As a site for extensive research at the core of ethnomusicology, Brazil occupies an ambiguous position. On one hand, Brazil is commonly framed as a colonial Other, subjected to extractive economies of music and knowledge. On the other hand, Brazil is characterized as a cosmopolitan musical center with a massive commercial circuit that exports musics and rhythms, such as samba, capoeira, and Carnaval. This ambiguity is at once enforced and challenged by the circulation of musicians and music scholars who complicate the nation’s meanings as they navigate institutional, political, and socioeconomic boundaries. Drawing from their experiences researching in or about Brazil—on topics including racial and diasporic identities, religion, Brazilian ethnomusicology, and contemporary musical markets—each participant will offer a different angle in imagining Brazil and its music while reflecting on their academic positionality. Guiding questions include the following: What does it mean to study the country from the United States, particularly considering the long history of US imperialism and the creation of disciplinary fields and geographical imagination around Latin America? How do music studies and its institutions reproduce colonial dynamics for Latin American scholars seeking inclusion in the US academy, and what are the stakes for these scholars? How can music scholars examine musical practices in Brazil without reifying the parameters of the nation-state? Six participants whose academic trajectories transit across US and Brazilian borders will respond to these questions with short presentations.

As governments exert economic and political pressures on ethnic, gendered and racialized migrant minorities, this panel demonstrates the power of musicking to co-create new communal spaces within and around political, social and economic restrictions. Traversing diverse national horizons, these papers explore the multiple forms of sonic signification that grant migrant communities a sense of place in the context of displacement. Evicted during the Yugoslav wars, Kosovo Romani communities in Germany have leveraged musical and ritual practices to enact kin networks, share economic strategies and forge dynamic communal belonging in neighborhood spaces. Forcible expulsion of Muslim Roma and non-Roma from Greece in 1923 through the terms of the Lausanne Treaty have led to a multi-generational celebration of “immigrant” (mu[h]cir) senses of belonging. Romani female gendered musical work and social reproduction helps to secure the economic health of families as well as transmit sonic archives for patron communities. Persian female Christian immigrants to Europe and the US have created emergent religious practices that engender belonging in the face of Iranian state repression. Persian female religious musical traditions produce community-building affect that convert 6/8 dance rhythms into spiritual joy. The final study examines the experiences of diverse immigrant communities in Würzburg, Germany as they navigate policing of musicking in public spaces revealing strategies by which authorities and minorities negotiate class and color lines through sound. Together these studies demonstrate the productive qualities of musicking to generate public place-making and new political discourses in the face of restrictive economic, political and social structures.

This panel explores how ethnomusicology might productively intersect with a minor genealogy of thought in the humanities that critically rethinks the solidity (and legitimacy) of a taken-for-granted social world, through the figure of the ghost. From Derrida’s “hauntology” (1993) and Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters (1997), to tropes of specters, silences, and afterlives across critical race/ethnic studies over the last decade, ghosts and their hauntings give shape to a social theory centered on people and practices refusing to be erased. Ghosts scramble the lines between life and death, domination and resistance, memories and imaginations, human and more-than-human. Ghosts puncture modernity’s fantasy of progress and expansion. How might ethnomusicology listen with ghosts in our ears, as a critical theoretical orientation? What disciplinary exorcism might we need in order to heed our interlocutors’ own ghostly work as they sound and listen? Three case studies experiment with ways to think with and about ghosts in ethnomusicology: 1) how Taiwanese publics ritually reframe a prematurely deceased Mandopop icon, transforming her from ghost into divine presence; 2) how a Romani genocide survivor sings a duet with a 1933 vinyl record to re-animate fading histories and confront ethnoracial stereotypes that refuse to die; and 3) how everyday cacophonies on Taiwan offer a sensorial basis for a ghostly way of listening, through which people keep alive the island’s multiple counterhistories and otherwise futures. A discussant’s remarks conclude the panel, which ultimately considers the sonorous sociality between ghosts and their living counterparts.

As the political conditions under which ethnomusicologists conduct research are changing, this panel asks how the political claims made on behalf of music and sound must also necessarily change. To date, ethnomusicologists have largely affirmed the political potency of music and sound to express resistance to domination, fortify social identity and cultural recognition, produce sensations of healing and belonging, or model “otherwise” possibilities. Against this affirmative stance, the four panelists offer a more skeptical set of analytical questions. How do we evaluate “alternative” musical communities that reproduce male dominance? Why might activists subject to state surveillance react with paranoia to a simple telephone ring from an unknown caller? What are the limits of music and sound when confronting conditions of domination, inequality, and suffering in Gaza? Indeed, can music actually *do* anything? Against the valorization of music and sound as inherently liberatory or counter-hegemonic, the papers confront instances of discomfort and abuse, impotence and uncertainty. These sticky realities came to light through research on the indie music sector in São Paulo, Indigenous and settler land defenders in British Columbia, media representations of genocide and dissent, and creative multimedia projects exploring music’s radical ambiguity. As ethnomusicologists continue to wager on the political efficacy of music and sound, this panel grapples with their relative powerlessness to alter contemporary conditions that have profoundly narrowed political horizons.

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.

This paper investigates how âşık/Alevi musicians transitioned from traditional cultural roles as transmitters of Alevi religious principles to urban public intellectuals who shaped political and cultural critiques in Turkey between 1960 and 1980. It argues that the âşık/Alevi musicians secured a significant cultural role by (re)articulating the political ideologies of the left, actively participating in leftist cultural debates and, engaging with the popular music genres and artists of urban settings. Following the Second World War, many âşık/Alevi musicians who had long held intellectual authority in their communities due to their role in preserving and transmitting the religious principles of the historically oppressed Alevi community migrated to major cities alongside their communities. Therein, they fused the political foundations of the Turkish left with the rebellious traditions of the Alevi community through their music, reaching beyond the Alevi community to engage the broader Turkish public. Through their music, speeches and writings in influential periodicals, these âşıks also involved in the ongoing debate between modernism and (socialist) realism in an effort to set aesthetic standards of an emancipatory cultural agenda to the socialist movement. Additionally, many collaborated with leftist-affiliated popular musicians and competed with pioneering artists from other genres -such as arabesk- actively engaging in the aesthetic struggles over identifying “authentic” music. As a result, they secured a public recognition as intellectuals and earned a position of authority to establish the standards of the folk music worlds in the urban sphere.

This paper presents an analysis of Stars Gathering (Qunxing hui), Taiwan’s first and longest-running musical program, which aired on Taiwan Television from 1962 to 1977. The program primarily featured performances of Mandarin popular songs and played a pivotal role in shaping Taiwan’s music scene during that era. Its eclectic blend of foreign song adaptations and hybrid musical arrangements exemplified a unique form of musical cosmopolitanism, deeply tied to Taiwan’s geopolitical position during the Cold War—a connection often overlooked in existing scholarship (e.g., Shen, 2016; Hsu, 2019). Drawing on archival research and prior studies, this paper investigates how Stars Gathering’s musical cosmopolitanism was intertwined with Cold War coalition politics. The lack of audio-visual recordings and limited access to artist interviews presented challenges, which were mitigated by utilizing alternative sources such as TTV Weekly magazine, producer manuscripts, LP records, and secondary interviews. Using Martin Stokes’ (2008) theory of musical cosmopolitanism, which views music as a medium for creating new cultural worlds, and Shih Shu-mei’s (2007) concept of “multiply mediated cosmopolitanism,” which examines how Taiwanese cultural creators navigate multiple cultural references within the hegemonic frameworks of global superpowers, this paper argues that Stars Gathering reflected Taiwan’s alliances with the West and the pervasive influence of American culture. Simultaneously, it resisted U.S. cultural hegemony by incorporating elements from other allied nations and rebuilding cultural ties with Japan despite Kuomintang restrictions. Thus, Stars Gathering not only mirrored but actively engaged with Cold War coalition politics, illustrating the agency and cultural impact of its participants.

This panel explores non-verbal registers of emotion and meaning in traditions of sung poetry in Iran, Tajikistan, and Mongolia. In each case, as words cease to be intelligible or disappear altogether, it is primarily the textures, timbres, and gestures of embodied utterance that facilitate communication among, and awaken feelings within, performers and audiences. Nonetheless, words remain foundational to each performance: although poetic or ritual texts recede from semantic presence, they continue to reverberate sonically, symbolically, and energetically. Paper #1 shows how linguistic unintelligibility during Shia mourning rituals in Tehran shifts attention from ritual poetic and hagiographic texts to the sonic and sensory dimensions of grief, engendering a powerful, collectively shared atmosphere and experience. Paper #2 explores how male musicians in Tajik Badakhshan use plucked lutes in instrument-only performances to emulate and extend the vocal-poetic and affective dimensions of the traditional women’s lament-song dargīlik. Paper #3 considers Mongolian nomadic herders’ use of vowel-elongation techniques in performances of the urtyn duu song tradition to render texts unintelligible in support of metalinguistic communication with a multi-species audience. The panel concludes with comments from a discussant with expertise in the ethnomusicological study of language, emotion, and embodied practice. This panel engages with a broad interdisciplinary literature on these themes to understand how moments of linguistic unintelligibility or absence in sonic performance—whether through ritual weeping, voice-instrument surrogacy, or verbal modification—serve as powerful contexts for establishing, or reinforcing, relations of intimacy and shared feeling among those who produce and receive them.

