This film, which will be finished editing in May 2025, is approximately 30 minutes long and has Chinese and English subtitles.

Hani, one of the 55 ethnic minorities in the People’s Republic of China who reside in Yunnan Province, trace their origins migrated from the Tibet plateau through the Sichuan basin to the Ailao mountains. This film mainly focuses on one of the Hani Haba repertoire during the Kuzaza Festival (矻扎扎节), also known as the Sixth Month Year (六月年), one of the three major festivals of the Hani people. Due to the length of the narrative of ethnic musical epics, Hani Haba faces a grim survival situation that serves as Hani’s music and memory. By the end of the 20th century, Chinese scholars had finished the collection of Hani folk music in Yunnan, which marked the build-up of the Hani musical archives. Through interviews with the only Beima (clergy) Ma Jian Chang and the villagers of Aichun Village, one of the soundtracks is the 10-minute Hani Haba, which can only be sung by Beima during the Sixth Month (Hani calendar), aims to emphasize the dynamic nature of oral traditions in preserving cultural identity across generations. More broadly, this film tries to rely on music to convey oral narratives to maintain the coherence and continuity of the culture of minority groups in our contemporary changing world and local intangible heritage dynamics.

While Lijiang in Yunnan Province is widely recognized as the cultural heartland of the Naxi people, less attention is given to Yanjing Village (盐井 in Chinese, meaning "Salt Well") in Markam County, eastern Tibet — the only Naxi settlement in the region, home to a small community of around 1,400 Naxi people. Historically, Markam was a key stop along the ancient Tea Horse Road and a significant salt production center. The Naxi people arrived during the Mu chiefdom (1382–1723), adopting a livelihood centered on salt-making by women and horse caravanning by men. Over centuries of coexistence with Tibetans, significant cultural blending occurred, though the Naxi have largely assimilated into Tibetan cultural traditions.

Today, the Naxi people in Markam primarily speak Tibetan (with only a few retaining knowledge of the Naxi language), follow Tibetan customs and beliefs, and play a prominent role in preserving the Markham pi wang (fiddle), a celebrated Tibetan instrumental tradition. In 2006, Markam pi wang was included in China’s first batch of national intangible cultural heritage designations, with the Naxi community proudly serving as its core inheritors and representatives. This paper introduces Mr. Yang Pei, one of the contemporary Naxi representatives of the Tibetan pi wang music tradition, exploring how this heritage has been adopted, adapted, and assimilated into the Naxi people’s musical heritage and identity in Tibet.

In 2013, North Macedonia’s national public broadcaster Macedonian Radio Television (MRT) selected Macedonian singer Vlatko “Lozano” Lozanovski and Macedonian-Romani singer Esma Redžepova to represent the nation in the Eurovision Song Contest as a duo. Their song “Imperija” (“Empire”) imagines the world as one large empire, united by the power of music. However, it was widely received by Macedonians as an endorsement of the then-ruling nationalist party VMRO-DPMNE’s Skopje 2014 project, designed to give the nation’s capital Skopje a classical aesthetic through the construction of new government buildings and erection of monuments depicting historical figures from the Macedonian region. In this paper, I argue that Redžepova, the singer and humanitarian known as the “Queen of the Gypsies” (Silverman 2012), aided the North Macedonian government in promoting their imperialist agenda by posturing herself, a famous representative of Europe’s most impoverished racialized migrant community, as a figurehead of this “empire” united by music. Despite VMRO-DPMNE’s complicated treatment of Roma, Redžepova endorsed their brand of Macedonian nationalism developed in opposition to European integration, and notably amid their candidacy for EU accession, through this collaboration. Moreover, “Imperija” was met with fierce criticism from Greeks and Bulgarians upset with North Macedonia’s geopolitical claims regarding the region’s imperial history. While ethnomusicological literature on Roma has focused on narratives of resistance, acts of worldmaking, and formations of new subjectivities among Roma (Helbig 2023; Lie 2021; Costache 2018), I ultimately demonstrate how narratives of belonging among Roma have been commodified by national governments for nation-branding strategies targeting global audiences.

How does sound (mal)function to mediate, interpellate, and distribute authority and power? This paper expands on existing, albeit limited, scholarship to examine the strategic implementation of Nazi radio propaganda during WWII through Irland Redaktion, an Irish-language station founded and operated by the Schutzstaffel (SS). By analyzing a series of broadcasts that emphasized Ireland's colonial history and nationalist sentiment while avoiding overt Nazi rhetoric, the paper examines the nuanced, format-specific strategies used in an attempt to foster a sympathetic Irish neutrality untethered to Nazi social or race-based ideology.

This research underscores the complexities and challenges of sonically disseminating propaganda in a foreign context –– especially, in Ireland’s case, given the limited access to radio technology among the Schutzstaffel's target audience in the deeply anti-crown Gaeltacht –– and offers insights into the broader implications of such efforts on national identity and political alignment in an otherwise "neutral" space. The paper additionally suggests avenues for further investigation into the long-term impact of sonic wartime propaganda on Ireland’s political climate and collective memory, highlighting the delicate interplay between manipulation and resistance in the propagation of ideological narratives.