nation, and its colonial regimes encompassed diverse places and epochs, with a first global trade empire ending in 1663, a second focused on Brazil ending in 1822, and a third in Africa ending in 1975. Diverse musical networks specific to Portugal’s postcolonial geographies emerged, through which the mediatization of music, transnational paths of musicians, and immigrant musical worlds cut across ex-colonial nation states, sometimes mediated by Portugal but also through South-South networks. Hegemonic articulations of a common transnational culture based in Portuguese colonialism, such as the colonial apologetics of lusotropicalismo and more recent language-based diplomatic framework of lusofonia, have been justly criticized. We suggest instead “lusosonia,” a postcolonial collection of musical practices, including those of non-Portuguese speakers, that is open to interventive articulations of interculturality among communities historically impacted by Portuguese colonialism. This panel examines case studies, ordered chronologically, that reflect Portuguese colonial histories in Asia, Africa, and the Americas and the resultant musical networks that have been and are newly forged. The first paper examines the radio transmission of Brazilian music after the incorporation of the Portuguese ex-colony of Goa into India. The second analyzes how popular musical genres were categorized in Mozambique as the country transitioned from Portuguese rule to Independence. The third paper shows how Cape Verdean star Cesária Évora was made legible in the French press through comparisons to Portuguese fado. The last explores the emerging Brazilian immigrant carnival in Lisbon, evaluating postcolonial theories to understand challenges to the event’s viability.

From four intersecting perspectives on contemporary Cambodian and Cambodian American performance practices, this panel examines moments in traditional performance when sound, music, and dance not only bind community but act as platforms for people to negotiate temporality as well as spatially construct senses of home. We ask, how do sounds create and embody ideas of community and home in ephemerality? Amidst histories of contemporary migrations, intergenerational trauma, and social changes, people create a space of their own through the production of familiar sounds or the performance of known gestures. These ephemeral, often repeated soundings allow people to exist in unfamiliar, changing, or unwelcoming environments. Sounded cultural practices such as classical and social dances, ceremonial music, and even traditional games ground people into the land they live on, generate comfort, pride, and belonging in both private and public spaces. Considering these initiatives to access and produce music and culturally meaningful sounds, we offer insights on individual and collective negotiations of social identity, racial inequities, and tactics to claim space and shape time. Through different situations, we look at how cultural and social identities––in our case, Cambodian––are sounded out through the way people musically inhabit spaces. In doing so, we bring innovative perspectives at the crossroad of ethnomusicology and sound studies on how notions of place and belonging are crafted and articulated through auditory experiences.

In African Music, one of the many ways of thinking about what we hear is by untying the layers that make and influence sound. Is it possible, for instance, to have a music genre devoid of any influence from other genres? The lines between popular, art, and traditional music have crossed in different ways, giving rise to new music genres and new ways of listening, performing, recording, evaluating, and theorizing music. In this roundtable, six participants with distinct research interests in African music will engage in an in-depth critical discourse on how these three kinds of music intersect on the page, stage, and studio recording practices. With practical examples of ancient, contemporary, and historic sounds emanating from the continent of Africa, each participant in the roundtable, in addition to the audience, will bring their distinct scholarly perspectives to the discourse. Discussants' contributions include critical topics on Afrobeat(s), African Pianism, Jazz, Choral music, performance cultures, and the use of instruments across genres. The purpose and significance of this roundtable is, among others, to examine these three kinds of African music in their historical and contemporary contexts in order to appreciate the sonic qualities and nature of music performed within and outside of the African continent.

Despite current scholarly attention to promise of a “multispecies ethnomusicology” (Silvers 2020), the concept of the biological “species” continues to be taken for granted within music studies. Whether through the species concept’s biologically essentialist and taxonomically exclusionary overtones, its prioritization of settler-scientific knowledge practices, or its implicit emphasis on collective life as object of care and conservation at the expense of the individual animal, invocations of “species” prematurely resolve urgent ethical, political, and existential issues posed by the advent of the Anthropocene. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork at the Gibbon Conservation Center, an animal facility in Southern California devoted to caring for gibbons (endangered, arboreal apes endemic to the shrinking rainforests of Southeast Asia who maintain their monogamous pair-bonds through the daily bouts of coordinated vocalization), I discuss conservationist listening practices and analyze recordings of the Center’s multispecies soundscape to argue that both captive gibbons and the humans who care for them are engaged in auditory strategies that complicate and resist endangered species conservation’s biopolitical emphasis on the species as unit of care and attention (e.g., Chrulew 2011; Parrenas 2018). Instead, those actors invested in maintaining sonic and social continuities make audible the ontological unruliness of the species concept and reframe it as a more-than-human ethical conundrum whose various attempts at resolution perpetually (re)configure bodies, concepts, technologies, and scales. Taking advantage of the meeting’s virtual format, this presentation will feature immersive ethnographic recordings made in an experimental 360-degree, omni-binaural format. The use of headphones is recommended but not required.

An iconic collaboration penned for Animal Liberation, the 1987 PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) compilation album, Lene Lovich and Nina Hagen’s “Don’t Kill the Animals” raised global awareness about animal rights, and also secured the divas’ prominent visibility as forward thinking and eccentric mainstream “avant-pop” artists. Unapologetically wacky and over the top, Lovich and Hagen’s performance of “Don’t Kill the Animals” captures the spirit of “new wave,” a wildly heterogeneous and colorful genre that arose out of mid-to-late 1970s punk rock and underground scenes, characterized by its campy garb, gender subversion, and insatiably frenetic energy. While Theo Cateforis’ influential study, Are We Not New Wave? (2011) contextualizes the movement in terms of a pervasive affect of “nervousness” arising in response to Cold War anxieties, there has yet to be a substantial exploration of the feminist meanings carried by the genre. In this presentation, I will move to interpret Lovich and Hagen’s new wave animal rights protest song as exemplifying an ecofeminist, new wave energy that harnesses the Zoe force — what posthumanist philosopher Rosi Braidotti theorizes as an all-encompassing life force resistant to the anthropocentric destruction of the planet. Unmoored from harmful structures of power and hierarchical, speciesist identifications, Zoe-powered feminists are nomadic, global subjects in motion. Following Braidotti, this presentation will present a hermeneutic analysis of Lovich and Hagen’s new wave eco-feminist romp, attending to the performative strategies with which they mobilize a new wave, Zoe-powered resistance to speciesism and late capitalist patriarchy.

This paper broadly examines the intersections between animal rights activism and ethnomusicology. I am specifically interested in music’s—and by extension, music scholarship’s—utility in advocating for non-human animals. I argue that ethnomusicologists are uniquely positioned to engage with animal rights through ethnographic research of activist music scenes and through frameworks developed by zoömusicology and related subdisciplines. I posit that animal activism is relevant to ethnomusicology’s discursive engagement with decoloniality; there is a strong relationship between Western European colonial projects—which ethnomusicology ostensibly aims to reject and dismantle—and animal industries. Many animal activists, particularly those in the hardcore punk scene I highlight in this paper, see their fight for animal liberation as part of a larger critique of global capitalism. I first argue that a lack of ethnographic work on animal rights activist music scenes has contributed to a misunderstanding of them; as such, I believe that ethnomusicologists can amplify the voices of such activists through ethnography. I then turn to an examination of discourses in zoömusicology to show how ethnomusicologists may contribute to these discourses and more specifically align their goals with animal activism. Finally, I tie these threads together with a consideration of applied ethnomusicology and its use as a framework for participating in animal activism inside and outside of the academy.

Historically, people with Williams Syndrome (WS), a rare form of neurodivergence, have been fetishized as musical savants. However, through my decade of collaborating with this community, I have observed most people with WS have an innate musicality that departs from traditional definitions of musical talent. This unique ability to engage in creative and emotional expression with others through musical means in manifested through a unique music phenotype termed “Williams music.” In this presentation, I utilize ethnographic fieldwork conducted at a summer music camp for children with Williams Syndrome to examine the development of new music curriculum that centers the cultural, creative, and physiological needs of these campers. Drawing upon ethnographic interviews with music leadership, facilitators, and teenage musicians with WS and in conjunction with autoethnographic reflections, I explore how this curriculum creates sustainable, adaptable, and accessible music programming by foregrounding the creative agency of the campers while providing adaptive instruments and music notation. This longitudinal research builds upon the growing work of music and disability studies scholars (Bakan, Dell’Antonio, Jensen-Moulton, Straus) and serves as a case study for exploring how valuing musicality over traditional ideas of musical talent can create opportunities for neurodivergent musicians to participate in the creation of musical culture. In addition to furthering applied ethnomusicological research on music and neurodivergence, such findings have important implications for the field of music education as they demonstrate that aspects of this adaptive curriculum can be utilized to create inclusive and accessible music environments for neurodivergent musicians more broadly.

As a disabled independent scholar and first time SEM attendee, I will discuss the ways that increased virtual access has facilitated both my conference participation and my continued scholarly work. I will also argue that, while it is a vital component of access, simply setting up video conferencing is not enough for me and other disabled independent scholars to be on equal footing with our colleagues who have institutional support. My identities and position shape not only the format in which I participate, but also the content of my work, the sources I have access to, and my writing process. Following Emily Roberts in her assertion that all scholarship is embodied, I examine the ways that I navigate participation in a musicological field that does not often make explicit space for disabled and academically unaffiliated perspectives. Drawing on disabled activists and scholars such as Sara Acevedo and Cal Montgomery who nuance ideas of access and belonging, I explore what it means not only to include me and other independent scholars, but to make space for non-normative scholarship.

“Would you believe there are some people in this choir who don’t read music?” This veteran chorister’s offhand remark both invoked and troubled one of the core normative assumptions about people who sing in Western art music choirs. Even in unauditioned, community-based choral societies, choristers are expected to sing from notated scores. Members of these choirs feel that this elevates them above other local community choirs. In practice, however, the level of “musical literacy” in these choirs is variable, and “note-bashing”—the joyless repetition of passages to achieve accuracy—occurs often. Recognising this, choir leaders encourage members to make use of assistive technologies like rehearsal tracks, which are welcomed by some and derided by others. In this presentation, I examine the objects and processes of musical literacy in the choral society as “technologies of the self”: that is, tools by which individuals transform their minds and bodies to attain an aspirational state (Foucault 1997). Using ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Melbourne choral societies, I argue that the act of reading music is idealised as a means of “performing abledness”, with the musical score signifying the highest state of the choral art. In doing so, I use critical disability theory to articulate the stakes of reading music and the consequences for choristers who do not. Problematising the concept of musical literacy in this fashion is just one step in revealing how insidiously ableist normativities shape hitherto accepted divides between “community” and “professional” musicians in the Western art music world.

In June 2023, Hong Kong applied to the court for an injunction to prohibit citizens from broadcasting or distributing “Glory to Hong Kong,” a protest anthem widely performed during the Anti-Extradition Bill and Pro-democracy Protests (2019–20) on the eve of the National Security Law (Hong Kong) (NSL(HK)) enactment (June 2020). The city went from being a “semi-democratic” to a “semi-authoritarian” police state (Tai 2020), security forces exercising “rule-by-law” (Ginsburg and Moustafa 2008) instead of a liberal “rule-of-law.” Local buskers who performed the song on the streets were arrested under charges such as “public disorder” and “possessing an offensive weapon”. The song was famously and mistakenly played as the “national” anthem in several international sporting events, triggering the government to ban it since it “violated national security.” Paradoxically, the prohibition threatened those who performed the song publicly while implicitly endorsing its subversive power.

In the prohibition, sound, aurality, and the law intersect, forcing a new habitus delimiting the spoken and the heard (LaBelle 2021). Joining song to space, singing and listening marked unprecedented political territories, which I call political aurality. This paper examines ethnographic materials, archival videos, and legal documents to trace how Hong Kong’s political aurality becomes entangled with the new “lawscape” (LaBelle 2021). Taking “Glory to Hong Kong” as a case, the paper reveals Hong Kong’s loss of freedom in the process of politicized listening demarcated by “authoritarian legality” (Chen and Fu 2019) at this critical moment in history.

