Brazil faced one of the most extensive official slave trades in the world. This process forcibly brought around 5.8 million Africans to the country between 1500 and 1850. This historical trend has substantially impacted the Brazilian music scene, especially in the context of musical expressions created and performed by Black communities (Lucas, 2002; Queiroz, 2023; Sandroni, 2001). However, although structural racism is still intense in Brazil, the fight against the oppression of black people and their culture have increased considerably over the last two decades. Considering both the reality of the exclusion that characterizes Afro-Brazilian culture and the reaction of these people to this reality around the country, this paper analyzes how Black communities have promoted music performances focused on activism and social awareness to surpass racism in Brazil (Moraes, 2024; Santos, 2022). This research project encompasses a qualitative four-year ethnographic study (2020-2024) in four Black communities in Northeastern Brazil, highly immersed in diverse Black music culture expressions. The results show how these people live in a vulnerable social situation and have historically faced a trajectory of inequality and exclusion. However, their music practices and critical performance initiatives have expanded enormously over the last two decades, incorporating awareness and strategies of resistance, antiracist attitudes, and the construction of collective Black identities in contemporary society. The paper brings out some essential ideas and propositions to reflect on how ethnomusicology can create dialogues among these musical actions built outside the universities and the academic initiatives focused on combating racism, prejudice, and exclusion.

Irish music festivals in the Midwestern United States are a key component of the annual migrations of touring musicians in the Irish traditional music scene. Oftentimes, outside of the official time-space of the festival and after paid duties are completed, musicians gather, away from larger audiences, and play in “sessions” late into the night. Against a backdrop of more commercialized and commodified performances of traditional music on festival stages, I suggest that these afterparty sessions deliberately foreground a sociality and being-in commune. In particular, audience-performer boundaries are blurred, and melodies are heterophonically sounded in productive dissonance with the commercialized ideals of polished unison and harmony (Taylor 2024; Kaul 2013). In a musical tradition where a loss of the principles of collective stewardship and common ownership are lamented by practitioners and scholars alike (Ó hAllmhuráin 2017), I draw on extensive ethnographic fieldwork to argue that the afterparty session re-asserts a communitarian orientation—“reclaiming the commons" (Smith 2006)—in an environment where it is most roundly criticized for ignoring such values—the highly-commodified US Irish festival. This paper underscores the importance of recognizing how musicians' public performances and more privately facing musical practices can sound in mutually constitutive ways, in turn leading to richer ethnographic data. Further, drawing on Cashman (2016), this study explores how some of the wider conventions and norms of a collectively maintained musical genre can potentially impact one’s way of being in the world.

There exists a common sentiment among contemporary Muslims that the ummah (global Muslim body) is in crisis(es). While prior research in music/sound studies has attended to “religious” vocal performance genres of Islam or “secular” or “political” music/song traditions of Muslim-majority ethnic groups, less attention has been directed at forms of music/song that center Muslim religiosity and contemporary material or political realities simultaneously. This paper theorizes global tarana as a meta-genre of sung or recited poetry that centers the plight, collective memory, national identity, patriotic sentiment, religiosity, and/or political aspirations of a given Muslim-majority ethnic group—or the ummah as a whole—that understands itself as being collectively oppressed. I take the tarana music/poetry of contemporary Rohingya refugees living in Bangladesh as a starting point from which to construct global tarana as a multilingual conglomerate that subsumes the broader South Asian Muslim category of tarānā (anthem, Urdu; song/tune, Farsi) and comparable lament cum anthemic vocal practices most often categorized as nashīd (anthem/chant/song, Arabic) among non-South Asian Muslim-majority ethnic groups. This repertoire interweaves key Islamic concepts such as ummah, qurbān (sacrifice), hijrah (migration), jihād (holy struggle/war), and al-ākhirah (the afterlife) with core aspects of the nation including national homeland, language, and culture. I argue that an orientation in music/sound studies toward global tarana can help elucidate the overlaps between the ways in which Muslims throughout the ummah embody, make sense of, and/or respond to shared senses and experiences of dehumanization, colonial subjugation and extraction, ethnic cleansing and mass displacement, and genocide.

Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Within months, Repair Together was founded, a grassroots organization that mobilizes volunteers to rebuild areas impacted by the ongoing military conflict. One of their signature work programs, Project Toloka, shuttles 150-300 volunteers each weekend to affected areas, where they collectively clean up rubble from homes, cultural buildings, and youth centers while deejays spin electronic dance music. Donating their time and services, the deejays sustain the volunteers through two days of back-breaking work with the energizing beats of Ukrainian techno.

This presentation explores the impact of the ongoing military conflict on the Ukrainian rave scene and the ravers’ impact on restoration efforts. As a scholar of electronic dance music (EDM) scenes, I consider how this commitment to volunteerism manifests the EDM community’s values of peace, love, unity, and respect. Drawing on Jill Dolan’s theory of utopian performances, I suggest that these clean-up raves are important ways of imagining and actively working towards a better world, even in the midst of a dystopian present. While volunteers have been criticized for raving in a war-torn country, I argue that these embodied responses to the ongoing violence are meaningful cathartic experiences during which participants celebrate life, recovering a small sense of normalcy, enjoyment, and fulfillment. With evidence from interviews with Project Toloka volunteer workers and deejays, I demonstrate how raving is helping Ukrainians restore their homes, their culture, and themselves during this crisis.