This paper explores adowa, an Akan funeral music and dance tradition, through the career of Maame Ode, a contemporary Ghanaian indigenous music composer and performer. Drawing from Joshua Brew (2023), whose work on “Music Career and Sustainability” argues that sustained musical careers lead to sustained musical cultures, I examine how Maame Ode uses her agency, cultural knowledge, and digital technology to promote her career and essentially re-present adowa music to the local and global market. I argue that, aside from the rich funeral economy among the Akans in Ghana, open online communities also provide avenues for adowa to be sustained. I illustrate how the sustainability of the genre occurs on open online communities by drawing from Tony Perman’s (2020) metonymic and deixis indexical process. This paper also seeks to push scholarship in applied ethnomusicology away from generalized notions of sustainability— especially tropes of change and preservation of “local music culture”— to acknowledge new forms of hybrid music created through an artist’s agency. While contributing to ethnomusicological literature on Ghanaian music and career development, my work is relevant to the broader literature on new ways of conceptualizing sustainability, continuity, and change. This paper is based on nine months of ethnographic, historical, and archival research on communities like Maame Ode’s in contemporary Ghana.

The performance of the Kyrgyz epic Manas represents as a vivid example of a living oral tradition that continues to be practiced among performers and their audiences in contemporary Kyrgyzstan. However, the perception of traditional performance art, both by the performers and their listeners, is evolving under the influence of modern contexts. The central figure of the ethnographic documentary film is a manaschy (epic storyteller). Manaschy received the gift of storytelling from the spirits of the epic’s heroes in his youth through a visionary dream. In this way, ancestral spirits select individuals and bestow upon them the blessing to become storytellers. The film’s hero recounts his unique journey of becoming a manaschy, as well as the challenges, responsibilities, and obstacles he faces in practicing his art. The storyteller believes that the epic is a living embodiment of the spirits of the epic heroes, who continue to serve the people through the art of the epic performance. Recognizing the importance of this mission, storyteller perpetuates the old tradition by mentoring a new generation of young storytellers. This work sheds light on the dynamic interplay between tradition and modernity in the preservation and transmission of cultural heritage, offering valuable insights into the evolving role of the manaschy in contemporary Kyrgyz society. The film, titled The Path, has a total runtime of 40 minutes, is in the Kyrgyz language with English subtitles, release year 2025.

https://youtu.be/SYOzDe0Jiw4

The experiences of young Afghan musicians within the United States diaspora provide a compelling framework for analyzing the intricate interplay between cultural preservation, identity formation, the redefinition of women’s roles in Afghan music, and the impacts of forced displacement. This study focuses on a group of young Afghan musicians who fled Afghanistan due to the severe restrictions on music imposed by the second Taliban regime. Through this research, I seek to explore how these musicians navigate the challenges of exile, adapt to their new environment, and preserve their musical and cultural identities, while simultaneously redefining the role of women in Afghan music through their promotion of Afghan musical traditions in the United States. While foundational studies by scholars such as (John Baily 1999, 2005, 2011) have examined Afghan music and diaspora communities, and (Marko Kölbl 2021) has explored Afghan music in Vienna, there remains a significant gap in research on the younger generation of Afghan musicians in the United States following the resurgence of the second Taliban regime. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, participant observation, interviews, and recordings, this study highlights how music functions as a powerful medium for reconstructing identity and fostering a sense of belonging within the Afghan-American diasporic community.