Since the beginning of the Woman, Life, Freedom Movement in the wake of the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian woman at the hands of Iran's police, ongoing protests have been happening in Iran and the diaspora, significantly in the United States. The soundscapes of Iranian protests in the United States are directly influenced by American social movements, specifically Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name (Mosley 2020; Siamdoust 2023). My fieldwork in the US reveals a striking adaptation of these movements' slogans into the lexicon of Iranian communities, as chants of "Say his/her name" reverberate through the gatherings. My discussion considers these global dialogues and interactions through sounds and similar patterns of resistance among oppressed groups that transcend national boundaries during social movements (Melucci 1996; Hollander and Einwohner 2004; Manuel 2019). This research sheds light on how the soundscape of feminist and political movements intersect among Iranians in the US. How does intersectionality unite people globally during social movements? To what extent do Iranian diasporic communities in the United States align their protest's soundscape with their host societies' expectations? Why do Iranians draw from Western slogans and songs to convey their national struggles and grief?

During the 2019 social movement in Hong Kong, we witnessed a creative outpour of music that responded to and contributed to the social movement. This paper enriches the academic literature on Hong Kong social movement music, by putting the spotlight on a particular piece of remix music on YouTube, “Fat Mama Has Something to Say.” “Fat Mama Has Something to Say” was a timely and comical response to the police brutality incidents in the 2019 Hong Kong social movements. In this music video, an anonymous netizen remixed a pro-Beijing celebrity, Maria Cordero’s pro-police speech into lyrics that criticized the police, and the melody was autotuned to Sia’s Chandelier. The “Fat Mama” song very quickly became immensely popular online, and was extensively used in the social movement. This paper explores what made the “Fat Mama” song so popular and effective, and analyses such with the theoretical concepts of oscillatio, asyndeton, and the Grotesque. This paper contributes to the newly explored academic dimension of remix music on YouTube, and offers new insights into how remix music could be used as protest music, in this particular case study of the “Fat Mama” song during the 2019 Hong Kong social movement. Serving as a case study, this song also showcases a divergence from the current literature on protest music, and proposes another model for understanding the impacts of protest music.

This presentation approaches musicologically and phenomenologically the Romeo and Juliet thematic complex and observes it in cross-cultural perspective: while William Shakespeare’s original play, published in 1597, has been adapted countless times for a great variety of genres, predominantly in Western contexts, the goal of the current analysis is to critically underpin the transformation of the Romeo and Juliet significance beyond Western set-ups, e.g., in the Japanese all-female popular musical theater Takarazuka Revue’s eponymous musical performances since 2010. Based on Gérard Presgurvic’s highly successful musical play Roméo et Juliette: de la Haine à l’Amour (world-premiered on 19 January 2001 at Paris’ Palais des Congrès), Takarazuka Revue’s versions display paradoxical concatenations, both textually and contextually, underscoring conservative messages of masculinity and nation on the background of meta-narrative, subliminal associations of power, enlightenment and love. Presgurvic’s production has had an immense success worldwide, with the inherent dramaturgical modifications, but the current analysis showcases the conservative atmosphere of Takarazuka Revue’s version: at the core of the analysis stays the main song “Aimer” (“To Love”), translated into Japanese as 「エメ」 Eme detailing the marriage vows of the two teenagers, in which Takarazuka Revue’s (predominantly male) administrators inconspicuously distance themselves from the prevailing interpretation of Romeo and Juliet as a tragic love-story and re-imagine it as a site of female identity projection and fulfilment, transcending the conceptualization of “love” as yearning and desire into a vision of “love” as responsibility, self-awareness and existential coolness – lavishly encapsulated in the synthetic character of Romeo.

Choreographer Ohad Naharin’s unforgettable work for Batsheva Dance Company,
“Echad Mi Yodea,'' is a stirring study of choreomusicological embodiment: a rock adaptation of the traditional, accumulative Passover song, “Echad Mi Yodea” by Israeli rock band Nikmat HaTraktor, plays as dancers accumulate ever-intensifying choreographic phrases throughout the piece. The repetitions in the music and unyieldingly physical choreography demand acute sensory responsiveness to maximize the piece’s effect. Using Brian Massumi’s (2002) theories of proprioception, viscerality (interoception), and the autonomy and escape of affect, I address how the Batsheva dancers physically embody Naharin’s choreography and the musical viscerality of “Echad Mi Yodea.” Particular attention is paid to the music and movement’s interactions within my analysis to consider how “Echad’s” physical and sonic intensity produces a viscerality that has ingrained the piece into contemporary dance history. In doing so, my paper addresses the sonic-affective gap in Elinav Katan-Schmid’s Embodied Philosophy In Dance—the only book on Naharin’s philosophy of embodiment to date—through the 2016 performance of “Echad” by the
Batsheva Young Ensemble. My paper ultimately argues that “Echad Mi Yodea'' remains Batsheva’s most memorable piece because of the dancer’s embodiment of its physical and musical relentlessness.

On December 1, 2023, Anishinaabe rapper and community activist, SouFy, released a new track called “Futursitic Ndns.” In the hook, SouFy raps, “Natives in the building feeling futuristic, spaceship to Turtle Island travel through dimensions.” While academic discourse surrounding Afrofuturism and its intersection with music exhibits a substantial body of scholarship that centers Black futures (Parmar 2009; Brock 2020; Kubatanna 2023), Indigenous futurism remains notably underexplored within the realm of music studies. Anishinaabe author Grace Dillon first used the term “Indigenous futurism” in 2012, contending that, “all forms of Indigenous futurisms are narratives of…recovering ancestral traditions in order to adapt in our post-Native Apocalypse world” (Dillon 2012). Adopting an Afrofuturist framework, Indigenous futurism interrogates the binary between tradition and modernity, insisting on direct connections between past and future. I argue that Indigenous hip hop futurism roots itself in liberatory and technological contexts, connecting Natives to ancestors and future generations while strengthening relationships to land and decolonial pursuits within the Indigenous technosphere. As exhibited in SouFy’s hook, spaceships, time travel, and notions of the multiverse bridge futuristic technology and ancient knowledge through Native slipstreams (Dillon 2012). Drawing on Indigenous conceptions of time, space, and place, I contend that SouFy and other Indigenous hip hop futurist artists are storytellers that reside within the traditions of both hip hop and science fiction (Little Badger 2020; Whitehead 2020; Minosh Pyle 2020), building the infrastructure amongst future generations “from the city to the rez” (SouFy 2023).

Inuit in Canada often identify three arts practices that are integral to their culture: katajjaq (vocal games), qilautiqtuq (drum dancing) and ajaja (personal songs with drums). However, contact with European whalers beginning in the 1800s, the arrival of missionaries in the mid-nineteenth century and the establishment of Indian Residential Schools in the 1950s added multifaceted layers of Western influences on Inuit music. Furthermore, the convergence between Indian Residential Schools and access to the radio in the 1960s and 1970s intensified Western influences. To further disrupt cultural connections between Inuit children and their communities, residential school administrators encouraged Inuit to listen to the radio. As a result, many adolescent Inuit (now elders) were exposed to and consumed Western popular music from a young age; so much so that many Inuit consider country and rock and roll to be just as essential as katajjaq. While scholars have written about Indigenous popular music, Inuit contributions remain under researched. This paper examines how Indian Residential Schools and the radio deeply affected Inuit music making between the 1960s and 1980s. I argue that the emergence of Inuit rock during this time is an early example of Inuit resistance. Through close readings of songs by Willie Thrasher and William Tagoona, I contend that Inuit rock allowed residential school survivors to scrutinize their lived experiences of settler colonialism. In so doing, they challenged assimilative practices by strengthening and forging new connections between their experiences, culture, and community. This research then, furthers knowledge about Inuit popular music.

In this paper, I present a close reading of Inuit experimental vocal artist Tanya Tagaq’s music video “Tongues” (2021), putting it in dialogue with the work of Anishinaabe thinkers and creators. I propose that Tagaq creates a productive site of refusal wherein she rejects the settler gaze and centers Indigenous philosophies of relationality. Rather than allowing settler audiences to consume her art passively, Tagaq participates in what Dylan Robinson terms “structural refusal.” From this refusal, Tagaq creates a generative space where she enacts Indigenous ways of being and relating.

Tagaq communicates a specifically Inuit soundscape through katajjaq (Inuit throat singing) and Inuktitut (language). Nevertheless, the English lyrics of her song and the music video’s imagery resonate with broader Indigenous audiences. Putting Tagaq’s work in dialogue with Anishinaabe musicians (Tall Paul, Samian), visual artists (Chief Lady Bird), and scholars (Geraldine King), I show how Tagaq’s underlying message resonates with efforts to restore Indigenous ideas of the body, sex, and love as central to reclaiming sacred relationships to land and community.

“Tongues” performs an entanglement of land, language and body, uniting them through the tongue. The video’s human Earth-mouth makes human-environment relationships explicit, and the climax of the music video stages the reclamation of sexuality unburdened by shame. In her construction of identity as a modern Inuk woman, Tagaq centers the body and sexuality; the grotesque imagery of the tongue refuses objectification. Rejecting the settler gaze, Tagaq centers Inuit lifeways, echoing broader efforts to reclaim Indigenous ways of being and relating.

This paper delves into the intercultural musical landscape of Ghana's Guan people, a linguistic and ethnic minority constituting about 3.7% of the nation's populace. Spanning regions like Volta and Oti, Guan communities such as Avatime, Tafi, Logba, Nkonya, Akpafu, and Santrokofi boast rich linguistic and musical legacies reflecting influences from Ghana's major languages. Despite speaking distinct Guan languages, these communities often infuse elements from dominant languages like Ewe and Akan into their musical expressions. The paper examines how factors like migration, geopolitical ties, Christianity, Western education, and modernization have influenced Guan music, dance, language, and wider social customs. Through ethnographic inquiry and analysis, this study aims to illuminate how these socio-cultural dynamics have sculpted the intercultural musical traditions among the Guan people. By scrutinizing the convergence of traditional Guan musical practices with external influences, the paper contributes to existing discourse on cultural exchange and musical evolution in Ghana and beyond.

In July 1990, the renowned Portuguese fadista Amália Rodrigues performed a historic show at Goa’s elite Kala Academy. Reports of the event depict thousands of people crashing through gates and clamoring to hear Amália’s mesmerizing voice. The public response to both her performance and her concomitant interview with India’s public broadcasting corporation, All India Radio, not only shines a light on fado’s enduring power and reputation in a Goan sonic imaginary, but also draws attention to India's cultural link to a former colonial power, one that has largely escaped critical attention in global scholarship on music in South Asia.

The history shared by Portugal and Goa is long and fraught. Indeed, Goa was a Portuguese territory from 1510 to 1961 before its annexation and incorporation into India. Thus, we find the prevalence of fado performance in Goa along with contemporary efforts for its revival to be particularly deserving of attention.

This paper deploys fado as a critical and generatve dialectic for examining the sonic link between India and Portugal. As a dialectic of interaction, fado co-produces, co-forms, and co-performs Indian cultural identity while simultaneously constituting and reconstructing a collective Goan past. We further reflect on whether the revival of fado should be viewed only as a heritage revival endeavor, or as a cultural enterprise aimed at co-producing new meanings for Portuguese music and sonic heritage in South Asia.

In this paper, I examine the recent phenomenon in the Korean music industry in which non-Korean individuals play a significant role in the production of K-pop. I argue that border-transcending collaborations have become indispensable to the music, thereby raising questions about the authenticity of K-pop. Throughout the paper, I examine two distinct case studies: diasporic Korean singers in the United States who returned to Korea, and foreign producers and songwriters collaborating with the Korean music industry. I seek answers to these questions: 1) Is K-pop at risk of losing its authenticity? 2) Is there anything musically Korean in K-pop? Informed by Shim’s argument that globalization encourages local peoples to rediscover the “local,” I suggest that new interpretive possibilities of K-pop can be achieved through the concepts of circulation and diaspora, specifically the idea of glocalization (Roudometof, 2016). While scholars such as Michael Fuhr, Ji-Hyun Ahn, and Kanozia and Ganghariya highlight concepts of globalization and cultural hybridity as defining elements of K-pop and its marketing strategies, the significant impact of Western cultural influence—particularly through the involvement of foreign producers and songwriters—is rarely examined in the context of transnational sound circulation, diaspora, and musical authenticity. In my analysis of two case studies, I aim to demonstrate that K-pop embodies deliberate multivalence, thus requiring a hybrid analytical framework that incorporates musical, theoretical, and sociopolitical perspectives. I propose a new hybrid methodology and conceptual lens for the study of K-pop.