This paper examines how incarcerated Japanese and Japanese American musicians asserted their “symbolic mobility” (Asai 2023) and rejected U.S. Americanization projects by performing Japanese military music (gunka) during World War II. Following the 1943 segregation of ostensibly disloyal “No-Nos” to the Tule Lake Relocation Center, incarcerated men covertly formed pro-Japan fraternal organizations such as the Sokuji Kikoku Hoshidan (即時歸國奉仕団) and Hokoku Seinendan (報國青年団) to contest their imprisonment. As part of their protestations, the Seinendan organized a bugle corps that paraded around the camp as part of a broader Japanese cultural training regimen. War Relocation Authority (WRA) officials responded by cracking down on bugling activities, raiding the group’s headquarters to squash “anti-American” activity. Nevertheless, the Seinendan bugle corps remained active until the end of the war. While much ethnomusicological scholarship has highlighted how music shaped wartime ethnic identity formation and national belonging for incarcerated Japanese Americans (Waseda 2005; Barbour 2014; Robertson 2017; Asai 2024), the explicitly anti-U.S. sentiments of the Seinendan suggests that music also served as a significant site of political dissent “at camp.” In this paper, I draw upon archival documents and confiscated, handwritten music notation from the U.S. National Archives to consider how Japanese military music contested WRA efforts to police "No-No" political expression. I argue that, unlike musical efforts towards cultural citizenship (Rosaldo 1997), gunka performance rejected the assimilationist agenda of the WRA, allowing incarcerated musicians to assert their symbolic mobility through physical, cultural, and political agency in the face of immobility and confinement.

The Southeast Asian country of Myanmar (also known as Burma) is controlled by a military dictatorship. The dictatorship oversees an ecosystem of cultural production that includes films, print media, standup comedy, and music recordings. These recordings, which are the focus of this presentation, are called colloquially “army songs” or “soldier songs,” and are disseminated via regime-controlled television programs and on social media. Burmese people usually dismiss all regime-produced materials as nothing but lies. I argue that army songs do include lies of commission and of omission, but they are best understood as propaganda. Scholars of musical propaganda (eg. Perris 1985, Morris 2014, Fauser 2019, Godfrey 2019, Sultanova 2025) have often declined to engage with the founding theories of propaganda studies, with the result that propaganda in music is only fuzzily understood. In this presentation I analyze several Burmese army songs using Alfred McClung’s seminal appeal-bond-commodity framework for defining propaganda, demonstrating that the army songs push a consistent commodity using number of different appeals. I contextualize these appeals by explaining how they are relevant to Burmese listeners, the intended audience for army songs. This presentation also reveals that propaganda theory, which was first developed to address government messaging in liberal democracies, is also useful in illuminating the manipulative music produced by one of the world’s most repressive governments.

The ongoing Russian occupation of Ukrainian territories has severely restricted free expression, yet music has emerged as a powerful tool of communication, resistance, and cultural continuity. This paper explores how wartime songs serve as a bridge between Ukrainians in occupied regions and those in free Ukraine, enabling the transmission of censored messages, reinforcing national identity, and sustaining a sense of shared struggle.

Drawing on case studies of songs that have circulated via digital platforms, social media, and underground networks, this study examines how lyrics, melodies, and performance contexts encode meaning that would otherwise be suppressed. Many of these songs rework historical resistance narratives—reviving folk and partisan songs or adapting pre-existing popular tunes to fit contemporary struggles. Others use metaphor, irony, and coded language to navigate censorship while delivering crucial messages of defiance, hope, and connection. Additionally, this presentation explores how songs serve as a means of communication on the military front, facilitating the transmission of messages between armies.

By analyzing the ways in which music functions as a covert yet effective mode of communication between occupied and free territories, this study contributes to broader discussions on the role of sound in information warfare, cultural resilience, and transnational solidarity in conflict settings.

Shell shock, the neurasthenia (nervous exhaustion) diagnosis of World War I, was the first great test for musico-therapy, as the early field was then called. For scientific medicine, shell shock was a dubious condition, and musico-therapy a dubious treatment. Doctors initially believed that shell shock resulted from brain injuries incurred from exploding shells. That organic basis became increasingly doubtful when medical examination did not reveal brain or nerve lesions. Medical humanists have argued that medicine expects symptoms—bodily signs—to signify identifiable medical conditions (Zilcosky 2021, Belling 2012). Neurasthenic patients frustrated that expectation by presenting with medical symptoms—tremors, palpitations, insomnia, memory loss—for which no organic source could be found. This frustration of bodily semiotics made physicians uncertain whether the symptoms they observed were fundamentally physical or psychological. They faced a similar uncertainty regarding musico-therapy. While the therapists insisted their treatment physically soothed shellshocked nerves, physicians wondered if it was mostly a “mental salve.” I draw on William Davis’s (1987, 1993) and Annegret Fauser’s (2013) work on early twentieth century musico-therapy, the published work of musico-therapists such as Eva Augusta Vescelius, and WWI-era news reports of musical treatment to reveal musico-therapy’s neurological strategies of self-validation. I argue that shell shock and musico-therapy legitimized one another within a scientific-medical establishment that doubted whether the condition or its treatment warranted medical attention. My work contributes to medical ethnomusicology by offering WWI musico-therapy as a case of musical negotiation between patients and scientific medicine in the mind-body borderlands where traumatic conditions reside.

Ethnic Armenians constituted a sizeable minority in twentieth century Baku, Azerbaijan. They were particularly prominent as instrumentalists, performing and recording with renowned singers in state-sponsored ensembles as well as informal settings. This community reached its peak in the 1970s, before ethnic tensions spurred mass emigration. The pogroms against the Armenian population in January 1990 ended the Armenian presence in the city. Members of this community, now living in a distinct diaspora within Russia, Armenia, and the United States, are currently involved in digitizing and archiving the musical culture of Armenian Baku through social media networks such as VKontakte, Facebook, and YouTube. In particular, the “Clarinet Caucasus” YouTube account has digitized recordings of well known members of this Armenian musical community, including many amateur home audio and video recordings of performances. Spanning nearly a century, these digital archives and musician-specific memorialization pages serve as a digital record of the Armenian musicking community in Azerbaijan. Considering these digital repositories and how members of the Baku Armenian diaspora experience these recordings, I explore how these digital archives enable acts of remembering and digital diasporic intimacy. Listening to these Armenian musicians of the past elicits karot, the particularly Armenian sense of loss and longing, but also of perseverance. A study of these digital memorialization projects, and the reactions these archives create, reveals the digitally mediated construction of homeland, the reification of a chronological and social place through preservation of sound and image.

While conducting research in Yale’s archive of Choctaw Historical Papers to answer long-standing questions of authorship, I found three original copies of Choctaw hymns by missionary Loring S. Williams that had been left aside and/or changed to such a degree that these early versions no longer exist in the daily usage or memory of the Nation. This paper connects one of these hymns, a Closing Conference hymn written for a meeting to address secular business that ended with all-night singing and prayer, to its modern counterparts for use in worship by the same composer. In doing so, I examine the evolving use and text of the Closing Hymn genre. As I argue, the gradual evolution of the structure, content, and use of this hymn demonstrates the changing purpose, function, and audience of hymns within the increasingly-Christianized portion of the Choctaw Nation. I draw on autoethnographic reflections as a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, in addition to Victoria Lindsay Levine’s history of Choctaw music (1990) and Sarah Eyerly’s historical documentation and understanding of music in Indigenous mission communities (2020). Additionally, I examine modern religious and social usage of Indigenous-Missionary music, drawing on Tara Browner’s work concerning Indigenous ownership of non-material culture (2000). Ultimately, this project explores how the changing identity of the Choctaw Nation from the first mission schools, through forced removal, to the revitalization of the Choctaw language, subtly shaped the construction of hymns within the Nation.

Discos Smith was a Peruvian record label based out of Lima that operated from the late 1950’s to the early 1970’s. In 1989, 500 master tapes from Discos Smith’s catalog were acquired by the American label Arhoolie Records, containing approximately 2150 individual recordings. These tapes were transferred to Smithsonian Folkways Recordings when SFR eventually acquired Arhoolie Records, and the tapes are now stored in a warehouse outside of Washington D.C. In 2024, I was able to examine roughly 20% of the tapes, documenting the potential contents through the marginalia on their boxes. This examination suggested that there is a rich historical record of the musical character of mid-20th century Lima contained on the tapes with repertoire spanning Andean folk dances, urban criollo musics, Afro-Latin genres from the Caribbean, and early Peruvian rock and roll. Only a fraction of these recordings have ever been released and without substantial restoration the tapes will literally moulder away in obscurity. However, there is no guarantee that these recordings are still viable or that the expense of restoring them would be justified or recouped. Consequently, the Discos Smith collection exists in an existential limbo, possibly containing a rich historical record but also possibly being too damaged to restore. Through this case study, this paper examines the obligations ethnomusicologists have to preserving historical records of musical practice, how commercial discourses around recordings of music define the value of their contents, and what ethical complications arise when considering the fate of the Discos Smith tapes.

By examining the interplay of social and environmental issues in different forms of music-making, this panel asks: What can we learn by attending to musical and sonic experiences at a time that increasingly feels like the end of the world? In answering that question, we explore musical mediations of environmental struggles within Earth’s north and south polar regions, focusing on how complexities of climate change and extractivism offer new but uncomfortable, emplaced cultural experiences that spur sonic actions and musicalized debates. In particular, this panel addresses how Greenland/Kalaallit Nunaat’s Inuit musical expressions contribute to public discourses of extractivism; how a goavddis (Sámi drum) created in the 1980s by Niillas Somby exemplifies resilience in the face of extractivism and climate change; how the figure of el petrolero (the petroleum worker) can reflect gendered and scalar value systems around weather sounding practices in Magallanes and Chilean Antarctica; and how Mapuche ül metal uses loudness, distortion and screaming as ways of resisting colonialism and extractivism in Chile. Through theories of extractivism and extrACTIVISM (Willow 2019), we delve into how histories of polar places and non-sustainable environmental practices inform musical aesthetics and activism as well as related experiences of the human and non-human (Moisala 2024) in contexts of popular music recordings and media, and Indigenous musical instruments. This panel thereby expands ethnomusicological studies of the entanglement of musical expressions in multiple environmental crises and provides the first instance in ecomusicology that case studies from the Arctic and Antarctic regions are put into dialogue.

