Throughout the 1920s–40s, various informally trained music enthusiasts and amateur folklorists scoured California, recording the musics of its inhabitants. Working idiosyncratically at the margins of musicology, anthropology, and folklore studies, they collected songs from migrant camps, immigrant settlements, and Indigenous communities. When the discipline of ethnomusicology began to be codified in the 1950s, much of this work was left behind in favor of research methods inspired by existing practices in musicology and anthropology: long-term ethnographic fieldwork, participant-observation, and scientistic music and cultural analysis. Histories of the field tend to prioritize scholars who pioneered these standardized methods, relegating amateurs to the footnotes (Brady 1999; Nettl 2010). This paper recovers the work of these overlooked figures for what they can reveal about changing attitudes towards non-Western musics in the decades preceding the institutionalization of ethnomusicology. From the Bohemian poet, Jaime de Angulo, to Sidney Cowell, wife of modernist composer Henry Cowell, I show how their unorthodox methodologies were excluded from, but not unknown to the academic world. By engaging with archival materials, I trace an intellectual history of this undervalued sect who held a surprising amount of influence amongst the contemporary vanguard of music studies, from Charles Seeger to Mantle Hood. In doing so, I complicate received histories of the field by privileging the passionate and at-times problematic work of amateur music-ethnographers in the United States. As public scholarship assumes renewed urgency, ethnomusicologists may find new inspiration (or a reminder to take caution!) by returning to marginalized figures of the disciplinary past.

Quoting Audre Lorde in their introduction to On Decoloniality, Walsh and Mignolo remind us that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” In recent decades, higher education has undergone a rapid commodification, reshaping the landscape of learning. In the humanities, emerging technologies—such as AI chatbots—are swiftly transforming the ways we teach and learn, both inside and outside the classroom. This paper examines the role of technology and AI in ethnomusicological work, particularly in teaching and content production. The rise of AI-powered chatbots has presented both faculty and students with a new technological paradigm—one that can serve as either a powerful pedagogical tool or a disruptive force in education. In this paper I explore how this evolving landscape can be harnessed to create an innovative, productive, and collaborative learning environment that remains mindful of copyright and ethical considerations. To illustrate this potential, I share insights from a decade-long collaborative project that enables educators and students to design customizable learning experiences, empowering them to craft their own educational paths. Additionally, I expand on the concept of conversing, which I introduced in Voices of the Field (Oxford 2021), emphasizing the importance of developing cross-disciplinary communication skills and engaging diverse audiences. This paper situates technology and AI within the broader context of higher education’s commercialization, reflecting on how we might navigate these structural constraints while advancing humanistic goals. Though such efforts may not dismantle the master’s house, they hold the potential to transform it in meaningful and constructive ways.

Despite an emphasis on fieldwork with music makers, ethnomusicologists have rarely conducted fieldwork with celebrity popular musicians. In the field of celebrity studies, research methodologies have often been limited to textual analysis, related to celebrity portrayal in mainstream media (Driessens 2015). Celebrity musicians are hard to access and are often inundated with media requests, making them difficult to collaborate with for research (Aberbach and Rockman 2002). Scholars like David Pruett (2011) have modelled, however, that this type of research can be meaningful for artists and the larger scholarly field.

This presentation explores social and methodological concerns for conducting qualitative interviews with celebrity musicians, and suggests that this method can reveal truths about unstable or hidden aspects of a music industry. It draws on the experience of conducting 22 semi-structured virtual interviews with women celebrities in the Christian music industry, ranging from recording artists to megachurch worship leaders. Women are underrepresented in a range of roles in the Christian music industry (Loepp Thiessen 2022, Payne 2024), but it is difficult to understand their experience of exclusion without discussing their experiences directly. Personal and confidential correspondence can be a revealing way to understand the industry culture.

What are best strategies for interviews with celebrity artists? How can researchers respect anonymity with high profile artists? Is there the possibility for collaborative ethnography with celebrity interviewees (Lassiter 2005) despite limited accessibility? This presentation ultimately invites music researchers to utilize the qualitative interview as a tool to better understand industry power dynamics and hidden structures.

In February 2024, musical duo Estem Atabalats released “Som Valencians” (We Are Valencians) on YouTube. The song’s music video features a series of speakers who utter the word “we” directly to camera, seemingly demonstrating the Valencian community proclaimed in the song’s title. But while the speakers all use Valencian Catalan, the co-official language of the eastern Spanish region, the ways they deliver their one-word monologues differ: “natros,” “mohâtros,” “nosaltres,” “nosatros,” and “mosatros.” “Som Valencians” casts Valencian Catalan as a social-sonic practice around which a community coalesces, even if speakers vary in their engagement with the language. It also furthers debates about language’s material and sonic forces and its relationship to other sonic practices, musical or otherwise (Faudree 2012, Ochoa 2014, Samuels and Porcello 2015). In this paper, I situate “Som Valencians” as a jumping-off point to argue that ethnomusicologists must attune to the sonic factors that shape community members’ relationships with language and with one another, an attunement best framed through the sociolinguistic concept of register. Register names the ways speakers shift their language use in response to the perceived formality, neutrality, or other contexts of a communicative scenario, but it also describes the work of the ethnographer who registers these shifts in verbal and textual translations. Understanding ethnographic translational work in terms of register enables ethnographers to interrogate how language shapes communities through sound. More importantly, it positions ethnographers to treat language not as a neutral intermediary for analyzing sound, but as the grounds for reciprocity with community members.