First released in a single that was reported to have sold more than two million copies in Japan, “Minatochō burūsu” is a song typical of mūdo kayō whose melancholic expressions often adapt elements of blues and sentimental ballads for lyrics on the heartbreak of romance. Featuring vocal techniques such as ko-bushi as well as accompaniment parts written for instruments such as saxophone and steel guitar, “Minatochō burūsu” earned Mori Shin’ichi (1947– ) the “best vocalist” recognition in the eleventh Japan Record Awards in 1969. It became an enka standard whose renderings included those by eminent singers such as Mihashi Michiya (1930–1996), Ishikawa Sayuri (1958– ), and Sakamoto Fuyumi (1967– ). Its popularity and critical success in Japan also inspired record companies in Taipei, Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, and Jakarta to produce, market, and distribute its Mandarin, Hoklo, Cantonese, Thai, and Indonesian covers. Noting the quantity and variety of these covers as well as the multiple ways these covers were circulated across mediascapes in East and Southeast Asia during the Cold War, this paper uses these covers as examples to interrogate the logic of covering, reconsidering covering as: 1. a pragmatic response to restrictions on music-related or language-related material and information flows in particular locales; and 2. a business strategy that exploited the creative labor of lyricists and, to a slightly lesser extent, the multilingual talent of pop stars such as Teresa Teng (1953–1995).

French politicians and artists today are turning to cultural policies to address extremist politics, mitigate institutional mistrust, and counter anxieties about cultural loss. This is particularly visible in their reappropriation of folk music in Provence—a culturally diverse southeastern Mediterranean region grappling with a migrant crisis and growing far-right politics. Local politicians have inserted themselves into a long-standing conflict between two regional folk music movements—Occitan and Provençal—to promote different views of regional identity. Musicians, meanwhile, redefine these music cultures to speak to right- and left-leaning governing bodies as they build their careers and identities amidst shifting politics. Drawing on ethnographic research (2014-2023), this paper shows how musicians and politicians leverage regional folk musics in politically salient and ideologically driven ways.

Occitan musicians define themselves as innovative cosmopolitan professionals. Their eclectic aesthetics celebrate Mediterranean cultural exchange (yet compress cultural difference). Occitanistes eschew Provençal music as amateur “folklore” that promotes a 19^th century “ghost of a …White and single Provence” —a position some right-leaning politicians reinforce by subsidizing Provençal music to attract far-right voters. Occitan musicians thus appeal to policies that privilege professionalism and to politicians hoping to associate themselves with cultural diversity. Provençal musicians promote an arguably less aesthetically diverse vision of local folk music while critiquing the Occitan movement as ill-defined. Some mitigate far-right appropriations by nuancing Provençal identity as culturally specific, but not racist or closed. Musicians and politicians thus dance around identities and ideals to redefine artistic traditions to their own ends in an ever-shifting political landscape.

This paper explores Central Asia’s embrace of Russian dissident 'guitar poetry' (Smith, 1984) during the late Soviet period, and the expressive and political possibilities of the genre for one practitioner and his disciples in Tajikistan. Pioneered by legendary bards (in Russian, bardy) such as Bulat Okudzhava and Vladimir Vysotskii, guitar poetry entailed the highly individualistic, and often deliberately unpolished, solo recitation of original texts to simple melodies and the sparse accompaniment of an acoustic guitar. Lidush Habib, the self-proclaimed 'first Vysotskii' of Tajik Badakhshan, adopted the aesthetics of guitar poetry and modelled his distinctive vocal style and stage comportment on those of his namesake. Like the Russian bards, he circulated his recordings through informal networks (e.g., magnitizdat), performed in unofficial spaces, and articulated experiences and perspectives not sanctioned by the Soviet state (cf. Daughtry 2006 and 2009, Platonov 2005 and 2012). Yet importantly, Habib also integrated local musical idioms and wrote in the minority language of Shughani, thus nativizing the genre while still capitalizing on its broader transnational valence as cosmopolitan and anti-establishmentarian (Djagalov 2013). This paper analyzes Habib’s recorded performances and public statements alongside the musical-literary and social praxis of contemporary bards from his region to show why—and how—Russian guitar poetry took root and continues to thrive in a place far from its origins. “Translating” musical dissent to local conditions has involved an alchemy of imitation and modification, yielding a powerful and durable resource for site-specific resistance.

A key transformation in the North Indian classical tradition of Hindustani Khayal music since the early 20th-century has been the emergence of women performers from diverse backgrounds. Prior to this period, the genre had been the domain primarily of male hereditary master-musicians who trained within patrilineal familial structures. Over the course of the century, as forces of nationalism, modernisation and democratisation came to shape Khayal’s social contexts, opportunities opened up for women aspirants from middle- and upper-class backgrounds. In academic scholarship, the question of gender in Khayal has been analyzed sociologically through the struggles of woman performers as well as the gendered associations of different classical genres. In this paper, I propose a conceptual question: A crucial step in the training of early 20th- century women musicians was the translation of embodied performance knowledge which had been developed and sustained for men—a form of knowledge that gradually assumes gender neutrality. How may we think about creativity, aesthetics and pedagogy in Khayal in this context and in its continued practice? I address this question by drawing upon biographical writing, archived interviews and music recordings. Through such examination, I also seek more general insights into the situated and gendered dynamics of creative processes and the intertwining of the social and the aesthetic.

The Mexican woman as a flamenco performer constitutes one of the main musical and visual ingredients of the album Tijuana Moods, a recording that in 1962 Mingus considered “his best one yet”. In Beneath the Underdog, Mingus’s autobiography published in 1971, Mexican women are a central part of his recollections, they are the main counterpoint that helps him create his hyper masculinity and his concept of himself as an underdog. Despite the fact that they are everywhere in Mingus’s musical narrations of Mexico, these women are rarely brought to the foreground and conversation in musical and literary analysis of his work, and this disregard of their presence speaks of stereotypes and mistranslations of identities across borders still relevant today. This is an example of how one of the oldest forms of distinction of Otherness – gender – collides with one of the newest ones – race - , as Morgan Teasdale affirms in his essay “Rebel Body, Indomitable Race” (La Cifra, Mexico, 2016).

In Tijuana Moods, I will listen to Ysabel Morel’s voice, piano and castanets as a manifestation of Mingus’s identification with the Mexican woman as an underdog, an improviser and performer, one whose musical language – as imagined by Mingus – had to negotiate with an audience’s expectations and demands. In Beneath the Underdog, I will read Mexican women as gender and racial Otherness. Their language, nation and color marginalized them, they represented a mirror that magnified Mingus´s identity and compelled him to take his music beyond the border.

Xi’an Guyue (Xi’an Drum Music), a unique form of Chinese traditional music, originated in Xi'an and can be traced back to the Tang Dynasty. It is renowned for its large-scale ensemble that incorporates a diverse range of instruments, and its complex structure has captivated audiences for centuries, and has been meticulously preserved through generations within dedicated societies. Historically entrenched in male-dominated performance traditions under the doctrine of “transmission restricted to males and insiders”. This genre has undergone a significant paradigm shift with the inclusion of female musicians. This research probes into how this gender inclusivity has redefined the musical lexicon, instrumental repertoire, and ensemble dynamics within Xi’an Guyue, embodying a critical intersection of musical tradition and gender politics.

Based on seven months of fieldwork in the representative group of Xi’an Guyue (Jixian drum group). Employing a methodologically robust approach that combines ethnographic fieldwork, participant observation, and in-depth interviews with both male and female Xi’an Guyue practitioners. The study explores the nuanced interplay between gendered performance practices and socio-musical change. It critically assesses the stylistic innovations and reinterpretations introduced by female musicians, examining how these contribute to the genre’s evolving soundscape. Further, the research situates these developments within the broader discourse of gender equality and cultural identity in contemporary Chinese society, offering insights into the symbiotic relationship between musical evolution and sociocultural shifts.

In the Applied Ethnomusicology project “Learning from Ethnomusicology and Our Neighbors: Musical Heritage, Creativity, and Intercultural Engagement” supported the Volkswagen Foundation, we aim to educate the dominant culture about diverse cultural expressions in small-town Germany, to counter stereotypes about post-migrant cultures, and to assist under-acknowledged artists in networking, transmitting their heritage, and sharing their stories and creativity. The resulting film The Music of Our Neighbors features six portraits of artists who make their lives in and around Würzburg, a conservative-leaning provincial city known for its wine festivals and local Franconian identity. Franconian accordionist Bernd uses folk music to connect with dancers, the elderly, and hospitalized youth. André teaches African drumming and gives benefit concerts for a school in his former hometown Kinshasa. German-born software engineer Elizabeth dances Kathak and Bollywood to de-stress and pass on her Indian heritage to children. The Bolivian-Ecuadorian-German family Rosenbaum build community with their Spanish-speaking and German neighbors through Andean folklore. Syrian-German rapper Niro integrates Arabic influences into his German-language rap and teaches hip-hop to German and migrant youth. Guitarist Rob journeyed from Metís community music in Canada to rock, EDM, and flamenco, collaborating with his Spanish-German wife Mercedes in teaching and organizing flamenco events. Their combined experiences provide insights into the intercultural struggles (racism, cultural policing) and joys (interpersonal connections) that characterize the increasing diversity of provincial Europe today. We aim to contribute to work on music and migration (Stokes 2021), cityscapes (Finnegan 2007), Applied Ethnomusicology (Pettan and Titon 2015), and Audiovisual Ethnomusicology (Norton 2021).

Tension in the reception of American-Italian film Call Me by Your Name (2017)—as a beautiful film that implicitly condones a problematic narrative—is shaped by its manipulative compilation soundtrack. Already lauded as a timeless masterpiece in cinematography, sensuality, and music, the film also receives steadfast criticism regarding its portrayal of homosexuality and condoning of inter-age desire between Elio, a 17-year-old Italian-French boy, and Oliver, a 24-year-old American man. In this paper, I analyze three musical episodes from the film, including The Psychedelic Furs’ “Love My Way,” Ravel’s Une barque sur l’océan, and Sufjan Stevens’s “Mystery of Love.” In each scene, respectively, I find that aesthetic prioritization, appeal to emotional universality, and false portrayal of Elio as the primary initiator of intimacy all function to dismiss the problematic narrative and Oliver’s irresponsibility. I analyze each work’s lyrics and/or narrative placement. Subsequently, I reveal that these instances perpetuate a subconscious and harmful misrepresentation of modern queerness that is especially self-destructive in the wake of today’s far-right obsession with pedophilia in the LGBTQIA+ community. Acknowledging recent homo/transphobic fearmongering in the guise of “child safety,” I remove the film’s rose-tinted glasses and instead interpret these scenes as tangible inspirations for real-life problems. Finally, I incite musicologist William Cheng’s advocation for reparative work in critical theory fields. Call Me by Your Name’s soundtrack simultaneously beautifies queerness and succumbs to weaponization against queerness; I argue that the film and soundtrack alike can be appreciated for their achievements while guide the work ahead of us.