Scholars of music/sound and gentrification have recently argued that while shifts in soundscape must be counted among the violences of “racial/spatial dispossession” (Zanfagna and Werth 2021), numerous communities of color persist against the erasure of their histories through musical or sonic practice (Martin 2024, Summers 2021). While it is crucial to highlight how artists and communities resist gentrification through sound, we must also ask how musical practices shift in response to violent displacement and spatial reconfiguration, and concomitantly how communities navigate the sonic losses entailed by such violence. Drawing on the work of Jeff Todd Titon and others that understand musical practices as dynamic “ecologies” to be sustained, rather than preserved (2021; see also Cooley 2020), I examine how the reconfigurations characteristic of “urban renewal” shift musical practice by changing its spatial ecology. In particular, I focus on the Cabo Verdean and Cabo Verdean American communities of New Bedford, MA, many of whose longstanding musical support network of social clubs, benefit societies, bars, and restaurants have closed in the wake of “urban renewal,” highway-building, and disinvestment. I argue that my Cabo Verdean/American interlocutors engage with the violence of “racial/spatial” capitalism against this community, in part, through discomfort with how their music resonates in spaces not built to accommodate it. Further, I show that “resistance” to this violence is not always audible as protest, but also emerges in attempts to reconfigure and rebuild sound spaces towards present and future musical sustainability.

In the last five decades, Danza Azteca (Aztec dance) has become prominent in Chicago's Mexicano-Latino community and has thrived under community outreach and youth education. This paper argues that Danza Azteca participants in Chicago utilize the practice as a catalyst for resilience, resistance, and respite, navigating an ongoing transnational push-and-pull dialogue with what Walter D. Mignolo first coined as the coloniality of being. I highlight Chicago's reverence as a "hidden Tenochtitlan" and analyze how external and internal senses of place are cultivated internationally and intertemporally across geographic locations, inviting a broad range of participants. Finally, I explore authenticity discourses amongst Danza Azteca groups in Chicago, explicating how an Aztec identity is navigated, imagined, and critiqued amongst participants. Ultimately, I reflect on what it means "to be" as a Mexican in Chicago, incorporating theorizations of sonic disruption as ontological disruption and decolonial strategy.

To do so, I draw upon several interviews as well as participation in velaciónes, celebrations, and performances throughout Chicago. While a handful of studies trace Danza Azteca narratives and their complexities in the United States (Armstrong 1985; Luna 2012; Huerta 2019; Nielsen 2017), few incorporate the concretized experiences of danzantes in Chicago into the current discourses and transnational dialogues impacting Danza Azteca group members. This paper fills this gap in the literature by exploring the particular effects that Danza Azteca spaces have on individuals as they navigate their region-specific identities whilst attempting to grapple with enduring transcultural and intergenerational colonial legacies.

This presentation examines the placeness and cultural geography of the commercialized island reggae by Pacific Islander Americans in the Los Angeles reggae music scene. On the continent of the United States, the island reggae of Los Angeles serves as an Indigenous medium of storytelling for Pacific Islanders to express their metropolitan and interracial experiences. Since its emergence in the 1990s, island reggae has fused Jamaican roots reggae and R&B with traditional island music, sharing spaces and sounds with diasporic Africans. As the genre is commercialized, it now occupies performance spaces in the Southern Californian music scene alongside roots reggae and reggae-rock, the latter predominantly influenced by Caucasian Americans. This commercialization has created a prosperous Islanders’ space in the scene but also led to criticisms of inauthenticity, highlighting the complex interracial political dynamics Pacific Islanders navigate in Los Angeles. Despite this, their narratives and musical expressions remain underexplored in music and spatial studies of interracial interactions (Johnson 2013; Alvarez 2022). How do Islanders articulate their shared spaces and sounds with diasporic Africans through island reggae within the capitalist framework of Los Angeles? The case study focuses on the 2025 Marley’s Festival in Long Beach, a significant event celebrating Bob Marley’s legacy, where roots reggae, reggae-rock, and island reggae are performed concurrently. I argue that Islanders’ interracial interactions remain rooted in practices of Indigenous relationality and self-determination despite its commercialization. The presentation advocates for studying the interracial experience as the new continental localness of diasporic Indigeneity.

Since the mid-19th century, Japan and the United States have participated in political and cultural exchanges that have influenced Japanese identity. The 20^th century especially saw a stark rise in the popularity of Americana in Japan. Drawing from fieldwork done in Japan, I argue that in performing, consuming, and interacting with bluegrass and old-time music, participants cultivate individual and communal identities in uneasy dialogue with imagined class-based, regionalized, and racialized iterations of Americanness. These imagined iterations of Americanness, both temporally contingent and enmeshed in broader cosmopolitan dynamics, demonstrate the multifaceted nature of identity. By focusing on the imagination, I attend to the complex processes through which Japanese musicians and enthusiasts constitute their identities, investigating how transnational imaginaries are tied to constructions of Americanness yet simultaneously rooted in Japan. To do so, I identify expressions of personal significance, communal meanings, and anxieties connected to participating in these music cultures. In this paper, I focus on divergent meanings tied to imaginaries cultivated within bluegrass and old-time music by highlighting periods of engagement that correlate with heightened geopolitical encounters between Japan and the United States, such as the Japanese anti-Vietnam war protests and accompanying Folk Boom in the 1960s-70s. I suggest that the history of bluegrass is also a Japanese history, furthering an ongoing conversation that repositions bluegrass as a global music. In doing so, I continue conversations within ethnomusicology that examine Japanese consumption and performance of transnational cultural forms while pushing back on overly particularizing discourses of Japanese cultural uniqueness.

This paper investigates how sound technology shapes jazz performances at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City, with a focus on Meyer Sound Laboratories's Constellation adjustable acoustics system. Described by critic Alex Ross as "the acoustic equivalent of Photoshop," Constellation is an advanced audio technology that uses a network of microphones, speakers, and digital processing to dynamically alter a room's acoustics--simulating acoustic environments ranging from small, intimate clubs to large, reverberant concert halls. At Jazz at Lincoln Center's Appel Room, the system employs 122 speakers and 40 microphones to shape the sonic environment in real-time. Building on three years of ethnographic fieldwork, I analyze how the pursuit of "pure" sound that is simultaneously materially vibrant and mathematically objectified reflects alignments with raced and gendered ideologies of listening. I show how these practices align with Western epistemologies while complicating jazz's Black cultural particularity. The findings illuminate the cultural and political implications of sonic mediation in contemporary jazz spaces, contributing to ethnomusicology and sound studies. By examining the design and implementation of sound reinforcement systems, this paper reveals how technoscientific decisions about acoustics are shaped by broader cultural discourses of race, identity, and authenticity in jazz performance. Through interviews with sound engineers and musicians, I demonstrate how these practices shape perceptions of musical authenticity in ways that intersect with historical patterns of racialized listening and urban spatial organization. This paper offers new insights into the entanglement of sound, technology, and race in live music settings.

During the protracted struggle to establish jazz studies programs at universities across North America in the late 1960s and 1970s, many Black jazz educators emerged as interlopers, disruptors, and fugitive pedagogues. This network of subversive educators—including Nathan Davis, Archie Shepp, Max Roach, David Baker, and Randy Weston—functioned as both an above-ground and underground guerrilla movement, striving to integrate Black aesthetics into Eurocentric institutional spaces. While these educators embraced a diverse range of sometimes contradictory ideological commitments, they remained united by the transformative potential of Black music-making as an alternative epistemology. Following Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, I conceptualize this cadre's cultural and pedagogical labor as part of a university undercommons. This jazz educational undercommons represents a material and ontological realm of resistance and subversion within and beyond traditional educational power structures.

While the educators mentioned above are jazz luminaries who exemplify social agents with varying degrees of fame, status, and recognition, I draw on Nathan Davis’s archives at the University of Pittsburgh to center a lesser-known figure within the jazz educational undercommons that highlights the transformative potential of untold historiographies. I begin the paper by examining the theoretical and socio-historical foundations of the jazz educational undercommons, then trace resonant lineages from the 19th century and connect them to Davis's innovative initiatives. Ultimately, the jazz educational undercommons serve as a historiographical framework that reclaims the radical potential of jazz education and provides an alternative theoretical perspective that challenges Eurocentric narratives.

The Pan Afrikan People’s Arkestra was founded in 1961 by Horace Tapscott (1934–1999), a pioneering African American musician and community organizer working in Los Angeles. During a period when the Central Avenue music scene that Tapscott grew up in was becoming increasingly dispersed, he conceptualized the Arkestra as a community ensemble that began with the mission of preserving Black arts by playing music of unknown composers in free public concerts.
Tapscott’s work offers a window into the power of music to build community, claim space, and cultivate political agency for artists. The Arkestra’s creative practice of collective improvisation lends insight into the philosophical foundations of L.A.-based community arts movements during a period of volatile racial politics marked by the Watts Rebellion of 1965 and a renaissance of Black cultural activism. This paper considers the Arkestra’s music as a hybrid form that responds to the social contexts of the 1960s and 1970s in South Los Angeles, expressing conceptual correlations between the aesthetics of free jazz and the politics of Black radicalism and self-determination.
Drawing from the Horace Tapscott papers at UCLA and interviews with Arkestra musicians, the paper highlights contributions of individuals such as Linda Hill (d. 1987), a founding member of “the Ark” who spearheaded initiatives to develop its social and educational reach, and Samuel Browne (1908–1991), a music teacher at Jefferson High School who set the template of learning and mentorship inherent in the ensemble which lives on and continues to nurture emerging artists in Los Angeles today.

