In Guyana, Trinidad, and North America, “Madrasi Religion” is known by Indo-Caribbeans to consist of relatively unrestrained styles of Hindu goddess worship. “Madrasi” was an appellation for 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. Despite the prevalence of Kali worship in the Caribbean among different groups and similarities with obeah, “Madrasi” reemerged in Hindu reform efforts to hierarchically categorize and differentiate North Indian-derived orthodox Hinduism from South Indian-derived ecstatic worship. Like Afro-Caribbean religions, the identification of spirits and deities who “manifest” people is central to Madrasi Religion and facilitated by sonic practices of tappu and udkay drumming, animal sacrifice, alcohol and cigarette offerings, and fire oath-taking ceremonies. And yet, Madrasi sonic practices remain a source of anxiety and ambivalence. Throughout colonial and post-emancipation plantation indentureship periods and post-migration North American contexts, Madrasi sonic practices have been negatively associated particularly by Indo-Guyanese with blackness, obeah, superstition, and sorcery. Given a genealogy of listening practices rooted in West Indian British Orientalism, “correct practices” and narratives about the “ancient Tamil” origins of Madrasi Religion produce prestige as “sound knowledge” (Kapchan 2017) that capitalize on notions of purity within “representational economies” of Hindu heritage (Inglese 2024). Despite a disavowal of mixing, I argue Madrasis maneuver within Tamil sonic diasporas via transformative performances of the sounding spirits and an ontology of vibration to transduce and transcend being derivative, imitative, and instead known through sonic presence.

‘Xiansuo Beikao,’ a compendium of musical notations in Gongche notation from Beijing, was compiled by the Mongolian scholar Rong Zhai in 1814 during China’s Qing dynasty. This manuscript meticulously documents thirteen suites for string ensemble featuring the Huqin, Pipa, Sanxian, and Zheng, providing an historically important record of the era’s popular music among the elite and literati. Once widely appreciated, this musical tradition gradually faded amidst shifting social transformations. From the perspective of cultural heritage preservation and transmission, ‘Xiansuo Beikao’ holds a distinctive historical connection with the Prince Gong’s Mansion in Beijing. In the 1950s, musicologists Anhe Cao and Qihua Jian translated these works into Western staff notation, leading to their publication. By 1984, a Central Conservatory of Music research team began reconstructing this music. Today, efforts continue to reintroduce it to modern audiences, exploring new models that adapt to contemporary society while maintaining its authenticity.

This paper investigates how ‘Xiansuo Beikao’ transcended hierarchical divisions among the imperial aristocracy, literati, and public life within historical social strata. It examines the challenges of reviving this repertoire in contemporary paradigm of “authenticity.” Drawing from theories of cultural memory (Assmann, 1995), music revival authenticity (Haskell, 1988), and heritage studies (Schippers, 2015), it interrogates how competing authenticity narratives influence its reintegration into modern Chinese musical discourse. Additionally, it investigates how conservatories, state-sponsored heritage initiatives, and the music industry mediate its reception, adaptation and recontextualizations.

Since Park Chung Hee’s 1964 address on revitalizing minjok munhwa (ethnic-national culture), the state has funded the establishment of the National Gugak Center (NGC), with the aim of the promotion and preservation of traditional performing arts of Korea. In 1979, the NGC founded a folk music ensemble, underneath the pre-existing ensemble for court and literati music. While folk repertoires were less canonized than court music and marked by improvisation rather than rote performance, folk instrumentalists mobilized to Seoul, contrived musical suites based on folk singers’ melodies to validate their work ethic to the director.

Borrowing on Chakrabarty’s concept of “provincializing” (2008), this paper examines the process of purifying folk music within a state-led, urban, and institutionalized system (Howard 2016) and its impact on the ecology of elite Korean musicians. Despite folk music’s rural origins (Maliangkay 2017; Kwon 2024), vernacular music has been standardized to the point where timbre is the primary personal musical attribute that distinguishes individual artistry (Pilzer 2012). My ethnography of urban-based folk instrumentalists engages with the “schizophonic” (Feld 1994) environment in hyper-globalized South Korea (Kwon, ibid) where contemporary folk music ensembles are separated from quotidian rural life. I argue that the privileging of Seoul-centered sonic practices constitutes a form of “triumphant negligence”—a condition in which instrumental techniques featured in Seoul have attained disproportionate authority, as musicians who “successfully” settled in or acquired the cultural capital of this key node have come to define and represent the sound of folk music in kugak (traditional-national Korean music)’s entirety.

In 1892, Eastern Cherokee traditionalist Will West Long wrote a list of tunes and page numbers in his Cherokee language journal. Amid surrounding pages of Sequoyan script, the list of English tune names stands out. At the bottom of the list, Long wrote, “this is Christain [sic] Harmony.” The seven-shape Christian Harmony tradition of shaped note singing, already becoming anachronistic in 1892, nonetheless persists today as a historical cultural practice across the American Southeast, particularly in the lower Appalachian region. Eastern Cherokees in Western North Carolina engaged in shaped note singing in the Cherokee language, taking texts from the 1831 Cherokee hymn book. Currently, only a very small number of Cherokee elders know or remember the practice of shaped note singing. In 2023, Uweti Tsalagi Dininogisgi, the Cherokee Language Repertory choir, was established in partnership with Western Carolina University and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians to revitalize and expand historical and contemporary Cherokee language singing practices. The choir’s repertoire includes shaped note tunes, hymns, gospel tunes, secular popular songs, and newer compositions. With fewer than 140 first-language Eastern Cherokee speakers still living, the choir contributes to Cherokee language persistence even among non-speakers. In this performance demonstration, the Cherokee Language Repertory choir will perform songs from their repertoire accompanied by discussion of performance practices, language-specific variations for shaped note singing, and historical and contemporary cultural perspectives on group singing in the Eastern Cherokee community.