Since its formation, Queer theory has been involved in criticizing oppressive powers that censure and discipline individuals who live their gender and sexuality freely. Although such critiques are ultimately political, many queer theorists have abstained from proposing transformative political practices for communities or governments. Historian Samuel Clowes Huneke (2022) argues that queer theory should both criticize and improve governance, while political economists Nicola Smith and Donna Lee (2015) have argued that political sciences and practices have not considered queer theory extensively. Thus, I examine how avoiding queerness from political strategies has a profound impact on LGBTIQ+ exclusion. In other words, I posit that the disconnection between queer thought and governance hampers equality in terms of gender and sexuality. I analyze diverse LGBTIQ+ musical practices from the Colombian Caribbean city of Barranquilla to support my argument. Taking the Barranquilla Gay Carnival (also known as the LGBTIQ+ Carnival) as a political group (a collective subject) and, at the same time, as an object to be governed, I posit that the Gay Carnival has moved away from heteronormativity to a homonormativity that privileges cisgender gay men. I show how Gay Carnival’s organizers hire ensembles that perpetuate music as a men-centered practice without acknowledging it or trying to prevent it (nor the governmental sponsors). Finally, I show how the feminist traditional-music ensemble Raras no tan Raras (weirdos not so weirdos) is an alternative that embraces queer theory and feminism to organize themselves through governance centered on care and inclusion.

In this paper, I propose a theory that I call the “body of techno,” a mode of corporeal feeling whose porosity works to fragment the boundedness of the liberal subject. Using the body of techno as a framework, I posit a queer ethnomusicology as the study of musical possibility achieved through forms of embodied knowledge that exceed anthropological truth. Throughout its history of substantiation, the field of ethnomusicology has been authenticated by its genealogical links to anthropology, whose claim to scientific objectivity is predicated on an empirical conception of reality. Specifically, this objectivity has been refracted through the favored formula of “[these people] + [make this music] + [for this reason].” However, this investment in a narrow empiricism reveals epistemological gaps when the underpinnings of a musical practice can only be appraised through a philosophical reading of its speculative character. One such practice is techno (and its broader context of the rave), which I argue entails a series of bodies that overlap, cross-contaminate, and mutate, revealing the possibility of a plural subjectivity that exceeds the normative order of the liberal subject. A queer ethnomusicology, I argue, works outside of empirical reality to ask what we as ethnomusicologists hope for music to do beyond what is readily observable. Based in techniques of minoritarian feeling, a queer ethnomusicology is a decidedly fantastic endeavor that strives to feel out new lifeways beyond the epistemological regimes of "man."

Complex transnational musical spectacles thrive on Drag Race Philippines, an adaptation of the international competition format featuring talented drag performers. The Philippine edition’s debut season in 2022 prominently featured song-and-dance challenges including the staging of variety shows, impersonation musicals of pop artists, girl group showdowns, music videos, and lip-sync battles of Philippine and foreign tracks. This paper analyzes such performance texts as manifestations of novel convergences in aesthetics and codes culled from local and global ideas, owing in part to the nation’s postcolonial history and the mobility of transnational content via digital technologies. Crucially, the program’s musical staging of queer artistry allows for blurring of cultural boundaries as the performers’ own identities, subjectivities, and orientations embody modalities of innovation within mainstream creative industries due to their rupturing and reinvigoration of existing templates. Further, the paper interrogates the transmedia aspects of the program’s production and reception, primarily the show’s release on global streaming platforms and informal consumption (and remixing) across social media. The screen — of the television, the mobile phone, the production cameras, and the monitor where RuPaul Charles communicated virtually with contestants — is reckoned as a queering portal that disrupts mainstream conventions by enabling the art and tradition of drag to render the queer Philippine performer as figurative interface of postcolonial, postmodern expressive cultures. Broadly, the analysis assesses the significance of local, regional, and transnational multimedia scenes conveying their modification and amplification of musical performances, overlaps, and re-codings as evolving technological spaces of difference with flourishing public reach.

This paper builds on fieldwork with acousticians, sound designers, and musicians in some of the most prestigious jazz performance venues in the world, including the Montreux Jazz Festival and Jazz at Lincoln Center, arguing that the unique methods of objectifying sound and space at these sites are entangled with raced and gendered epistemologies of scientific knowledge production. Using state-of-the-art audio measurement technology, my interlocutors assertively invoke the “objective” authority of scientific rationality in calibrating “neutral,” “pure and clean” sonic environments. Engaging with sound studies and feminist antiracist science studies, this paper demonstrates how pretenses of accessing sound and space as “properly ontological” materialities transcending identity and culture (Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007), align the sound of jazz with epistemological regimes of whiteness, masculinity, and “the human as Man” (Wynter 2001). I further analyze how the rationalization of sonic space reveals underlying entanglements with what George Lipsitz calls a “white spatial imaginary,” an ostensibly neutral environment conducive to discriminatory systems of capital accumulation. Such spaces complicate the oppositional, counter-hegemonic potential of jazz and other forms of Black sounding, prompting musicians to imagine new ways of using musical performance as a mode of resistance and affirmative space-making (Sakakeeny 2010; Williams 2021). This paper thus explores how an ethnographically performed social phenomenology of race, space, and technology may contribute to an ethnomusicology that more sensitively attends to the technological in the sonic, the sonic in the racial, and the racial in the spatial.

In 1981, a quartet consisting of guitarist James “Blood” Ulmer, saxophonist David Murray, drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson, and bassist Amin Ali, released their debut album. Calling themselves the Music Revelation Ensemble, the group drew upon diverse and eclectic influences, including punk, funk, and free jazz, while the album’s title directly referenced a central element of the nascent Downtown art scene in New York: No Wave. As a stylistic category, the term “no wave” is traced to Brian Eno’s 1978 compilation No New York, which featured experimental musicians such as James Chance, Arto Lindsay, and Lydia Lunch, white artists who would come to be regarded as pioneers of the style. Yet histories of no wave often situate it primarily as an outgrowth of punk, a precursor to “noise rock,” or an avant-garde counterpart to the popular new wave style; direct links to jazz are, by contrast, often fleeting and tangential. Little mention is made of Ulmer and his associates, nor other artists of color whose work was sonically resonant with no wave. I argue that the conventional understandings of no wave, like its punk forerunner, overlook direct and meaningful connections to key developments by Black artists such as Ornette Coleman, whose group Prime Time (whose members included Ulmer) was a key predecessor to the style. An examination of the Music Revelation Ensemble’s work reveals significant stylistic overlaps with the no wave style, while the album’s title calls for a more inclusive view of experimental music related to the Downtown art scene.

In modern music scholarship, contemporary New Orleans jazz is a genre that remains relatively untouched by rigorous debate and investigation concerning its cultural and stylistic underpinnings. This research seeks to remedy this oversight by delving into the vibrant world of modern New Orleans jazz through ethnographic research conducted with prominent musicians currently shaping the music scene. The primary aim of this research is to trace the evolution of contemporary New Orleans jazz from its roots in the late 19th century to its present status as a globally recognized jazz sub-genre. By drawing on historical references, interviews with notable contemporary New Orleans jazz musicians, and analysis of contemporary New Orleans jazz recordings, this paper aims to unpack the cultural and stylistic influences that make New Orleans jazz unique amidst the broader jazz landscape. Through conversations with New Orleans musicians and musical analyses, I shed light on the eclectic mix of influences—from traditional jazz and brass band music to blues, funk, and beyond—that contribute to the richness of contemporary New Orleans jazz. By doing so, I aim to offer a deeper understanding of what sets this jazz sub-genre apart while celebrating the ongoing vibrancy of the New Orleans jazz tradition in the 21st century.

Jazz is a historically contested terrain in the United States public narrative and in jazz historiography. Using Dave Brubeck’s Downbeat Magazine published origination theory of the music’s “mixed parentage of primitive African and highly developed European cultures” (1951), scholarly and journalistic attention has focused on claiming the music’s supposed hybridity as a Euro-American and African-American created form. Conversely, Langston Hughes claims the music as African American culture and heritage, saying that it is “one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America” (1921). The transnational connection between Black South Africa and African-America expressed in the shared jazz tradition between the two groups offers a response to these contested origins. Jazz has been indigenized by Black South African musicians since the music’s early development in the 1920s, as a form that, from their perspective, was created by Africans in America via the Trans-Atlantic Feedback Cycle (Ballentine, 1991/Collins, 1989). Building on the work of Ballentine (1991), Nketia (2005), Maultsby (2015), and Kubik (2017), I will analyze my ethnographic field research with Black South African jazz musicians in Johannesburg to explore the African aesthetics they hear in jazz with what I call their ‘bi-musical ear’ - a bi-musicality in indigenous South African forms and jazz. This paper explores the African-derived musicological elements (melodies, harmonies, rhythms, scales and other cultural/musical functions) that older and younger generation Johannesburg-based jazz musicians hear in jazz, and the implications of their bi-musical ear on the cultural identity, the African origins, of African-American jazz.

Over the past half-century, an increasing amount of musical activity worldwide has taken place in connection with the work of Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs). The rise of this “third sector” has transformed the ways in which music is transmitted, taught, funded, and understood in varied global contexts, and many contemporary ethnomusicological research projects inevitably intersect with NGO discourses and practices. However, the field of Ethnomusicology lacks systematic theoretical and methodological approaches to engaging with this relatively novel institutional structure, perhaps in part because of its historical privileging of the rural and the “authentic;” a nonprofit organization is not a “community” in the traditional ethnographic sense, after all. Yet without addressing these complex and often transnational institutions’ roles in diverse societies, we cannot adequately interpret much twenty-first century musical activity.
This roundtable brings together panelists whose research engages with NGOs and music-making in Nepal, Cambodia, and the United States, with a focus on topics including environmental sustainability, post-conflict social formation, and youth education. United by their critical attention to the role of NGOs in their areas of study, the panelists have three primary goals for this roundtable: first, to articulate their understanding of NGOs’ present role in music-making; second, to synthesize existing approaches to studying NGOs and their cultural impact (e.g. Sociology of NGOs [DiMaggio 2006]; Anthropology of Development [Escobar 1995]; Cultural Studies [Yúdice 2006]; Ethnomusicology [Luker 2016; Ndaliko 2016] and propose new directions; and third, to build a community of ethnomusicologists who wish to collaborate and advance this area of study.

The emergence of the hybrid 5-/7-tone Gamelan Semarandana in the 80s elicited various theorisations about Balinese modal practice (Rai 1996, McGraw 1999/2000, Vitale 2002). Since then, the associative qualities of modes have expanded, the use of previously rare modes increased, and new modulation techniques invented. Many composers now frequently use these once-unexplored elements, and arts institutions are more open to them since their use is seen as exploratory yet maintaining continuity, thus occupying a liminal space between the binary tradisi vs. moderen discourse that pervades the academic spaces of Balinese musical practice (Sudirana 2019). These developments have yet to be explored in the ethnomusicological literature, and despite a proliferation of 7-tone compositions, theorisations of mode have not been updated. By comparing and contrasting the two authors’ analyses of recent compositions—one based on implicit, emic compositional approaches, the other based on etic analysis techniques—this paper theorises various new aspects of Balinese modal practice. We discuss the complexities of analysing mode changes during modulations in relation to the effects of meter, different elaborative textures, melodic contour archetypes, and solmization choices; and we present a new way of comparing relationships between modes, one that considers common tones, interval structure, associative quality, and rasa. All of these suggest paths for future research and compositional development. Finally, we explore how these musical techniques—once radical breakthroughs in traditional practice—endure and progress long after their emergence and musical-cultural normalisation, and how their expanded use relates to local vs. national contexts of musical change.

While it is generally accepted that Cantonese Music (Guangdong yinyue, 廣東音樂) employs three modes, namely zhengxian (正線, “authentic tuning”), fanxian (反線, “reverse tuning”) and yifanxian (乙反線, “tuning according to scale degrees yi and fan in gonche solmization”), there is little consensus regarding the definition and organization of its modal system. While some scholars suggest links between the Cantonese modes and the wusheng (五聲) pentatonic modal system described in ancient Chinese music theory (Yuan, 1987; Thrasher, 2008), others view them as heptatonic scales with Western influence rather than modes (Jones, 1995). Contemporary musicians, accustomed to the cipher notation system (jianpu, 簡譜) in which numbers correspond to the degrees of the Western diatonic major scale, equate zhengxian and fanxian with the keys of C and G (Yeung, 2013), thereby interpreting them as transpositions of each other and implicitly reducing the number of distinct modes from three to two. Drawing upon the anthropological distinction between etic and emic, this paper seeks to untangle the considerable conceptual conflations between scale, mode, tuning, and temperament in historic and contemporary explanations of the Cantonese modal system. We examine etic tonal types and emic modal categories separately, the former by analyzing selected repertoire and the latter by studying theoretical and pedagogical writings from the 1920’s to the present, before exploring their intersections and correlations. Such comparisons help unpack the aesthetic and ideological influences informing modal representations at different stages of the genre’s development.