This paper aims to grasp how Blackness was understood in colonial Korea by focusing on the African American music genre, jazz. In the early 20th century, Korea faced a complex situation in which colonialism and modernity were intertwined. A variety of foreign cultural influences were introduced into Korea, and the terms representing the sociocultural changes, such as modern girl, modern boy, café, and dance hall, became pervasive. In this context, the term jazz embraced important meanings as it was used for jazz song, which was one of the popular music genres embracing all “Western” musical elements in colonial Korea. While black stereotypes were pervasive in colonial Korea, some Korean musicians pursued the African American style of jazz and incorporated aspects of Blackness into their music by utilizing jazz languages, such as the blue note and scat singing. Some of the most talented musicians were often compared to African American jazz musicians; for example, Son Mok-in was described as Duke Ellington of Joseon. The Afro-Asian connection has been examined by scholars, and terms such as “Afro-Orientalism” are used to describe Asians as allies against the imperialist (see Du Bois; Mullen). However, there are complex dynamics involved in understanding Blackness among Asians, especially in colonial Korea. I argue that jazz is an important medium for grasping why and how Korean people’s understanding of Blackness is not one-dimensional but multidimensional. Consequently, the study aims to contribute to the discourse of the Black-Asian connection.

This panel brings together four papers that examine different locales of jazz performance and how their musical and community practices participate in the production of space. Space encompasses physical location, cultural expression, and socioeconomic relations and has been theorized in human geography and ethnomusicology. Drawing on the mission statement of the SEM Jazz Special Interest Group, the authors connect theories of space to African American studies and recognize the contested nature of the term “jazz” as well as the importance of framing jazz studies within a larger discourse of Black musical traditions. Drawing from a diverse range of methods such as ethnography, archival research, and historical analysis, panelists seek to answer the following questions: how has jazz practice in a variety of contexts–from Accra to New Orleans to Chicago to Pittsburgh–produced collectivities through its reclaiming of urban space? What are the impediments to such placemaking? How does musical space encrust or sediment archives and history? How does place manifest affectively in phenomenological experience? Due to the expansive literature on space, we have created a reading list to focus our discussions of jazz venues, performance, and placemaking. A few of these works include, Jazz Places: How Performance Spaces Shape Jazz History (Teal, 2021), Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place (Roane, 2023), The Jazz Bubble: Neoclassical Jazz in Neoliberal Culture (Chapman, 2018), and Loft Jazz: Improvising New York in the 1970s (Heller, 2016), Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra: Five Musical Years in Ghana (Feld, 2012).

The influence of colonial legacies on Ghanaian music, particularly in church worship and choral traditions, remains a subject of debate. While British missionaries introduced hymnody and Western choral structures, Ghanaian musicians have actively reshaped these elements to reflect their cultural and spiritual identities. Rather than simply preserving colonial-era forms, Ghanaian worship and choral traditions represent a fusion of musical practices that foster inclusivity, community engagement, and artistic innovation. This panel explores how Ghanaian musicians have redefined their sacred and choral soundscapes through adaptation and hybridity. The first presentation, “Beyond Missionary Legacies: Examining the Musical Practices in Ghanaian Methodist Worship,” highlights how hymnody has merged with indigenous forms such as Ebibindwom, Singing Bands, and contemporary Praise and Worship styles, creating an evolving, accessible tradition. The second paper, “Cultural Identity and Future Directions in Ghanaian Choral Music,” examines how youth engagement, technological advancements, and global collaborations shape the balance between Western and indigenous influences in Ghanaian choral music. The final presentation, “Colonial Residue or Sheer Love for Music? G.F. Handel in Ghanaian Choral Art Music,” investigates the sustained performance of Handel’s oratorios in Ghana, questioning whether this reflects colonial remnants or Ghana’s broader ethos of musical inclusivity. Together, these studies challenge colonial narratives, illustrating how Ghanaian musicians actively shape their artistic legacies by blending inherited and indigenous traditions into a dynamic and evolving musical landscape.

From traumas experienced by undergraduate voice students to opera singers’ exploitation in their Resident Artist contracts to the (in)visibilization of trans singers in institutional DEI initiatives, this panel addresses the multilayered harms young singers endure in the early stages of their careers. Following important scholarship that considers musical and acoustical responses to trauma, and its reparative potentialities, we examine what happens when music and musical environments are the sites of trauma. Our focus on early-career singers experiencing normalized abuses of power, exploitation, and invisibilization in their training and pre-professional experiences, takes as apodictic that trauma is socioculturally constructed (Alexander 2004). Centering musicians’ emotional lives (Rogers 2021), we highlight systemic oppressions of class, race, gender, and dis/ability by critiquing institutionalized power relations, structural modes of operation, and built environments. Over time, these shared traumatic experiences contribute to a shared sociocultural identity. The opening paper interrogates trauma and tribalism in undergraduate voice programs, arguing that voice training often creates a cult-like atmosphere that isolates students in toxic, insular environments. The second paper analyzes young artists’ exploitation and trauma in Resident Artist Programs, through the lens of “insidious trauma.” The final paper posits a care ethics-informed framework to assess the implementation and efficacy of DEI initiatives, understood as reparative measures, in American opera houses, highlighting a particular initiative focused on trans singers. This research collectively aims to critique systems of oppression within the opera industry and its pipeline, validate lived experiences, and posit concrete, actionable steps towards solutions.

The Gullah-Geechee Ring Shout Tradition (RST) is Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) of the southeastern United States with roots in West Africa and influence across contemporary music, from jazz to hip hop. In 2024, we formed a Research-Practice Partnership (RPP) with HBCU scholars and active RST practitioners. Our shared interest is to address challenges to sustaining the RST including (1) lack of intergenerational transmission and (2) limited economic opportunities. In 1980, Art Rosenbaum (UGeorgia) brought national attention to the RST, which had been a private practice shared among family members in their local church. Numerous albums, books, and documentaries followed that helped to preserve the tradition; however, award-winning organizations like the McIntosh County Shouters still struggle with sustainability. What is the future of the RST? Its legacy has been absorbed to some extent by the commercial recording industry and new Europeanized-musical interpretations. In 2019, the Kronos Quartet performed "Testimony" by Charlton Singleton, and in 2024, the Atlanta Symphony performed “Ring Shout” by Carlos Simon for Black History Month. To better understand, African-centered approaches to sustaining traditional music and dance practices, our team including members of three Gullah arts organizations visited Belize and Nigeria to interface with communities and universities actively engaged in sustaining UNESCO-recognized ICH traditions. This 90-minute workshop will include an interactive demonstration of the Ring Shout and guided participatory discussions of African-centered interventions for sustaining ICH in the United States, noting that the US is not a party to the 2003 UNESCO Convention that 161 countries have ratified.

Music scholars track multiple ways people wield music in cultural conflicts. When communities frame political differences in moral terms, cultural, racial/ethnic, and class signifiers invoked by music enhance this framing and foster belonging. Artists and audiences leverage music to crystallize critiques, draw boundaries, and discredit the positions of imagined others. This roundtable gathers scholars of diverse traditions, each of whom centers the ways both artists and listeners deploy complex, sometimes conflicted, moral reasoning. We advocate for ethnographic approaches in understanding and analyzing these phenomena and the debates they support in various public spheres.

Presenters analyze (1) French media condemnations of Aya Nakamura’s 2024 Olympics performance as un-French; (2) how transnational networks of white nationalist activists recode recordings to their own ideological ends; (3) how Turkish artists negotiate top-down state initiatives and grassroots opponents; (4) how digital technologies affect collective practices of signification as DIY gains new significance within US political discourses; (5) how Indigenous musicians in South Asia familiarize global audiences with human rights abuses during the Indo-Naga conflict; and (6) how Greek nightclubs maintain cultural intimacies based on rigid heteronormativity and white nationalism, conveying anti-globalist aesthetics. Together, these case studies explore how we might recenter music as an underanalysed form of moral reasoning in conflicts understood as “culture wars.” Using music as both a form of expression and a method of investigation, we seek to account for making and listening together, moving towards a cohesive approach to musical practices as simultaneously representing, circulating, and acting in cultural conflicts.

This panel examines how songs in Jewish diasporic languages—specifically Ladino and Yiddish—function as articulations of resistance, solidarity, and counter-hegemonic Jewish belonging in contemporary musical practice. Due to pressures of assimilation and genocidal destruction, these languages increasingly function within a "postvernacular" mode, where the performative act of using the language becomes more significant than its semantic meaning. Within this context, we analyze how Jewish diaspora language songs are mobilized to challenge various forms of erasure and structural violence, both within and beyond Jewish communities. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from diaspora and postcolonial studies, we examine how these musical practices construct new forms of political solidarity across racial, ethnic, and religious boundaries. The first paper examines how Ladino liturgical songs in Seattle's Sephardic community preserve communal identity and resist cultural erasure through continued ritual performance; the second explores the intersections of Black and Yiddish music through an autoethnographic lens to examine diasporic identity and anti-racist resistance; and the final paper investigates how contemporary Yiddish songs express solidarity with Palestinians while carefully navigating questions of positionality. By bridging Jewish music studies with contemporary critical cultural studies frameworks, we aim to open new analytical possibilities to examine how musical practices in minority Jewish languages negotiate complex intersections of religion, race, coloniality and gender/sexuality in different contexts. This intervention illuminates how postvernacular musical practice serves both cultural preservation and social change, contributing to broader conversations about diasporic belonging, cultural memory and the politics of minority languages.

