Since the turn of the 21^st century, timbre has emerged as an important research topic in various music disciplines. This has been demonstrated through the creation of the multi-institution ACTOR Project, societal special interest groups, three iterations of a timbre summer school, at least four specialized academic conferences since 2018, two seasons of an Afrological timbre speaker series, and a noticeable uptick in publications with a timbral focus. The characteristic global scope of our discipline challenges conventional claims of timbre scholars while also presenting ethnomusicologists with numerous issues. For example, since semantic descriptors have existed in various communities for generations, is the widespread claim that timbre is difficult to describe (Dolan 2013, Fales 2002, Fink et al. 2018) accurate? For what reasons do scholars believe we lack a timbral vocabulary and how do global case studies counter this? Does the development of analytical terminology for timbre risk supplanting these emic vocabularies or does their employment help sidestep problematic ethnotheories (Agawu 2023, Diego Díaz 2024)? How do we benefit from embracing a less rigid definition of what constitutes timbre terminology and theory? Might our approach to “throat singing” essentialize Tuvan music as solely timbral akin to our invention of African rhythm (Agawu 1995)? And how are we to grapple with the fact that timbre, unlike meter and tonality, is present in every music? While ultimately embracing an ethnomusicology of timbre, in this paper I consider these theoretical quandaries, ruminate on their implications, and advise those looking to navigate this academic inquiry.

It is no surprise that universities are becoming increasingly driven to provide students with transformative and experiential learning opportunities. For music programs, traditional career training has focused on performance and/or teaching opportunities. But what about those students who want to pursue other paths in music, including those with public-facing roles? Providing students with practical training in public and applied ethnomusicology and musicology, grounded in the ideas presented in the 2019 SEM Action Plan for Career Preparation in Public and Applied Ethnomusicology, can aid in helping students to obtain real-world training and experiences while still students. One solution for providing this training is to create courses and programs that teach students the fundamentals of transferring their knowledge about music and culture to other contexts in which students produce material that is immediately used by partner organizations and interact with practitioners. This presentation examines the incorporation of public-facing, experiential learning into music courses and how they can prepare students for careers related to public ethnomusicology and musicology. To demonstrate how this can be done, the presentation will use the only public musicology program to date in the United States as a case study, demonstrating how the program’s students obtain real world experience in various areas through partnerships with musical organizations worldwide. Attendees will take away strategies for connecting with partner organizations as well as ideas and tips for incorporating public-facing work and experiential learning into their music curricula on both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

Beginning with the immigrant-owned restaurant as a site of everyday musical encounter, this paper reimagines the soundscape of interwar New York City through the activities of early-twentieth-century musicians from colonial India. Biographies of American composers, including Johanna Beyer (1888-1944) and Henry Cowell (1897-1965), and so-called Oriental dancers, including Ruth St. Denis (1879-1968) and Ragini Devi (1893-1982), contain scattered evidence of professional relationships with the first generation of Indian working musicians to settle in the United States. Yet these individuals and their engagements with the American public have been relegated to the footnotes and margins of conventional historiography. Drawing from my dissertation research and building upon critical interventions in postcolonial studies (Guha 1983, 2002; Spivak 1988; Trouillot 1995) and microhistory (Ginzburg 1976; Muir and Ruggiero 1991), this paper argues for a transcultural historical musicology “from below.” By centering the stories of marginalized historical actors, I illuminate a complex interplay of cosmopolitan artistic practices, restrictive U.S. immigration and naturalization policies, and the fetishism of the early-twentieth-century Orientalist economy. Amplifying this history frames early modernism in American music as a transcultural project forged, in part, through global migrations and migrant labor. In reconstructing this microhistory, I discuss methodological advances—particularly in digital archiving and text-scanning technologies—that enable this type of (micro)historical (ethno)musicological research. Where the fragmentary archive falls silent and traces of marginal lives retreat into the shadows, I consider how attending to everyday encounters and experiences allows us to study, and hear, the past with renewed rigor and sensitivity.