This paper examines the tuning and playing of the qin in Qing court ritual music with reference to the Correct Principles of Music (Lülü zhengyi) and its sequel (Lülü zhengyi houbian). A treatise commissioned by the Kangxi emperor in 1713, the Correct Principles of Music introduces a musical system that divides the octave into fourteen pitches, creating scales that Jean-Philippe Rameau misunderstood as whole-tone scales. Now known as Kangxi’s fourteen-tone temperament, it was used to notate court ritual music in the Sequel to the Correct Principles of Music, printed in 1746.

The fourteen-tone temperament is a pipe tuning system arising from the acoustic incompatibility between strings and pipes: the same length ratio produces different musical intervals in strings and pipes. Applying the ratios of the Chinese circle-of-fifth tuning to pipes, the authors of the Correct Principles of Music generated fourteen pitches within an octave and redistributed the scale notes of the traditional heptatonic scale among the fourteen pitches to retain the intervallic relationship of the scale. However, this leads to an incompatibility with the just intonation in qin tuning; the scale notes produced by the seven strings of the qin are only compatible with those of the pipes when they are open strings. The incompatibility between strings and pipes led to a disorderly system of qin tuning presented in the Correct Principles of Music, which is modified and rendered more practical in the Sequel, resulting in a simplified form of qin playing that involves only open strings.

This lecture-demonstration will, through live violin examples, recordings, and sheet music analysis, show how the tango music of Argentina has fused Western Classical music aesthetics and epistemologies with those of the immigrant and native populations living in Argentina during the 1880 - 1950 period. The lasting influence of colonialism on music education and its 'universal' musical aesthetics within Argentina can still be seen today and remains underexplored. Jesuit concepts of time, devotional performance space, individual learning, and orchestral conductors ripped music away from everyday communal social life and placed it within strictly confined spaces and practices. The influence of the pedagogy of the Conservatoire de Paris remains very strong in Argentina and continues to shape the tango musicians of today, for better and worse. The marginalization of tango music from both ethnomusicological scholarship and world music pedagogy reveals ongoing misrepresentation which has reduced this genre to a rose in the mouth on the Hollywood screen. The Argentine musicologists Brunelli and Vega have both built the foundations of scholarship in this genre, but much is still left to be done. My work aims to contribute to the deeper discovery of this genre through praxis and education and demonstrate how it has embodied other kinds of epistemologies and aesthetics that may help develop new pathways in applied ethnomusicology and world music education. The Argentine scholar Mignolo has called for a 'de-linking' (Mignolo, 2007, p. 449) from colonial epistemologies, and suggests building new foundations of pluriversality, thus abandoning the lie of universality.

In a 1930 report for the meeting of the Society for the Study of Oriental Music, Robert Lachmann (1892–1939) praised the importance of the phonograph by stating, “melodies could be collected as they were actually performed, performed for research…Archives [of phonograph cylinders] have also been created in which the melodies that have been handed down orally to be saved from oblivion.” When Lachmann and other scholars of the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv traveled to Egypt for the Cairo Congress of Arabic Music in 1932, they carried with them both their equipment and predispositions to record musicians. These recording sessions became a space of friction between the European musicians who captured the music they heard and the Arab musicians who wished to use the phonograph as a tool for freedom. Drawing on scholarship on the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv (Nettl and Bohlman 1990; Feld 2002; Koch 2004, 2009), Robert Lachmann (Davis 2013), and the 1932 Cairo Congress of Arabic Music (Bohlman 2015; Katz 2015), I analyze Lachmann’s collection of Egyptian recordings for the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv in context with the congress to show the development of the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv and early comparative musicology. The discs, however, reveal how Arab musicians utilized the recordings for the cylinders for their goals of modernizing Arabic music to counteract European rule. I read these recordings against Lachmann’s bias to argue how the gramophone was a tool for musicians and musicologists to amplify their political aspirations and how these recordings reveal the ramifications of studying the Middle East today.

Recent debates about global music history have prompted scholars to reassess the history of musicology and to question the divide between ethnomusicology and historical musicology (Bloechl and Chang 2023; Law et al 2022). This has involved a renewed engagement with comparative musicology, which was more central to the institutional development of music studies than is often assumed (Levitz 2018; Zon 2007; Nettl and Bohlman 1991). Yet whether critical or celebratory, scholarship on the history of (ethno)musicology has focused overwhelmingly on individuals and institutions in Europe and the United States, with the underlying assumption that the discipline is an essentially Western preoccupation. However, many non-Western intellectuals actively participated in international musicological forums during the early twentieth century, while also making seminal contributions to the development of music studies in their own societies. This paper discusses the case of Mahmut Ragıp Gazimihal (1900–1961) as a means of expanding the intellectual and institutional history of (ethno)musicology beyond the West. Born in Istanbul, Gazimihal published in leading European journals and was a member of international learned societies, while also playing a major role in the establishment of musicology in the early Turkish Republic. At the same time, his research was grounded in evolutionary and racial theories that were associated with violent and exclusionary ethnonationalist policies. Thus, a global history of (ethno)musicology must take into account the role of non-Western intellectuals in the formation of the discipline, but also the interplay between universalizing scientific discourses and the complex political realities of non-Western societies.

Ethnic Turkmen musicians in Iran claim a distinct regional style of performance they call Gürgen ýoly. Musicians among their kin in neighboring Turkmenistan recognize a number of distinct regional styles of traditional Turkmen music, but they do not recognize a distinct style among Turkmens across the border in Iran. What accounts for this difference in perspectives on regional style? We argue that Iranian Turkmens claimed a distinct regional style as a signifier of their identity as their position diverged from that of Soviet Turkmens, particularly after the Islamic revolution of 1979. At the same time, they also cultivated musical differences on which they could base their claims to a distinct style. We examine the musical character of this style in terms of repertoire and the use of vocal technique, traits that make Iranian Turkmens’ Gürgen ýoly distinct from styles in neighboring Turkmenistan. We argue that the political context further contributed to stylistic differentiation, since in the Islamic Republic, musicians were required to perform religious poems. This circumstance afforded an opportunity to preserve original elements of Turkmen music that had been neglected during the Soviet period in Turkmenistan. Meanwhile in the absence of music schools, ensembles and weddings have played a crucial role in preserving the Turkmen culture in Iran. Ensemble leaders curated a distinct repertoire in this context, choosing songs that might strengthen a sense of shared identity and belonging among Turkmens living as a minority in Iran.

In June 2010, representatives from three Indian NGOs came together to write songs of peace and friendship with Pakistan. Believing that civil society could aid bilateral relations by celebrating shared cultural elements, renowned feminist activist Kamla Bhasin convened a small group of musically inclined community organizers on the campus of Jagori Rural Charitable Trust (JRCT) in the Kangra Valley of Himachal Pradesh, India. There, Bhasin led a three-day songwriting workshop for the local organizers, mostly young women from Kangra Valley, to write songs in their own language. Today, these remain some of the only Kangri-language songs in JRCT’s large, mostly Hindi-language repertoire. Drawing on recent interviews and collaborative analysis with attendees of the 2010 songwriting workshop, this paper examines the impressions left by these Kangri-language songs in relation to the broader musical context at JRCT. While the production of songs in the status-less Kangri language represents a significant shift toward indigenous modes of expression, I discuss how workshop participants themselves share in the more national and international appeal of the Hindi-Urdu songs comprising JRCT’s core repertoire. As the global development agencies that fund NGOs like JRCT increasingly emphasize localization of cultural strategies for mobilization, the JRCT case serves as a reminder for researchers of music and international aid to attend carefully to who defines terms like ‘local’ and ‘indigenous’, and to what end.

In his 2017 book "An Uncertain Age," Paul Ocobock articulates a version of politics in colonial and post-colonial Kenya called "the elder state," which, in short, necessitates the posing of oneself as a masculine elder in order to participate in statecraft and politics. In Tanzania, I argue there are similar historical cultural structures in place that make necessary the performance of elder masculinity for proper participation in politics. Popular music, moreover, is inherently tied to politics in Tanzania, and this paradigm is explored extensively in the work of in work by Brad Weiss, Alex Perullo, and Kelly Askew, among numerous other scholars. Thus, in this presentation, I borrow the framework of the elder state to outline the way power is wielded in Tanzanian politics and popular music. I will outline what versions of masculinity are prevalent in Tanzanian popular music, and how these masculinities adjust themselves to the elder Tanzanian state. Ultimately, I argue that the success of Tanzanian popular musicians is in no small part related to how successfully they can adapt to and negotiate "ideal" masculinity in muscial cultural spaces. I will also discuss the ways that women, who seek to engage and thrive in these musical spaces, must additionally find ways to mirror or adhere to an expectation of masculinity, broadly defined. Ultimately, these adaptations can help an artist endear themselves to the Tanzanian government, and earn them real political power.

This paper explores bagpipers’ hyper-masculine social and musical environment by examining their gestural and musical cultivation of embodied stoicism. Piping bodies are put under considerable strain: tendonitis, focal dystonia, deafness, performance anxiety, and palliative alcohol use are common, yet pipers are reluctant to admit to such afflictions as they are bound by performative conventions of physical and emotional discipline and a strict gestural stoicism that derives partly from the pipes’ martial context. Even in solo performance marching is often the only bodily movement that is regularly permitted, and a militarily rigid posture indicates the strength and stamina of the musician’s body. Such performances of stoicism contrast with other musical arts, where gestural variety rather than containment is more often identified as a medium through which to express and construct identity. Yet pipers do not understand their gestural habitus as oppressive. Instead, an absence of individualism is a highly sought after quality within pipe bands, where top performers strive to play “as one” with their bandmates; furthermore, gestural containment is widely understood as the background against which performers can cultivate judiciously minimal forms of individual expression, an accomplishment that in turn requires discipline and commitment not just in pipers’ musical practice but in other aspects of their lives as they prepare their bodies and minds for performance. As such the piping community represents a unique case study for exploring how norms of both gender and ability are negotiated through musical institutions and communities, and upheld and challenged in musical performance.

When a musician performing with a large-scale production can hear themselves onstage, it is usually thanks to a dedicated infrastructure and a behind-the-scenes team of specialized workers. In this paper, I examine the hidden labor of the monitor technicians on a Cirque du Soleil arena tour. From their relatively small but crucial workspace backstage—centered around a five-foot-wide digital mixing console—the monitor technicians inhabit a unique professional space of aural and emotional contradictions: they listen to the show, but only through each musician’s personalized blend of instruments and voices that is customized for each piece, which is not how audiences, front-of-house staff, or other performers hear the show. Indeed, it is not even how musicians necessarily hear themselves during performance. Meanwhile, backstage on a large-scale tour—a setting that is renowned for male-dominance and hyper-masculine registers of speech and behavior—a monitor technician’s role is one of attentive service, compromise, and care. By examining how these tensions intersect with the ostensibly seamless artistic presentation that occurs onstage, I show how monitor technicians help assemble this large-scale production through their hidden labor, while navigating creative hierarchies and shifting valences of masculinity and homosociality.