Musical repertoires are regularly paired with geographical and cultural enclosures—ethnonational delineations, mappings of minority populations—in ways that can both reinforce and contest the seemingly stable borders drawn by politicians, linguists, and ethnographers. These musical cartographies have always been subject to oversimplification, and recent histories of accelerated displacement, migration, and transsettlement—as well as the advent of digital cultures and cybercommunities—demand even more attention to the intricate and mercurial pathways of cultural interaction, synthesis, and circulation that underlie these mappings. This panel offers inroads in unpacking the contradictions, ambiguities, and dilemmas that result from considering musical and linguistic repertoires both locally and in terms of larger ethnonational constructs. Focusing on the former Ottoman lands of Eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus, the panel’s speakers explore zones of historical and ongoing contact among speakers of Armenian, Georgian, Russian, multiple varieties of Kurdish, Turkish, Arabic, Persian, and Aramaic, among other languages. The first paper considers attempts to challenge the dominance of Indo-European linguistics at the turn of the twentieth century through a turn to sonic archaeology and the intertwined musics of the Caucasus. The second extends the interplay between ethnonationalist geographies and macroregional concepts such as maqam to uniquely Kurdish positionalities. Finally, the third paper argues for the interdependence of bounded linguistic and musical spheres across demarcations of adjacent regional identities, with special attention to Qaderi Sufi rituals and Kurdish wedding celebrations in Turkey.

Following the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, popular music and its associated entertainment industry were banned. In the shadow of post-revolutionary government penalties, a once-vibrant public musical life was relegated indoors to black-market VHS recordings produced abroad and the auditory remnants of the past—music cassettes. This paper draws on ethnographic interviews with five middle-class women whose twenties—a crucial period in their lives for the development of their sense of self and womanhood—coincided with the Pahlavi era boom of “Iranian pop” (musiqi-ye pāp). Inspired by coeval Western popular music and portraying an emancipated female identity, Iranian pop was danced by these women in progressive venues such as discos and nightclubs. Building on previous literature (Breyley 2010, Hemmasi 2020) and supported by an ethnography of these women, focusing on what I call their “musical everydayness” in pre-revolutionary Tehran, I argue that Iranian pop provided an “atmospheric situation” (Riedel 2019) in which women could construct and articulate their “Iranian modern womanhood.” I use this term to describe a state of engaging in social settings with a bodily presence beyond traditional boundaries, facilitated through an increased agency in negotiating feminine body in mixed-gender public venues. Drawing on ethnography and theories of music and identity (DeNora 1999) and music and “the collective” (Shelemay 2011), I then contend that Iranian pop continued to be consumed after the revolution as a medium enabling the creation of a lost social environment tied to “Iranian modern womanhood”, within closed doors to continue embodying pre-revolutionary identity.

Sufism, which has deep roots in Iranian culture and history, has experienced significant transformations since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, particularly in relation to the status of Sufi women. Ethnomusicologists have extensively studied Sufi women’s leadership across various regions of the world, yet the status of Iranian Sufi women remains understudied. This paper investigates the evolving status and roles of women in the Qadiriyya Sufi order within the contemporary socio-cultural context of Sanandaj, Iran. At the intersection of religious practices and gender norms, this study examines the shift of women from passive participants to active leaders in a traditionally male-dominated domain. By focusing on a case study of Khalifah Fouzieh, a female Sufi master, along with a literature review and three months of ethnographic fieldwork in 2023, I argue that Sufi women challenge gender-specific limitations to assert their spirituality and authority within the order. They utilize music, protest-oriented ritual practices, and social media platforms to claim agency in both public and virtual spaces. Indeed, they break policies on religious minorities, gender limitations, and gender segregation laws which were imposed by the government on Iranian women since the 1979 revolution. Ultimately, by centering Iranian Sufi women as pivotal agents within Qadiriyya rituals, it highlights musical and religious practices as transformative forces shaping and changing gender norms and women’s societal status in contemporary Iran.

Multimedia supplement:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1_jO4hId2B_9-bKXLPLqhrOxdm1dtlbbi?usp=drive_link

In The Story of Daughters of Quchan, the Iranian historian Afsaneh Najmabadi investigates the necessity of “writing women into the history of Iranian modernity and writing a gendered history of that experience” (1998: 9). This idea, foundational to Najmabadi’s influential career, continues to reverberate today as efforts to include women in the histories of Iranian music gain traction in a limited, though flourishing subfield of inquiry. Yet, musicologists like Marcia Citron have long argued that in adding women’s names to music histories and canons, the “why must be addressed […] otherwise, women’s accomplishments remain window dressing or token contributions” (2007: 210-211). My paper juxtaposes these scholars’ ideas with my ongoing ethnographic research with Iranian female instrumentalists to elucidate how ethnographic research, typically concerned with the recent past, could inform the future historiographies of women and music in Iran. I propose that a dual examination of female musicians’ life stories alongside a critical analysis of their musical performances not only opens new spaces for women’s inclusion in the canons and histories of Iranian music but also interrogates the underlying assumptions that have historically marginalized women from realms of musical recognition and authority. Therefore, by framing female musicians as both women and skillful musicians, ethnography attends to the intricate intersections of gender and musical authority to reveal and challenge ways in which male hegemony perpetuates women’s exclusion despite occasionally recognizing a select few women’s musical achievements.

This paper examines the emergence and evolution of alternative R&B as a genre that challenges and redefines traditional conceptions of Black musical aesthetics, identity, and cultural consciousness. Rooted in the socio-political legacy of blues and the sonic innovations of contemporary R&B, alternative R&B diverges from mainstream R&B by incorporating elements of electronic music, jazz, and soft rock while adopting introspective and subversive lyrical themes. The genre represents a shift from Contemporary and Traditional R&B’s romantic, hyperfeminine and hypermasculine tropes to a more fluid and experimental articulation of Blackness, gender, and sexuality.

This paper highlights how alternative R&B embodies what is termed ‘New Black Consciousness’—a contemporary Black identity that resists fixed racial, gendered, and sexual boundaries. This concept, influenced by Alexis De Veaux’s theorization of new Blackness and Stuart Hall’s notion of identity as unfixed, illustrates how alternative R&B artists navigate and express multifaceted experiences of Blackness that challenge hegemonic norms.

By situating alternative R&B within the broader historical continuum of Black musical traditions, this study underscores its implications for ethnomusicology. It asserts that alternative R&B is not merely a genre shift but a cultural movement that signifies as a reconfiguration of Black artistic expression, offering a new sonic and ideological framework that resonates with contemporary Black diasporic realities. Ultimately, this paper argues that alternative R&B stands as a radical and necessary intervention in Black popular music, affirming the genre’s role in shaping new understandings of race, gender, and sexuality in the 21st century.

The speculative endeavors of Black Americans have recently gained widespread acknowledgement due to increased awareness of the Afrofuturist movement. Scholars such as Jayna Brown (2021) and Isiah Lavender III (2019) have historicized and expanded upon Afrofuturism by linking it to works that predate and exceed the term, situating it within a centuries-old lineage of Black speculative thought. I connect these speculative practices to the concept of uchronia as theorized by Amy Ransom (2010): postmodern alternate histories whose relationships to the time and history we know are often obscure and subversive. As an example, I take up the work of Swiss avant-garde metal band Zeal & Ardor. Manuel Gagneux, a Black Swiss-American musician, started the project in 2013 after 4chan users suggested he combine black metal with “nigger music.” The albums Devil Is Fine (2016), Stranger Fruit (2018), and Zeal & Ardor (2022) hybridize Black American spirituals and work songs with menacing heavy metal sounds, scoring a uchronia wherein enslaved Black people rise up against all worldly and divine masters through Satanic rite. Replete with occult imagery, blastbeats, fuzzed-out guitars, and screaming, the songs often seem to speak simultaneously to Black pasts, presents, and futures—as well as to timelines we do not know. I argue that this uchronian slippage between timelines reveals similarly dark speculative visions embedded in the very historical material Gagneux drew upon, illustrating both the historicity of the Black uchronia, and the recursive process at its core.

Among Black Banjo players in the U.S., performing often involves navigating the tension between honoring ancestral memory and confronting the white gaze. Carrying the legacy of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, the string band, New Dangerfield represents a new chapter in the Black Banjo Renaissance. Living in the wake of the Drops requires members of New Dangerfield to reconfigure themselves beyond spectacle of a Black string band. For them, songwriting and arranging with the ancestors in the archives evoke a numinous presence, channeling the banjo’s ase —the spiritual power embedded in the instrument and summoned by the musician— to produce sacred musical offerings. This paper presentation builds upon the theory of “Bodylands” set forth by Ana Maurine Laura, which calls for an investigation of the relationships and simultaneous co-constructions of beings and the lands across/through/on which these entities exist. I extend her framework to propose “Black Banjo Bodylands,” arguing that the Renaissance reveals both memories and tensions embedded in the instrument’s fraught history. This presentation focuses on reflections from one of New Dangerfield’s members’ performance. In the performance, her use of the banjo to conjure her own ancestral bodylands, through Raleigh, Brooklyn, Toronto, and St. George’s, are met with palpable frictions of the white gaze. These frictions emerge throughout elements such as culturally insensitive stage decorations and infantilizing audience engagement. This dynamic site sets the stage for my larger project, Black Banjo Bodylands, which examines the places where the banjo, contemporary Black bodies, histories, politics, and spiritual influences converge.

Contemporary Christian Music is a homogenous musical genre largely defined by its audience, Evangelical Christians, rather than by its sound which closely resembles pop/rock. Front-running artists in the genre often differ little in style, instrumentation, song structure, chord progression, and even in their visual elements such as clothing and lighting. These performances also have standardized posture: listeners and performers alike are posed in an almost trance-like state where their arms are raised, their bodies are prone, seemingly positioned in a physiological manifestation of belief, leaning forward and upward towards the Father who reigns in Heaven. Drawing on Nina Eidsheim’s listening-to-listening framework (Eidsheim 2018) and Wallmark and Fink’s exploration of the physical significance of tone (2018) this paper defines the creation of a musical belief system imbedded with fixed timbres, repetition, and a strong relationship with Biblical text.

Following ethnographic research conducted at two Lancaster County, Pennsylvania mega-churches, this paper considers how the “thick event” (Eidsheim 2015) of worship concerts leads to an enchantment with both the repertoire and the performance which could reflect a sense of belief or relationship with the Divine (Gell 1992). Ultimately, this paper considers how sound contributes to the making of a belief system contemplating the cultural environment of the live spaces where this musicking occurs (Adorno 1945) and the “mythical sense of belief” inherent to these affective attachments (Gallope 2017).

