In the mid-1960s, the mozambique, a popular Cuban dance rhythm, rose to prominence with the support of Cuban authorities as the sound of a new, revolutionary nation and an alternative to U.S. rock and roll. In the U.S., the music and its significance remain muted, as the fraught political relationship between the two countries has produced a specific, limited sound of “Cuba” made available general audiences, which (not incidentally) also limits its potential meaning. In this paper, I discuss the mozambique in the context of 21^st-century late capitalism and tourism in the circum-Caribbean, specifically in and between Havana and New Orleans, arguing for its continuing value as a robust popular art, despite its relative abandonment in popular culture. I do so through my work (as student and researcher) with Leandro Moré, a lifelong percussionist and resident of Havana who participated in the rhythm’s rise and dissemination in Cuba and abroad, and who still teaches it today. Our collaborative plan for a public-facing project that would bring the mozambique to New Orleans – a city that trades on its Caribbean connections – has thrown into new relief issues integral to the mozambique itself, including the value and meaning of participatory musicmaking and “cultural exchanges” as well as music’s relationship to place. The hurdles faced by the project continue to highlight the specific ways that potential audiences understand music and its value while also exposing the precarity of life and culture in cities oriented towards tourism.

Dammam drumming, or sinj-o dammam, is a collective musical performance central to Shia mourning ceremonies in southern Iran, particularly in the port city of Bushehr. Performed in public processions, this percussive tradition shapes the acoustic and spatial dynamics of urban mourning rituals, creating an immersive rhythmic and physical experience. Beyond its religious significance, dammam drumming is deeply intertwined with the Indian Ocean legacy of slavery in the Gulf, reflecting histories of migration and labor. While embedded in local identity, the practice resists fixed interpretation, continually shifting between religious, historical, and political meanings. This experimental documentary, Arba’in 1401, emerged from reimagining how the second episode of Nasser Taghvayi’s pioneering 1974 film, Arba’in—the earliest known audiovisual record of dammam in Bushehr—might look if made in the 2020s. Conceived in dialogue with Taghvayi’s work, Arba’in 1401 draws on my audiovisual recordings and interviews from my PhD fieldwork (2022–2023) to explore the sensory dimensions of dammam drumming. Approaching this tradition from my perspective as a woman in a historically male-dominated performance space, the documentary also situates dammam within the political context of the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, which began in late September 2022.

The traditional vocal repertoire of the Philippines’ Central Visayas encompasses linguistic traditions and subdialects, including Visayan, Bisayan, and Cebuano. This oral heritage provides a unique opportunity for comparative analysis, allowing scholars to discern normative patterns and outlier variations in pitch collections and scalar patterns across different song repertoires, geographies, and languages. In the mid-20th century, Silliman University and Indiana University supported the field recording and transcription efforts of Priscilla Magdamo. Her seminal work, "Folk Songs of the Visayas" (1957-58), comprising six volumes, stands as the largest corpus of traditional vocal repertoire in Visayan, Bisayan, and Cebuano languages transcribed by a single Philippine scholar possessing both linguistic and cultural expertise of the repertoire. Magdamo's transcriptions provide a foundational resource for scholarly analysis and exploration.

This presentation evaluates and juxtaposes various analytical approaches applied to this repertoire, drawing from the music pedagogical approach of Zoltan Kodály's pitch maps and post-tonal quantitative methodologies. Through employing contemporary analytical techniques such as tonic-centered successive-interval arrays and composite pitch collection mappings, normative patterns and outlier nuances of tonalities inherent in the Central Visayan vocal traditions can be identified. This presentation builds upon the analytic methodologies employed by the author assessing trends of other multilingual traditional vocal repertoires.

By engaging with both historical archives and contemporary analytical tools, this research serves to contribute to the preservation and appreciation of this vibrant cultural heritage for future generations of Philippine and diaspora music scholars and practitioners alike.

This research will focus on the sanshin as it was used to preserve and promote Okinawan culture. Okinawa went through many cultural challenges such as the anexation from Japan, US military presence during and after the Vietnam war, and influences from other cultures. Through these challenges the culture continues to survive and be represented by the people of Okinawa. The sanshin, originally an instrument limited to royalty, survived the cultural oppresion faced from Japan. Then after the Vietnam war it was used to create new forms of entertainment influenced by Western culture. Today the sanshin continues to be used by artists born and raised in Okinawa in modern songs showcasing the diverse cultures of Okinawa while uplifting and representing the surviving culture. Through the literacy review of works from Hideyo Konogaya, Henry Johnson, and examples of modern songs by artists such as Begin, Ozworld, and Awich I was able to understand the value of the sanshin in preserving a culture that was threatened with anihilation. Through this paper I hope to present this research in a way that ties the changes Okinawan music has had, focusing on the sanshin, and goals of the artists together to explain how this culture continues to evolve and survive. Understanding the survival of a culture like the Okinawan culture and the role of the sanshin can help future ethnomusicologists look at other cultures who have faced similar challenges in the hopes to understand its evolution and survival.