Migration and multiculturalism are defining elements of contemporary Australian society. Australia has a long history as a destination for humanitarian resettlement, leading to the establishment of diverse diasporic communities, especially in metropolitan centres like Melbourne (population 5 million). In the 1990s, refugee resettlement extended to new African communities with little prior connection to Australia. For these communities, music participation emerged as an important vehicle for navigating post-migratory diasporic experiences. The purpose of this paper is to map the ecosystem that supports music participation by Australian African diaspora musicians in Melbourne to better understand the role of music in cultural continuity, especially how opportunities and barriers to different types of musical participation affect the musical choices and identity formation of African diaspora musicians. We draw on the ecological model proposed by Schippers (2010) which offers ‘systems of learning’, ‘communities’, ‘contexts and constructs’, ‘regulations and infrastructure’, and ‘media and the music industry’ as five perspectives through which to understand music sustainability. In doing so, we extend the theoretical scope of the music ecosystems model to a diaspora context comprising musicians from multiple ethnicities and cultural backgrounds, where the notion of ‘tradition’ is disrupted by the presence of multiple overlapping and divergent practices. The musical ecosystem is also impacted by commercial and cultural forces extrinsic to the diaspora community, and this has specific implications for the musical choices made by African-Australian musicians and their collaborators.

Schippers, H (2010) Facing the Music: Global Perspectives on Learning and Teaching Music. New York: Oxford University Press.

Music as a means of memory practices is an important function of music. Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley (2015) describe music and photography as the two most essential technologies of memory in everyday life. Tia DeNora (2000) writes about reliving experiences through music as a reconstitution of past experience. Thus, the presentation asks about the relationship between memory practices and music in the context of forced migration. For the discussion of musical memory practices of refugees in Berlin, I am guided by the following questions: How are musical practices in the context of forced migration connected to memories on an individual and social level? What is remembered through music and how does that happen? What is the relationship between these forms of memory and musical practices? The case examples are taken from extensive fieldwork in Berlin between 2017 and 2022, in which grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss 2010) and ethnography (Sweers 2019) provided a methodological framework. In the research process, I primarily used participatory observation (Myers 1992) and narrative guided interviews (Rice 2014) as methods for exploring my field of research. My research highlights music as a mobile cultural technique and social as well as individual mnemonics in a disruptive environment characterized by displacement and crises. My findings on music and memory provide significant access to a better understanding of memory practices of refugees in order to promote cultural encounters and intercultural exchange in European migration societies.

"Maracatu de baque solto” is a performance combining music, poetry, and dance that takes place in the Zona da Mata Norte region of Pernambuco, Brazil. During Carnival, maracatu musicians and dancers describe feeling exposed to illness, which they attribute to the “envious eye” (olho grande) of their rivals. This prompts them to adopt several defensive practices, both in a symbolical-religious dimension and an aesthetic one. More precisely, to perform safely they need to “close the body” (fechar o corpo). This expression is synonymous with a powerful and healthy body, while an “open body” refers to a vulnerable one, susceptible to the attacks of negative entities aroused by the enemies’ envious eye. My hypothesis is that this “corporeal locking” is only effective when maracatu members achieve a heightened level of interpersonal coordination, expressed locally by the concept of “consonance” (consonância). Conversely, poorly coordinated acts of music and dance generate “holes” (furos) that can “fracture” (desmantelar) the group, exposing its members to a variety of health problems. Relying on long-term fieldwork, multi-track audio recordings of maracatu percussion, and a computer simulation of the dancers’ collective movements, I will show in this paper how maracatu rhythmic and choreographic patterns relate to these local concepts of “closeness” and “consonance.” Furthermore, I will suggest that in this cultural context – and probably in others as well –, coordinating intentions and movements in common actions is the best antidote against envy, a social emotion that is often conceived as dangerous for individual health and collective wellbeing.

Bachata is a music and dance genre that developed around the 1960s in the Dominican Republic. Today, bachata is practiced throughout the world at bachata dance congresses – large gatherings of dancers who learn and dance together for four days in a hotel. At the congresses, rather than practicing Dominican bachata, dancers namely engage in a sensualized version of bachata dance called sensual bachata. Sensual bachata amplifies full body rolls and close partnerwork and is performed to urban bachata songs (bachata mixed with hip hop and R&B sounds) and bachata remixes (popular songs overlayed with bachata beats). During the congresses, bachata DJs dictate the style of bachata music that is played and are expected to understand the various styles of bachata music and dance. What is the significance of the DJ in bachata social dance spaces? How can DJs shape dancers’ knowledge about bachata? In this paper, I argue that bachata DJs function as sensory-makers, meaning that their choices in music act as the catalyst for sensorial connection. I build upon the work of Tomie Hahn (2007, 2021) who suggests that the senses provide deeper revelations about embodied experiences. Further, the sensorial connections that DJs foster positions them to also act as educators in the dance space due to their ability to expose congress participants to the developmental progressions of bachata music and dance through their song selections. I rely upon interviews with dancers and DJs from my fieldwork in 2023 at several congresses in Florida to support this research.

The counterculture of the 1960s has sustained a vast legacy. As a result of the startling contemporaneous rise of rock artists, as well as the consequent discourse generated since then, popular media has gradually erected functional archetypes to these musicians, often rendered platitudinous. A category of bodily action from Hendrix has been chiefly framed in popular media as either a demonstration of the profound technical mastery Hendrix had over the, or a mode of affective hyper-expression which emanating from his guitar playing – acting as a psychosomatic response characterized by illicit substances. While these actions are important to consider, there is more to be understood about Hendrix’s own bodily movements as fuelling a countercultural saga.

In this paper, I compare Jimi Hendrix: Live at Woodstock (1999) with the concert footage from Music, Money, Madness ... Jimi Hendrix in Maui (2020), and show how the presentation of bodily movement, both audience and of Hendrix’s, diverge between the films. Specifically, I will analyse how the latter film places Hendrix’s movement in the context of the audience’s bodily gestures, and how the implicit narrative of the film maintains teleological dependency upon the degree of a collective bodily movement, and how the audience’s bodily movements correspond with musical structures. I draw upon work in affect theory (Thompson and Biddle 2013; Grant 2020). The implication of this research is that it shows how audience bodily movement in media might be used to identify nodes of representation which divert from a dominant commentary.

The Adjumani district in Northern Uganda is home to approximately 245,071 South Sudanese refugees. Eighty-six percent of refugees comprise women, children, and youth, and eighty percent of the households are female-headed (UNHCR, 2019). Since 2013, the Adjumani district has experienced a roughly fifty-five percent increase in the South Sudanese refugee population, negatively affecting refugee settlement and well-being. My ethnographic research in Adjumani indicates that some refugees live on 10 square meters of land and are unable to rent land; refugee management has drastically reduced food rationing; many youths have dropped out of school, leading to a rise in petty crime, alcohol, and substance abuse. In the absence of men due to war, women have become solely responsible for raising families. The effects of war and displacement on South Sudanese women in Adjumani district are profound. Women often feel anxious, fearful, depressed, and suicidal. Upon realizing the increased occurrence of mental health issues among South Sudanese refugee women in the Adjumani district in early 2013, refugee settlement leaders encouraged women to meet regularly in groups to compose songs, sing, and dance together. Singing and dancing are typical ways for South Sudanese women to work through trauma; one of my interlocutors referred to singing and dancing as “medicine.” Situated in critical refugee studies, which foreground refugee-based perspectives for understanding forced migration issues, I will analyze how Tanijamesi women’s group uses music and dance to work through trauma. My analysis is based on collaborative ethnographic research with the Tanijamesi women’s group during 2023-24.

This paper’s purpose is to share findings from a collaborative songwriting research project conducted in partnership with a Canadian refugee organization and an LGBTQI+ refugee young person who fled his country of origin due to identity persecution. This research is a part of a three-year, multi-sited, federally funded project with newcomer and refugee children and young people. Data will include excerpts from select online songwriting sessions, an analysis of the process of collaborative songwriting, song lyrics, and an excerpt from the recorded song. This research builds on the author’s use of collaborative songwriting methods (Author, in-press) as a part of research-informed theatre projects (Goldstein et al. forthcoming; Author & Goldstein, 2021; Goldstein et al. 2018), and with minoritized populations (Gruson-Wood et al., 2022; Hauge & Author, 2019; Author, 2022; Author & Goldstein, 2021). It also builds on the work of scholars who investigate musical methods with young people (Burnard et al. 2017; Campbell & Wiggins, 2013; Howell 2018; Pollock & Emberly 2019; Enge & Brynjulf Stige, 2021; Marsh, 2015, 2017; Young & Ilari, 2019; Zapata & Hargreaves, 2018) and other marginalized groups (de Quadros & Amrein, 2023; de Quadros & Evelyn, 2023; Harrison, Jacobsen & Sunderland, 2019; Yeoli et al., 2021). The significance of this research lies in exploring and documenting how collaborative songwriting mobilizes young people’s voices, allowing them to locate pathways for self-expression while underscoring the cultural and social forces—forced displacement, migration, and settlement challenges—that provided a foundation for these songs to be composed.

This paper addresses the challenges and opportunities of musical engagement as a means of empowerment for unaccompanied minor refugees and young asylum seekers in Lucerne, Switzerland. Situated within the framework of a four-year research project in applied ethnomusicology, the study focuses on recently arrived young people, predominantly from Afghanistan, and their use of musical practices to negotiate their new sociocultural landscapes. One of our central questions revolves around how musicking shapes young refugees’ experiences in their new environment and how these engagements may influence, challenge, or reinforce social imaginaries. Through six months of voluntary weekly “music listening sessions” in a transit center for minor refugees, insights were gained into their individual musical preferences and “musical literacies,” i.e., the musical knowledge they have already developed in their places of origin or on their journey to Switzerland. Within this temporal space, facilitated by music as “moments of choice and freedom” (Lewis 2015), participants engaged in musical dialog, occasionally selecting rap pieces, generally with preferences for artists from their own cultural backgrounds who rap in familiar languages. Based on the insights we gained from these sessions, a hip-hop workshop was organized, jointly led by a sociocultural expert and a hip-hop artist, along with support from the research team, who then critically analyzed the outcome. In alignment with the assertion that refugee empowerment is pivotal in the process of refugee integration this analysis aims to contribute to the discourse surrounding the interplay between empowerment objectives and musical involvement among youth and young adults.

Jam sessions of improvisational music depend on agreed-upon social conventions that allow individuals to contribute to a collective goal – the production of good sounding music and the possibility of having a good time. Jams are partially prescribed according to aesthetics and social practices, but they otherwise unfold according to the whims of participants who volunteer to show up and contribute. Jammers want to be there and, for the most part, they want to be heard; attending to jams, then, can teach us about inclusivity. This panel draws on bluegrass jams to investigate how successes and failures of inclusivity play out in spaces of improvisational musical encounter. Our projects include a public-facing app that allows jammers to document sessions, enabling communities to co-archive local scenes, and recentering amateurs and jams within bluegrass discourse; a rearticulation of “participation” that looks beyond musician/audience dichotomies to show the multiplicities of improvisational contribution – including the role of exclusivity in producing jams; and a college bluegrass ensemble that borrows jamming social conventions to meet the demands of engaged learning in higher education, particularly inclusivity and mutual listening. Ethnomusicologists have investigated how disparate jam scenes invite participation while embracing the wild card of improvisation (Morgan-Ellis 2021; Turino 2008; DeWitt 2008; Kisliuk 1988). We put this discourse in conversation with scholarship on inclusivity (Stimeling and Eriquez 2019; Smith 2024; Diamond & Castelo-Branco 2021; Kelly 2023) and argue that ethnomusicology - and bluegrass jams specifically - have important insights to offer, with implications for higher education and beyond.

Ethnomusicologists routinely report on rehearsals as part of research, but few theorize rehearsals for their own sake. Rehearsal studies arose from theatre and referred to sessions that prepare for a staged performance. The literature on Western classical music rehearsals comes from music education and is mostly pragmatic. Alternatively, some ethnomusicologists and historical musicologists have examined rehearsals for different genres as crucial for composer-performer transmission, pedagogy, group composition, and socialization (e.g., Bayley 2011, Dueck 2013, Odria 2017, Morabito 2020). This panel centers rehearsals as cultural fields (Bourdieu 1993), worksites, and processes of becoming in which conventions structure roles but also afford participants opportunities for creativity and even temporary social inversions. We understand rehearsals as special types of participatory performance that sometimes enforce, sometimes contravene, and otherwise negotiate larger socio-political forces.