Atop a knee-height, raised platform sits two harmoniums and a tabla, a microphone hovering above each instrument. These microphones route into a mixing board, which connects to an array of JBL speakers situated throughout the main hall and grounds of the gurdwara. When these microphones pick up the instruments or the voices that sing Sikh kirtan (hymns), they add a cavernous reverb to the sound that gives it an ethereal, otherworldly quality. Drawing Blesser and Salter’s theory of aural architecture (2007) and Auslander’s analysis of live performance in mediatized culture (1999), I theorize the spiritual and cultural meanings embedded in the technological filter of reverb in Sikh sacred musical practice. I argue that reverb in Sikh sacred music is understood as an acoustic signifier of the presence of the divine, whether in recorded or live music. This is due to a dual combination of (1) the reverberant acoustics of historical Sikh gurdwaras in Punjab being recreated in both recorded and live sound and (2) the use of reverb to accentuate dramatic song and dialogue in modern Indian popular media. In the 21st century, the wide reach of satellite television and Internet streaming platforms have further standardized the use of reverb in Sikh musical practice. Whereas previous studies on Sikh sacred music analyze affect, metaphysics, and/or spiritual underpinnings, I focus on the technical aspects and mediation of – and striking consistency across – Sikh kirtan in domestic, religious, and broadcast spaces.

Contemporary Cuban Santería ceremonies in the Afro-Cuban diaspora contexts often take place in all types of places–from boat houses to garages, public parks, and auto shops. These spaces are temporarily transformed to facilitate rituals through both material culture—offerings and sacred objects, including instruments—as well as the sound of the drums. How are everyday places, as opposed to religious temples, the most frequent site of ritual music practices? What is the role of sound in defining space in the religious ceremonies of Cuban Santería? Drawing on over ten years of ethnographic fieldwork as a religious drummer in the United States, Mexico, and Cuba, I will examine how sound plays a central role for Santeria practitioners to reconfigure space in the ritual drumming ceremony, known as the tambor de fundamento. By closely examining the relationship between the altar, igbodú, sound, and the spiritual co-presences known as orishá, I mobilize theoretical insights from Lefebrve (1971) and Abe (2018) to analyze the series of processes and sound evocations that create, define, and finally dissolve an alternative ritual time-space. My goal is to broaden discourses of sound and space in relation to spiritual co-presences and afro-caribbean religion.

Following much attention toward the re(p)(m)atriation of colonial-era music collections, ethnomusicologists are engaging in constructive discourse on decolonial methodologies emerging from critical perceptions of “the archive”. Indeed, recent scholarship advocates for contemporary archiving with and for Indigenous communities (e.g., Onyeji and Onyeji 2023; Kummels and Cánepa 2023; Watkins, Madiba, and McConnachie 2021), and asks us to consider: What might a postcolonial or decolonial music archive be and do? What are the forms and challenges of archival activism? What role, if any, should academics serve?

This roundtable will foster conversation about best practices in the collaborative making of new archives with Indigenous communities. We bring together Indigenous musicians, activists, and academics engaged in an ongoing project, “Sounding Indigenous in South Africa”, that collaboratively investigates and archives the heritage performance practices of people in the Northern Cape who identify as Khoesan and are known as a “first people”. Our team is establishing digitized performances held in archives jointly managed by Khoesan partners and whose content activists can use to promote cultural revivalism and policy change efforts.

The roundtable will open with a performance-presentation by a Khoe (Nama) musician and community researcher. We will then hear short statements from three South African speakers: a Khoe activist and member of S.A.’s Indigenous Rights Commission, an anthropologist and advisor to S.A.’s panel on Intangible Cultural Heritage, and an ethnomusicologist and ILAM archivist. The organizer will then facilitate discussion and invite the audience to share their insights on archiving with Indigenous communities in Africa and elsewhere.

Racial tensions have been widely prevalent in contemporary American society, compelling discussions on intersectionality and solidarity in cross-cultural contexts. This panel explores how Asian/American artists navigate race, gender, and ethnicity in the popular music industry. Examining hip-hop, pop, and electronic music, we analyze how musical practices shape cultural authenticity, representation, and solidarity. Situated within critical race studies, feminist theory, and transnational cultural analysis, this panel aims to bridge scholarly discourses on racialized performance and sonic hybridity. The first paper examines hip-hop from Taiwan in the early 1990s, focusing on Taiwanese American artists such as L.A. Boyz, Jerry Lo, and Shawn Song. It explores how their music contributed to transcultural identities and aesthetics that challenged Taiwan’s authoritarian past. The second paper addresses East Asian representation in Western popular music through the lens of "sonic Ornamentalism" (Cheng 2019), adopting the case study of Rina Sawayama’s collaboration with Paris Hilton to investigate how racialized femininity is commodified. The third paper explores the Korean American electronic producer Tokimonsta, whose collaborations with artists like Tinashe and AESPA illustrate the power of cross-cultural and collaborative realities. Drawing from Afrofuturism, it asserts that these collaborations exemplify intersectional solidarity and hint at speculative futures (Sandoval 2000). Methodologically, this panel integrates musical and multimedia analysis, and digital ethnographic engagement with fan communities, to investigate the politics of sound and performance. Bringing together various case studies, we interrogate how Asian/American artists navigate the music industry, challenge essentialist racial formations, and reimagine belonging through sound.

In the Middle Belt of Nigeria, three major language families converge in a region with cultural diversity rivaling the Amazon Basin and Papua New Guinea. Each of 340 distinct languages is accompanied by distinctive music and dance traditions. Diamond (1958–59) and Quersin (1972) documented a small fraction of these performance practices. These recordings are not accessible to the Anaguta, Berom, Jarawa, or Ngas communities featured in the releases by Smithsonian and Ocora. Widespread adoption of mobile devices has made it possible for community members to share audio and video through Bluetooth and WhatsApp with minimal cost. Often, the content shared through these means is intended to incite conflict between farmers and herders. Since 2021, our team has pursued a documentation drive in partnership with CONAECDA, a coalition of community development associations formed in recognition of the UN’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. We have produced hundreds of hours of audiovisual primary sources. We have tested and implemented dissemination strategies that ensure accessibility to the born-digital materials by community members soon after fieldwork is completed and in the future. The recordings amplify artistic voices for peace, countering divisive narratives. This program will feature three 20-minute films, each representing a cluster of ethnic groups from one of three Nigerian states: Adamawa, Kaduna, and Plateau. An international team, including junior scholars from Nigeria, will present the films. This work is the first Intangible Cultural Heritage project in Nigeria to be funded by the Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation (AFCP).

A current attitude holds that people can only legitimately “speak” from and about their own experiences, subjectivity, and identity. Taken to its logical conclusion, a male novelist shouldn't write about female characters, or a gay writer about straight ones—diminishing exploration, imagination, and empathy. Young novelists were advised to “write what you know,” but so as to explore the world and know more, not be stuck in predetermined categories. The restrictive attitude is a major dilemma for ethnomusicologists who historically researched and learned to play the music of others. Ironically, a major initial function of ethnomusicology was to move the academy beyond only studying “our own music,” understood as the classical cannon. Perhaps naive, this was perceived as a corrective for ethnocentrism and elitism and, especially after the 1980s crisis of representation, for enhancing dialogue over monologue. After decades of academic work deconstructing unitary essentialist notions of identity and subjectivity—foundations for multiple dangerous -isms, as well as for strategic counter movements--do we now really want to abandon more nuanced approaches to personhood, “ownership” of a tradition, and legitimate activity? Does essentialist policing preclude possibilities for positive personal and social interaction, learning, and change? With papers investigating the problem of the banjo, the traps for second-generation Balinese performers in the US, the paradox of world music ensembles in ethnomusicological pedagogy, and the tension between bi-musicality, positionality, and political activism, we balance answers to these questions while respecting the strategic essentialisms underpinning social movements countering racism, sexism, colonialism, homophobia, etc.

In 2022 for the first time the National Football League featured American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters in the live televised performance of the Superbowl halftime show, one comprising performances by Dre, Snoop, Mary J. Blige, Eminem, and Kendrick Lamar. While the inclusion of such hiphop and pop music luminaries was read by some as a reluctant concession in the wake of the organization’s fumbling of Black Lives Matter advocacy, the move inadvertently highlighted the confluences between the speech forms of African American English (AAE) and Black Sign Language (BSL); the gestural, visual, highly nuanced, and specifically embodied nature of BSL interpretation; and the question of racialized linguistic propriety. Conversations around Lamar’s recent Superbowl performance, also accompanied by live BSL interpretation, as exemplary of conscious hiphop’s resistive ideals again brought attention to the enduring distinctions between white and Black soundscapes or sonic ways of being (Stoever 2016, Eidsheim 2019). In this presentation I adapt Sarah Cervenak’s proposal of “Black gathering” (2021) and suggest a corporeal relation to one’s sound ecology as opposed to one’s physical ecology/surroundings as an opportunity to enact collective unboundedness in opposition to a Lockean philosophy of Black regulation. Analyzing the BSL interpretation of Lamar’s hiphop performance, I interrogate the possibility for the execution of this embodied speech form to realize a site for the expression of inextractable Black togetherness. This project addresses concerns of disability and access within hiphop studies and ethnomusicology more broadly and offers new ways to imagine musicking in light of pervasive auditory chauvinism.