Our papers concentrate on rehearsals characterized by liveness and co-presence, displaying the relationship between the practices of music and everyday life. The first paper celebrates rehearsal imperfections as sonic intimacy in a Filipino American community rondalla. The second interrogates how timbre determines hierarchical roles in traditional Korean music rehearsals and beyond. The third traces the reconfiguration of traditional positions and relationships in taiko and care work within rehearsal spaces in Japan and the US. The fourth compares divergent rehearsal approaches and creative philosophies in three free improvisation ensembles based in São Paulo, Brazil. Altogether, we hope to further ethnomusicological studies in rehearsals, not only as fieldsites but, more importantly, as social phenomena with their own idiosyncratic and distinguishing qualities.

Through case studies on praise, protest, armed revolt, and indigenous (re)settlement, this panel examines how political actors use sound and music to articulate and contest space in urban environments. It foregrounds how interlocutors use listening and sounding practices as crucial political techniques to inhabiting and contesting urban space. Expanding on a crossdisciplinary focus on the politics of affect and sensory perception, these papers present diverse ethnographic case studies of political listening, making a unified case that listening in the context of urban space becomes crucial to political subjectivies and the negotiation of the stakes in which they are entrenched. The first panelist writes a history of Taiwanese settler urbanism focused on its liberal listening practices, which alternate between exclusion of Indigenous residents from civil society and inclusion on exclusively nonthreatening grounds of “culturally expressive” traditional performance. The second panelist examines the place of shared ethical listening practices (cf. Hirschkind 2006) in coalition-centered climate protest in Berlin, where activists’ attempts at densely sonically layered spacemaking are vulnerable to state and motorist intercession. The third panelist examines Sikh militant revolt on the Punjab-Haryana border, where periurban conflicts over land reclamation and corruption “spill over” into fights waged over, and through, uses of music and religious recitation in urban space. The final panelists examines the ways that political brokers in Dakar listen and respond to civil society movements in an urban environment saturated with praise-driven distributive politics. Together, these papers offer a vantage onto urban political contestation, and listening as a political technique.

This paper examines the adoption of new musical instruments in al-mūsīqā al-‘arabiyya (traditional Arab music) ensembles, from the violin family to the electric guitar. Building on the theoretical assertion that musical instruments are “tools” (adawāt) rather than “instruments” (alāt) (Zakariyya 1964), this paper argues that musical instruments are tools whose function extends beyond sound-making to the manufacturing of emotional states, national sentiment, and national character. Ethnomusicologists have grouped perspectives about traditional Arab music in the mid-twentieth century in two categories: preservation vs. reform. Whereas preservationists treated new instruments with skepticism, reformists welcomed them as new tools in the expressive toolkit. One advocate equated nontraditional musical instruments to typewriters. Just as typewriters change form but preserve content, he argued, nontraditional musical instruments would change the musical medium without necessarily changing the music itself (Fathi 1932). Interviews with musicians and aficionados in Cairo’s contemporary Arab music scene, however, reveal the prevailing belief that new instruments have significantly reshaped Arab music. By constructing new emotional temperaments and “fixing” Arab music in a rigid tonal system of equal temperament, they have dramatically impacted Arab music, musically and socio-culturally. This research uses a mixed-methods approach, combining archival research with two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Cairo (2022–present). Examining the crucial role of musical instruments in manufacturing musical and emotional temperaments as well as national sentiment(ality), this paper seeks to contribute to literature on the social life of musical instruments (Bates 2012), emotion, and nationalism.

One-string fiddles are found in many cultures across large areas of the African continent, and are hugely diverse in terms of their shape, size and musical and cultural meanings. However, despite its widespread distribution, this instrument archetype has never gained the emblematic status of similarly diverse instrument groups such as the xylophone or lamellophone, and less even than some culturally specific instruments such as the Mandé djembe and kora, where the musical object is seen as a recognisable representation of African music from a European perspective. In this paper, I examine two arenas in which African music and musical instruments are emblemised in Europe: museums and the commercial world music sphere. By comparing how the one-string fiddle performs and is performed upon (literally and figuratively) in both of these arenas, I investigate the ways in which the instrument represents notions of Africa, Africans and African music to a majority European audience, and argue that museums and world music represent music in a similar manner through exoticisation and juxtaposition. Influenced by the critical organology of scholars such as Sonevytsky (2008), Bates (2012) and Roda (2014; 2015), and the established areas of musical-museology and world music scholarship, this paper furthers the study of the emblematic and symbolic potential of musical instruments from a new direction and a novel unification of two previously separate fields, while also serving to advance the knowledge of the African one-string fiddle as a cross-cultural phenomenon.

In 1991, Nirvana released a track that would launch the rock underground decisively, unexpectedly into the mainstream. With the distorted guitars and screamed vocals of grunge juxtaposed against the catchy hooks and predictable structures of pop, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” became an unlikely anthem for the angsty, disaffected teens of Generation X. Over three decades later, “Teen Spirit” remains iconic: both a metonym for the 90s alternative scene and a sonic fingerprint for Nirvana’s tragic frontman, Kurt Cobain. Yet its musical contradictions and lyrical abstruseness also seem to invite bold reinterpretations. In this paper, I combine musical analysis with archival research and digital ethnography to construct an intertextual and multimodal framework for cover analysis, comparatively analyzing Nirvana’s track with two important covers by women artists. A B-side from the 1992 album that cemented her centrality in the female alternative music scene, Tori Amos’ bare acoustic piano version also impels a contextual, polyphonographic analysis (Lacasse 2018) of the album’s other tracks as well as a consideration of the artist’s identity and branding as a confessional singer-songwriter. Referencing both Nirvana’s angst and Amos’ intimacy, Malia J’s epic orchestral cover, featured in the blockbuster movie Black Widow, moreover demands a cophonographic analysis of song meaning vis-à-vis its film context. Considering the different genres, styles, identities, and contexts of these three versions as intertexts reveals how popular music recordings create space for radical reimaginings, how artists differently respond to those invitations, and how music analysts might use multiple lenses to unpack their nuances.

“Songs to Aging Children Come,” released on Joni Mitchell’s second studio album, Clouds (1969), is unique among her early compositions. Although previous scholars have treated it as a chromatic anomaly, calling it “hallucinatory” and “helium-infused vocal warbling” (Whitesell, 2008), this song plays a central role in her emerging style. In my paper I will explore two features of Mitchell’s early harmonic language that have previously been neglected: atypical lament bass lines; and root motion by chains of major or minor thirds. Two groups of songs, some previously unreleased, will be examined. In the first group, Mitchell employs an innovative use of descending stepwise bass lines to express a sense of loss. Yet she not only revives the lamento topical tradition, which grew out of early Baroque Italian opera, she adapts it, for the melodic interval traversed by the bass is not always a perfect fourth. In the second group of songs, she introduces unorthodox harmonic progressions—root motion by continuous major or minor thirds—like “harmonies waiting unsung” (Mitchell, “Gemini Twin,” 1967). This type of progression has been thoroughly investigated as a musical form of uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit) based on Freud’s and Jentsch’s psychological theories (Cohn, 2004). Ultimately, the harmonic language in each of these songs reflects its corresponding poem, evoking either ambiguity, grief or irony. “Songs to Aging Children Come” serves as a culmination of crossover, portraying one moment in Mitchell’s ongoing creative evolution. It succeeds in fusing a work of art with a workshop about her art.

Is the term “tune family,” which refers to melodies which are similar but not quite the same, useful? What does it offer ethnomusicologists? In the mid-twentieth century, the concept “tune family” was developed by scholars of folk music such as Samuel Bayard, George List, and James Cowdery, evolving from an idea of “archetypal” melodies with a presumed single source toward later conjectures of polygenesis and looser concepts of tune family-membership criteria. With the infusion of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “family resemblance” ideas, recent analytic ethnomusicological scholarship explores relaxes criteria for “tune family membership,” but also opens the door to a lack of scholarly consensus. Scholars such as Anja Volk, Peter van Kranenburg, and Celia Pendlebury argue that, based on the Wittgensteinian paradigm, we can no longer postulate necessary and sufficient criteria for tune family membership—specific melodies can be similar without adhering to classificatory rules or having a genealogical relationship. This presentation examines ten recordings of a New Mexico Penitente alabado, “Adios acompañamiento,” as a case study of family resemblance in tune families. New Mexican alabados have been studied for over a century by scholars including Juan Rael, Thomas Steele, and J.D. Robb, but rarely transcribed. I transcribe recordings from these scholars’ collections as well as previously unanalyzed recent recordings, and conclude that the Wittgensteinian “family resemblance” paradigm is useful. We can see how these melodies are related to each other without raising questions of authenticity, parameters of similarity, originality, formulaic recomposition or memorization, or the march of time.

Latin America’s aural modernity has been shaped by conflicting dynamics where musics have been circumscribed to the geopolitical and interpolated into nation-states—a process of “folklorization” (Ochoa Gautier 2006)—and “popular” expressive cultures have been commercially circulated and incorporated into media capitalism (Martín-Barbero 1987). Central to these discursive formations is a political body that is voiced through the exaltation of its “folklorized” auralities and simultaneously silenced by the “community” of the nation (Esposito 2008). Analyzing Ecuadorian singer Julio Jaramillo (1935-1978), I suggest that his vocality signals dynamics of aural de/territorialization. Jaramillo’s capacity to sing and commercially circulate music genres deemed “national” and “cosmopolitan,” as well as his ability to incorporate and reinterpret vocal markers stylistic of these, signals an aural fluidity that puts forward broader issues of nationalism and the political. Elaborating on Derrida’s (1980) The Law of Genre, I argue that Jaramillo’s vocality reifies and unsettles musical nationalisms (Turino 2008). The Law of Genre posits that the ontological difference between genres is predicated on a principle of contamination; a parasitical presence of its other that affords such separation (Derrida 1980; Crimmins 2009). I consider what happens when music genres that articulate place (i.e., nation) are vocally contaminated. The law of genre/nation, I show, is voiced through Jaramillo’s fluid vocality. The listening subject that emerges from this theorization, simultaneously exalted and silenced, unveils dynamics of difference in sameness immanent to the mestizo racial order.

In 2006, Antares Audio Technologies released the fifth version of their wildly successful pitch correction software, Auto-Tune. Users, predictably, embraced the new version. Unpredictably, though, some users did not want to let it go when it was time to update versions once again. The following version, Auto-Tune Evo, sought to address public criticism accumulating around the software that it made voices sound “unnatural” by introducing new parameters to re-incorporate a more “human” sound. Subsequent releases took this goal even further, relentlessly pursuing inaudible pitch correction joined with streamlined workflow. But in the meantime, Auto-Tune users, especially those working in hip hop, preferred the 5 sound, which, they claimed, sounded and acted differently from later versions. In 2021, in response to what Antares notes is “the most common feature request” fielded from users, they incorporated Auto-Tune 5 into Auto-Tune Pro as “Classic Mode.” This parallel application allows users to access the mid-aughts sound of iconic hip hop recordings (T-Pain's Rappa Ternt Sanga, Kanye West’s 808s and Heartbreak) and, ironically, subvert problematically timeless or “classic” expectations for vocality.

Drawing on ethnographic research spanning twelve years, this paper examines the legacy of Auto-Tune 5 as part of a counter history to normative, essentialized vocality. It investigates the ways Antares’ pursuit of a more “natural” sound was contested by users who had no investment in that nature to begin with, and how “Classic Mode,” which sits alongside Pro X, offers a different vocal imaginary that still reverberates with users imagining the voice otherwise.

“Madrasi” is an appellation for the minority of South Asian indentured laborers who embarked for the New World via the southern port of the Madras Presidency of the British Empire between 1838 and 1917. “Madrasi” also became associated with relatively unrestrained styles of Kali goddess worship that European listeners/British colonizers and Hindu reformers within the post-emancipation indentureship plantation context constructed as uncivilized, “wild,” and superstitious. Such associations deeply resonate among Indo-Caribbean listeners who are ambivalent about similarities of Madrasi sonic practices with Afro-Caribbean religions. Unlike their Caribbean orthodox Hindu counterparts, and like colonial accounts and accusations of obeahmen, deities of “Madrasi Religion” of Guyana and Trinidad “manifest” people to heal, cleanse, and communicate with supplicants. During the ritual of “falling before Mother,” devotees listen to oracles that reveal reasons for their predicaments, spirit possession, and ancestral identities of spirits who inhabit them. At certain Madrasi temples, the presiding deity Kali, increasingly Mariamman, intones divine messages through melodies in an “ancient Tamil” language unintelligible to Indo-Caribbeans and Tamil speakers and perceivably powerful and prestigious. Discourses surrounding “correct” or “authentic” Madrasi sonic practices appear as attempts to perform Indian diasporic identity and Tamil racial purity. I contribute to recent ethnomusicological scholarship that engages the critique of the humanist equation of voice as representation with agency. I argue how in seeking forms of belonging to South Asian American diaspora culture, Indo-Caribbean/Americans mobilize musical performance and sonic interpellations of diaspora spirits—simultaneously reifying notions of racial hierarchy while defying essentialist ideologies about lacking legitimacy.

Though recognized as a pivotal contributor to the Civil Rights movement and praised for her enormous musical prowess, Nina Simone is notably absent from discourse on the voice. With its unique contralto timbre, her voice evades traditional cultural markers, such as gender and race, manifesting as a form of androgyneity that permits Nina Simone’s fluid occupation of several identities in her public and private lives: artist, activist, Black American, woman, mother, and survivor. Scholarship on Nina Simone addresses her intersectionality, however, her singing voice is not recognized as its own politically and socially engaged semiotic zone. This paper seeks to center discourse around the biomechanism through which Nina Simone’s identities and desires were mediated, asserting that its timbral qualities—dark, raspy, growling, and nasal, among others—granted her voice inimitable rhetorical power and subversive capabilities. Drawing crowds from across racial, economic, and gender spectrums, her voice seeps through barriers that would otherwise obfuscate messages of Black and women empowerment, thereby uniquely contributing to imperative revolutionary action of the late twentieth century. Building on the scholarship of Victoria Malawey (2020), Kristal Spreadborough (2022), and Kate Heidemann (2016), this paper attempts to understand the synthesis of identities through vocal timbre by analyzing iconic recordings of “I Loves You Porgy” (1959) and “Mississippi Goddam” (1964), songs laden with immanent racial and gender tension. Reaching beyond lyrics and expanding the civil rights era lexicon, this exploration of Nina Simone’s vocal androgyneity reveals that her voice’s enigmatic quality bolstered her musical success and political messaging.

In 2003, South African rap collective Cashless Society released the single “Hottentot Hop (Bantu 1, 2)” on their debut album African Raw Material, Volume One. The track promoted Cashless Society’s impressions of millennial technologies amid the impending cashless, paperless, and wireless future (Hitchcock 2009; Ice and Demy 1996; Kupetz 2008). Moreover, “Hottentot Hop (Bantu 1, 2)” contrasted indigenous South African San performance practices with imminent digital changes.

Cashless Society emphasized that the impetus for “Hottentot Hop (Bantu 1, 2)” was Saartjie Baartman, a San woman exhibited in nineteenth century European shows. Beginning in 1810, Baartman was labelled the “Hottentot Venus,” a racialized title associated with the exoticization, fetishization, and sexualization of her body by cartoonists, comparative anatomists, managers, satirists, and voyeuristic showgoers (Holmes 2007; Magubane 2001; Nanda 2019). “Hottentot,” a pejorative Dutch term associated with characteristics of San languages, evolved into a legislative classification applied to the San. By reinforcing the word, and centering Baartman and aspects of San culture on “Hottentot Hop (Bantu 1, 2),” Cashless Society juxtaposed her exhibition with modernistic lyrical descriptions (Mashile 2019).

This presentation examines memory and modernity in Cashless Society’s song “Hottentot Hop (Bantu 1, 2).” It is based on artist interviews as well as lyrical, musical, and video analyses. The presentation investigates depictions of San performance practices and Saartjie Baartman introduced in “Hottentot Hop (Bantu 1, 2).” In so doing, it explores the significance of San culture and Baartman in Cashless Society’s lyrical content and music at the start of the new millennium.

In 1947, Slim’s Y-Ki-Ki dance hall opened in Opelousas, Louisiana. Following decades of success that featured prominent zydeco musicians such as Clifton Chenier, the venue closed in 2015. However, in December 2023, the United States Department of Agriculture invested $100,000 in the Zydeco Historical Preservation Society to develop a restoration plan for Slim’s Y-Ki-Ki as a preservation site. Throughout southwest Louisiana, dance halls like Slim’s Y-Ki-Ki provided popular communal sites animated by music and dance. Although regional venues have diminished in social, cultural, and economic significance in recent decades, they continue to function as important sites of memory. Whether patrons remember the performance of captivating music, stomping their feet on wood floors, or the verbal exchange of local news, people engage with sound to express their belonging to shared spaces of dance halls. Drawing from heritage studies, I consider the interconnection of sound and memory in heritage construction processes. I propose the following research questions: Why is sound integral to remembering dance hall experiences? How does remembering those experiences reactivate sites via community participation and preservation efforts? Through archival research in the University of Louisiana-at-Lafayette’s Center for Louisiana Studies and oral history interviews in southwest Louisiana, I argue that dance hall patrons use sonic storytelling to sustain lived experiences of dance hall culture and imagine spaces of belonging that aim to reinvigorate those lifeways. This paper provides insight into how sound studies and heritage studies can interconnect to understand and support similar preservation efforts of social spaces.

Folk musical instruments used in Adivasi festivals and rituals in Assam, India, are dynamic sites of cultural production. The Adivasi community comprises people who migrated from central India to Assam in the 19th-20th centuries, settling in British-run tea estates where they served as indentured laborers. In post-colonial Assam, Adivasi musical production entails a constant negotiation between maintaining cultural continuity through invoking collective social memories of migration and connections with central India, and engaging in cultural reinvention through assimilation with ethnic groups indigenous to Assam. Inspired by a combination of vital materialism (Bennett 2009) and Bate’s notion of “thing power” (2012), I examine folk musical instruments as active agents in the erasure and reinvention of Adivasi traditions, throughout their various life-stages including the collection of raw materials for their construction, their use in sonic production and meaning-making, and their eventual discard. I ask, how does the material, sonic, and symbolic presence of musical instruments reassert Adivasi historical consciousness and memories of migration? How does the construction and discard of instruments adapt to changing socio-cultural and ecological conditions of Assam? Do the musical instruments and their sonic productions challenge the idea of a singular Adivasi musical sensibility, suggesting cultural assimilation with other ethnic groups? I answer these questions using oral histories of Adivasi folk musicians and instrument-makers, complemented by participant observation in festivals and rituals. By acknowledging the agency of musical instruments, this work aligns itself with the Adivasi animistic belief system that dictates service towards human and non-human agents alike.

This paper investigates how sound and image combine to craft new visions of national identity in Taiwan’s 2022 National Day sound-and-lights show (SLS). SLS’s, spectacular shows that project moving images, music, and abstract lighting onto classical architecture or famous landscapes, have proliferated as tourist attractions at sites as diverse as Greece’s Acropolis (Marlowe 2001) and China’s West Lake (Zhang 2010). Since 2017, Taiwan’s annual National Day celebrations have also included a SLS projected onto the Presidential Office Building in Taipei. The 2022 National Day SLS centered on the theme of Taiwan’s film history, stitching together 25 iconic films to create a Taiwanese cinematic canon. Underscoring these media was a medley of classic Taiwanese popular songs, arranged by musical theater composer Owen Wang 王希文. Drawing on close readings and interviews with audience members, I suggest that Wang’s score leverages the “stickiness” of music (Abbate 2004) to craft emotional connections between audiences and a Taiwanese cinematic canon, creating a common set of referents indexing an emergent national identity. By attending to Taiwan’s National Day SLS, I expand our understandings of how artists and the state navigate Taiwanese identity at a time when the nation’s existence is an increasing source of regional tension. I also show how increasingly popular multimedia technologies facilitate new kinds of placemaking and new means of shaping the national imaginary. Specifically, I suggest that the National Day SLS blends Taiwan’s world-leading technological prowess with local musical and cinematic traditions to assert the legitimacy of its existence.

The uilleann pipes (Irish bagpipes) occupy a central emblematic role in Irish traditional music and nationalistic portrayals of Irishness. The discourse and practice of uilleann piping can simultaneously express finer degrees of place and belonging – to a region, a county or even a township. Conversely, the uilleann pipes’ development and current status are testament to centuries of migration, diaspora and globalisation, and today unite a vibrant global community of pipers. Understandings of place and nationality continue to motivate conflicting narratives of localism, nationalism, globalism, tradition and change in Irish traditional music, both internally and externally to the uilleann piping community. This presentation will examine the significance of place and nationality as both generative and constraining factors in the contemporary uilleann piping tradition. It will reflect on the symbolic and imaginative dimensions of place and sound in establishing productive connections between pipers and community, lineage and history, and the ways in which pipers exert agency against fetishistic or deterministic understandings of geography and ancestry. This research draws on ethnographic interviews with prominent uilleann pipers, especially the contemporary pipers “Blackie” O’Connell and Joey Abarta, coupled with analysis of recorded music. A central framework explored will be that of musical style, a vital but frequently ambiguous concept amongst practitioners of Irish traditional music, which can be used to illuminate pipers’ understanding of place and the broader processes of choice and necessity that guide musicmaking.

The reggae band Lauwarm (“lukewarm”) became a media sensation in 2022 when its concert at the local cooperative bar Brasserie Lorraine in Bern, Switzerland, was abruptly stopped at intermission due to concerns over cultural appropriations. Audience members had complained that the rasta dreadlocks and African clothing of the band’s members made them feel “uncomfortable.” In this presentation, I demonstrate how this band’s stunning shift from alternative left-wing scene to right-wing media darling symbolizes a deeper struggle to redefine identity in a liminal state.

The media debate following the aborted concert mostly neglected the fact that Dominik Plumettaz, the band’s lead-singer and creative mind, has an Angolan and Brazilian family background. Would an audience feel less “uncomfortable” knowing this and react differently to the band’s references to Rastafarianism? As Jessica Perea shows in Sound Relations, it is exactly mixed-race musicians who are most often denied the right to define themselves and who are pressed into a concept of identity that others constructed for them.

Instead of trying to affix a singular identity to Plumettaz, I argue that it is more helpful if instead we examined the “density of truths” (Perea) of the story. Using Diamond’s “alliance studies”, Perea’s “sound relations”, and Thomassen’s “liminality” models, I demonstrate how Plumettaz’s multitude of experiences challenges a traditional view of how reggae and people of color are situated in Switzerland: they are now no longer simply an exotic “other”, but have transitioned to become part of the fabric of a more diverse population.

Junior Panorama, Trinidad and Tobago’s preeminent youth steelband competition held annually during the Carnival season, has long been affiliated with both the Trinidadian government and with various nationalistic movements. As such, the competition represents a stage in which Trinidadian nationalism is developed and reinforced. Trinidadian nationalism movements, including those connected with youth spaces, are frequently understood along racialized ideologies emphasizing either Afro-Trinidadian or Indo-Trinidadian perspectives (Ballengee 2019, Nathaniel 2006, Dudley 2008). Despite the racialized understandings of nationalistic spaces in Trinidad, Junior Panorama is frequently discussed in race silent language (Escayg 2020), with many adult steelpannists claiming that race has no role in youth centered steelbands. However, representations of Trinidad’s racial demographics are frequently accentuated on the Junior Panorama stage through both music selections and visual representations, with youth participants understanding and conceptualizing the role of race within their spaces. In this paper, I explore the complexities of Trinidadian nationalism and its presence within the Junior Panorama competition, arguing that a racialized Trinidadian nationalism is performed and negotiated in the annual competition. Utilizing interviews completed from 2021-2023, and a detailed case study from the 2023 Junior Panorama competition, I prioritize youth perspectives to question long standing perceptions of race in youth spaces, solidifying the importance of the competition within larger discussions of race and society in Trinidad and Tobago.