This short documentary explores the philosophy underlying Trinbagonian soca music and carnival focusing on the late soca artiste Dexter “Blaxx” Stewart (1962-2022). It presents the carnival in Trinidad and Tobago as a space where dualities- celebration and resistance, tradition and modernity, revelry and reflection, chaos, and order not only exist but include the in-betweens. The result has been an experience that makes it difficult to place soca artistes and their experiences in neat boxes that are typically used to define festivals and popular culture. Blaxx, as an artiste, faced being defined by standards that work in other cultural spaces, such as those in the global North. While praised as a brilliant artist, he was often confined by industry standards because of his appearance, particularly his Blackness and obesity. Blaxx’s position in soca reflects the attempts to market carnival within the aesthetic of the global North as it pertains to skin color and ideal body type. Also brought to the fore are other issues of dualities that complicate the carnival space, such as music competition and collaboration, marketing and obscurity, and spirituality and commercialism. Blending primary interviews with scholars and practitioners in the fields of carnival and soca sourced from a 2023 symposium, alongside secondary footage, the documentary examines how these dualities shape the art, identity, and culture of Trinidad and Tobago as seen through Blaxx and his work.

Like in many postcolonial states, the indigenous and transplanted groups of people in pre- independence Trinidad and Tobago became victims of ‘linguisticide’ on account of colonial language policies (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018). Out of the crucible of colonization however, formerly enslaved and indentured peoples engaged in the reconstruction of endonormative linguistic forms: Creoles, indigenized Englishes, pidgins, mixed-codes, (home) signs etc. (Ali et al, 2022). Each group of people that came to the region brought with them knowledge of their musics, including their accompanying instruments and dances, and they carried on their artistic practices in spite of ever-changing restrictions (cf. Cowley, 1996; Henry, 2008; Liverpool 2001; Rohlehr, 1990).

The musics most associated with Carnival are usually sung using Caribbean Creole codes and a main theme in a number of these songs is identity. This paper will first trace the linguistic history of Trinidad and Tobago and illustrate the concomitant development of the language of Carnival musics. It will then examine the theme of identity through various linguistic techniques in three songs: The Mighty Conqueror’s (1962) Trinidad Dictionary; Riki Jai’s (1989) Sumintra; and Bunji Garlin’s (2021) Trini Lingo. These songs represent three different genres of Carnival music with two and three decades respectively between them, allowing for an examination of changes in attitudes toward Trinidad Creole over time as well as to discuss representations of social practices and constructions of identity between the persona in the songs and the intended hearers.

Afro-dancehall is a syncretized Ghanaian genre wedged between the mimicry of Jamaican dancehall and the embrace of Nigerian afrobeats - the first globally audible instance of African musical self-representation. African popular music has continuously interfaced with diasporic genres since the emergence of highlife (a core ingredient in Fela Kuti’s afrobeat, originally branded highlife-jazz) in response to Caribbean polyrhythmic grooves played in Gold Coast ballrooms. In the 1990s, hiplife injected an explicitly African aesthetic into hip-hop, as Reggie Rockstone and other innovators rapped in indigenous languages and sampled classic highlife and afrobeat songs. Soon after, dancehall became the more effectual musical vehicle to express the aspirations of Ghana’s subaltern, with Jamaican artists like Vybz Kartel referring to a shared worldwide struggle as “Gaza,” a meaningful symbol of global "ghetto youth" solidarity. Ghanaian dancehall was branded by many as afro-dancehall, with the prefix surging in relevance contemporaneously with the meteoric rise of afrobeats. Afro-dancehall artists like Stonebwoy have increasingly incorporated afrobeats elements to attract listeners with an appetite for afrobeats, while purists like Shatta Wale have eschewed such syncretization as betraying pure, authentic dancehall – two distinct approaches in a rivalry between the two artists that has dominated the Ghanaian music industry since 2014. Based on ethnographic fieldwork over the past decade, including interviews with top artists, producers, and early pioneers, this paper explores the nuances of afro-dancehall’s crisis of authenticity as the genre continues to be massively popular domestically but struggles to attract dancehall and afrobeats fans on a global scale.

The conception of death among indigenous cultures of the Southern Chaco has been frequently explored in anthropology and ethno-history. From the pioneering works of Enrique Palavecino (1944) and Alfred Métraux (1946) to recent studies by Alejandro López (2009), Florencia Tola (2012), Silvia Citro (2016), and Agustina Altman (2017), it is possible to observe—albeit in a fragmented manner—that the act of dying and the very notion of death were linked to characteristic sonorities. However, despite mentions of the “sonic” dimension in ethnographic and historical studies, it has not been a central focus for examining Chaco indigenous societies.

This presentation deepens the analysis of the sound-death relationship through three case studies: the Mocoví, Abipón, and Qom cultures of the Southern Chaco. Based on historical and ethnographic sources that cover an extended period of time, the discussion is structured into four sections. The first one (sounds in front of death) examines sound practices in mourning and funeral rites. The second one (sounds from death) explores sonic manifestations of the nequi’í (soul) in the realm of the living. The third one (sounds that warn of death) focuses on netanec (signals) that foretell death. The fourth one (sounds to prevent death) discusses sonic practices used for healing and avoiding demise.

By addressing these dimensions, this work argues that the sound-death relationship extends beyond funeral rites (the preferred event for analyzing the sonic aspect related to death) to encompass interactions among diverse ontological agents—humans, animals, celestial bodies, and powerful non-human entities.

Mahraganat, a rap-driven and EDM-based musical style that emerged in the late 2000s, has amplified subaltern voices in Egypt. Its dominant presence recently waned, however, in the face of rising nostalgic pop music featuring the “Spanish tinge” of flamenco guitar and rhythms, used by the likes of Amr Diab in the 1990s (Frishkopf 2003). This nostalgic turn often includes visuals of an idealized Cairo, featuring classic affluent neighborhoods like Zamalek rather than new, flashy modern suburbs, while strategically employing typography characteristic of mid-20th century Egyptian cinema. This paper argues that today’s nostalgic turn signals a musical and visual shift in response to socio-economic instability and anxieties surrounding the erosion of a much-beloved image of Cairo. Drawing on evidence from chart trends and audiovisual analysis, I detail how this turn involves two key dynamics: first, nostalgia adapts ‘90s-era Egyptian pop by integrating elements characteristic of the Spanish tinge, such as instrumentation, rhythm, mode, and harmonic progression. Second, it resists the perceived erasure of Egypt’s cultural identity by reinforcing the image of a traditional Cairo. Emerging artists like TUL8TE, known for absurdist humor and masked anonymity, use these elements to negotiate a new sonic identity, presenting nostalgia not just as a longing for the past but as a psychological resource for reclaiming cultural agency. Engaging with frameworks regarding nostalgia in music and culture (e.g., Shannon 2015; Williams 1976), this paper examines nostalgia’s evolving role as a mode of cultural discourse and identity formation in contemporary Egypt.

Sephardic Jews trace their linguistic lineage back to medieval Spain, prior to expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492. Subsequently, many Sephardic communities found refuge in neighboring Muslim lands in North Africa and the vast Ottoman Empire of the Mediterranean. In this state of diaspora, they continued for hundreds of years to preserve Judeo-Spanish language and song through practices embedded into the fabric of daily life and ritual. In the 20^th century, the centuries-old oral transmission of Judeo-Spanish song was interrupted and largely halted. However, a few rare folksingers retained this lore as part of a living culture amidst the challenges of colonialism, migration, and national pressures toward homogenization. These singers partnered with institutions to produce a multi-faceted array of representations of Sephardic lore, however these studies primarily focused on communities and groups. In contrast, the following article will illuminate the biographies of two prominent Judeo-Spanish folk singers who acted as nodes of memory for Eastern and Western poles of the Mediterranean: Alicia Benassayag de Bendayan of Morocco and Bienvenida “Berta” Aguado of Turkey. Their stories expose a complex web of agents that have shaped contemporary notions of Sephardic song, touching upon the role of mentorship, patrimony in ethnography, the agency of songbooks and recordings, and the entanglements of national and colonial interests in folksong preservation. Understanding their roles as individuals invites larger questions into the forefront regarding the role of the archive, the nature of representation in ethnography, and the relationship of the individual to broader group identity formation.

This paper explores the critical role of music in the expression of solidarity with Palestine for Northern Ireland’s Catholic Nationalist Republicans (CNRs); this solidarity arises from shared experiences of settler colonialism and movements for national sovereignty. In the long shadow of the Troubles and the immediate aftermath of October 7th, I explore the sonic landscape of Palestine solidarity. I use the palimpsestic painting practices of Belfast’s mural artists as a template for investigating the broader processes of cultural layering–particularly the ways that local musicians rework existing songs (oftentimes, well-known “rebel” songs that narrate proud moments in Irish anti-colonial history) to celebrate Palestinian resistance. Because local audiences know the songs’ original stories, they engage in a palimpsestic listening in which the original texts, now written over, make their way back to the “threshold of visibility” (Daughtry 2013). I analyze representative songs from the Troubles-era to the present day, including Men of No Property’s 1971 song “Wee White Turban,” a reworking of “The Broad Black Brimmer,” “Fields of Palestine,” a recent re-write of Pete St. John’s 1979 “Fields of Athenry,” and bar chants of “Go on Home British Soldiers” which transformed into “Go on Home Israeli Soldiers.” I argue that for CNRs, palimpsests reflect a discursive tradition that conceptually links a particular past and an imagined future to artistic practice/praxis in the present (Asad 2009, 20). In a divided society where physical space remains highly contested, palimpsests radically combat the limitations that time and space so often impose.

This panel brings together work that chronicles the understudied transborder musical exchanges of Mexico and the southern U.S. We consider both how music has functioned as a tool of empowerment and community-building for Mexican communities in the U.S. South, and also how elites in the music industry have capitalized on the labor of musicians in the South and across the border in Mexico. Often overlooked as a region of ethnomusicological study, the South is home to some of the largest and fastest growing Latinx diasporic communities in the U.S. who contribute to the regional cultural landscape as artists, musicians, and tradespeople. We invoke what scholars of the Latinx South have referred to as the idea of the “Nuevo South” to consider how legacies of white supremacy and racial difference have shaped the experiences of these Latinx southerners. Drawing on theoretical tools from ethnomusicology, history, and cultural anthropology, this panel shows how southern Latinx communities and their musical practices (focusing largely on Mexican traditions) map onto and transform regional economic, racial, and political dynamics. In the transformation of these dynamics are new sonic and musical orientations to place and region that tell stories of migration, articulate new ways of Latinx belonging, and point us toward an increasing southern Latinx future. We argue that ethnomusicology’s investment in local and regional traditions–and subsequent discourses of belonging in the performance, negotiation, and transmission of these traditions–warrants closer attention to the music of the Nuevo South, in all its complications and possibilities.

This panel explores the gender bias within sonically Black performance spaces, and offers innovative accounts of transcending such barriers. These four papers discuss the ramifications of normalizing patriarchally-centered musical environments, and pose unique interventions specifically in the genres of jazz, emo, women’s Nigerian traditional music, and alternative R&B. The first paper navigates the jazz jam session as a gendered workplace, and the ways in which the masculine-coded social-professional setting allows for these biases to go unchecked. Following suit, the second paper describes alternative R&B as defying genre normativities both culturally and sonically, as the musical hybridity found in the alternative sound allows for a cultural hub of Black queerness to safely emerge. The third paper deciphers the authority around the Nigerian musical experience, and aims to center femme voices in musical narratives. Lastly, the fourth paper undrapes the utility of emo music community spaces for Black queer women, using resistance as a form of healing. Through the usage of feminist theoretics and queer studies, this research explains examples of sonic oppression and proposes a more fluid approach to musicking away from Western hegemonic structures in response. Within this international exploration, ethnographic accounts, each reflexive, observatory, and participatory, will contribute to the theoretical literature, garnering specific case studies contributing to the identity politicking of womanhood, maternity, and sapphism. This panel offers a multidisciplinary decolonial framework for understanding music and performance as dynamic, living practices that challenge rigid structures while centering marginalized voices and experiences.

What sonic worlds are written on the reels of the audiocassette? For decades, most of the world’s musical content was tied up in the ribbons of the humble audiocassette. But despite being common objects, cassettes contain infinities of otherwise inaccessible content, and elicit alternative narratives of social production and economic exchange. Although the format is often described as obsolete (as we will show, far from it), its ideological authentications continue to flow through contemporary digital networks and symbolize the erasures of migratory circulation and alternative forms of media distribution. Cassette archives house technological manipulations and unspool political imaginaries, holding hidden sounds that resonate with the counterpolitics of mediated memory.

In this panel, we consider contemporary cassette collections as personal curations of musical and sonic history, and analyze the effects and affordances of tape in creating and capturing social worlds. Beyond mere preservation, tape archives offer a materialization of sound as an adaptable, editable, and erasable past, which tell a truer history for and by its subjects. Our cases range from regionally censored Kurdish cassette networks crossing borders in Turkey, Iraq, Armenia and Syria, to community tape archives in contemporary multicultural Britain, to images of cassettes as a symbolic form for Punjabi truck drivers, to home tape recordings of a Polish American family that decenter the concept of field recording. Listening to both the collections and the collectors of these cassettes, we attend to the diverse voices that narrate tape-based practices, and elaborate a magnetic critique of diasporic history.

This roundtable examines grief and loss in gendered contexts, with a focus on their musicultural manifestations. Our discussion spans collective and individual memory practices (Frawley 2012, Casey 1987) and explores how women recover from trauma through embodied practices in ceremonial spaces (Belloni 2019, McBride 2021). Across five cultures and geographical locations, our presenters ask how grief is navigated, how social oppression is addressed, and how communities recover from loss. The first roundtable presenter considers a Central Australian women’s ceremony which is closed following a death and subsequently reopened, illustrating how this embodied collective activity facilitates transition from a mourning period. Our second participant explores how Irish song serves as a vehicle for communal lament, using cross-disciplinary approaches to examine its role in cultural memory, gendered resistance, and diasporic identity. Our third participant examines how the Albanian communist regime suppressed and co-opted traditional women's lamentation practices for propaganda, compelling women to modify their mourning behaviors to navigate societal repression and trauma. Incorporating Italian tarantism as a case study, our fourth presenter investigates how trauma survivors re-voice and embody grief to become autonomous in their own recovery. Our final participant explores how Chinese kujia lament enables practitioners to relive past memories and transforms remembrance into a cathartic and therapeutic engagement with the present. The roundtable will conclude with a discussion in which participants further outline their methodologies—including interviews, autoethnography, literary research, observation, and lyrical, sonic, and gestural analysis—while co-creating a multifaceted framework for studying grief and loss through gendered lenses in ethnomusicology.

Sound and movement are deeply entangled with each other. In response to an outgrowth of scholarship on choreomusicology over the past decade and multiple conference panels at SEM about dance and movement, this roundtable draws attention to these rich conversations about embodied praxis, musician-dancer interactions, spatial-temporal relationships in performance, and movement as a conceptual resource. While music and dance remain separate disciplines in the academy, this roundtable engages the intersections of music and dance studies, reflecting on current patterns and trends as well as the future of scholarship on sound and movement. Bringing together perspectives from early career and senior scholars, we plan to discuss each of our approaches to navigating these disciplinary challenges, including writing about embodiment and navigating institutional barriers. Roundtable panelists come with a variety of perspectives from across the globe with differing relationships to their music-dance practice of study. Each panelist will share their provocation and response, drawing or diverging from the following questions: (1) How do you see your scholarship fit into the trajectory of the music and dance studies, scholarship on sound and movement? (2) In what ways does working along the intersections of music and dance begin to unsettle and challenge systemic issues in academic research? (3) How has your work presented issues with legibility in the academy and beyond?

Scholarship on musical genre (Fabbri 1982a; Frith 1996; Negus 1999; Holt 2007), though vast, has not accounted for the ways in which it is informed by embodied sensibility. This paper addresses this gap in the literature with an attempt at understanding genre through embodied experience, using hardcore punk [from here called “hardcore”] as a case study. While certain musical parameters are often used to delineate genre within aggressive music scenes, metal and hardcore (and related subgenres) are most often understood by participants as socially constructed entities which cannot be defined by sound alone. Though many bands who self-identify as hardcore play music more closely aligned with metal sonically, social factors at play render the hardcore label more accurate. In this paper, I build upon Waksman’s (2009) punk/metal continuum and Kennedy’s (2018) theory of generic symbiosis by examining the role of embodiment in the construction of genre in heavy music. I explore how subgenres of metal and hardcore interact and how fans create meaning in their physical experiences with the music. Based on fieldwork and long-term involvement in Toledo and Detroit, I argue that one of the main differences between hardcore and metal is audience participation through moshing, dancing, crowd-killing, and other physical movement. I assert that the element of physical danger at shows understood to be hardcore is distinct from that of metal shows. Ultimately, I show how genres are embodied, examining the sensory experiences that inform how people construct and understand genres in relation to each other.

How does performing khayyami serve as a means of secular social identity formation in contemporary Iran? The establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979 leveraged political interpretations of Shi’a Islam as an essential arbiter for social and political control (Nooshin 2009: 3). As a result, concepts of Iranian-ness have been debated up to the present. As a significant part of the daily lives of Iranians, music has been a “target of constant government scrutiny” (Lucas 2006: 79), as well as a tool for resistance and defiance. Originating in the port city of Bushehr, the regional genre of khayyami has become a locus for ideological debates regarding Iranian-ness. Characterized by its textual repertoire from quatrains by the poet Omar Khayyam, this genre synthesizes Khayyam’s secular ideas with local dance songs. As a deeply participatory musical practice, musicians and audiences collectively shape the performance through singing, clapping, dancing, and creating a holistic atmosphere of social and musical interaction. As such, khayyami expresses embodied joy and resistance in a political context where singing and dancing in public are politically and religiously prohibited. I will argue that through performing khayyami as a collective musical activity people confront the domination of political Islam from their social identity, and reconstruct it through performing Khayyam quatrains, as the secular symbol of the Persian poetry. Using collected fieldwork and digital platforms materials, I explore theories of race, affect, and national consciousness to illuminate the role of khayyami in representing alternative expressions of Iranian belonging.

Sikh Sabad Kīrtan (the singing of scriptural verses) is performed in a diverse array of musical idioms, broadly categorized into what are called “classical” and “light” styles, the former based on rāg (the South Asian melodic system), and the latter, free of this structure. Whereas the vast majority of Sikh worshippers find their deepest devotional experiences through the light Kīrtan styles, many hold a special affective regard for the classical styles. This is due to the presence of rāg-names in the song- and section-headings in the Sikh scripture, the Guru Granth Sahib (1604|1704). A compendium of about 6,000 canonized scared song-texts, authored mainly by the founding Sikh Guru (1469-1708), the scripture’s organization by rāg lends a sense of historicity and aura even to contemporary classical styles of Kīrtan. In this paper, I highlight the embodied aspects of musical worship in this heightened auratic context, focusing on what the devotees describe as feelings of proximity to the Guru and the Divine. Based on Sikh epistemology, and sensory ethnography attentive to the thick event, I analyze the spatio-temporal experiences of congregants during the course of a Kīrtan session, to argue for a transportive sensation in worshipping bodies that is a dynamic unfolding of somatic consciousness.

In the early decades of the socialist revolution, Castro declared Cuba an Afro-Latin nation to the dismay of those who embraced a White identity, via Spain, and at the same time obfuscating the cultural inheritance of minority groups, such as Cubans of Chinese descent. Further, the attempt to construct a homogenous national identity has left very little room for the local exploration or discursive expression of identities that fall outside the official narrative, which suggests, promotes, and naturalizes the idea and logic of a perceived universal Cubanness. In this paper, I explore the role music plays in the creation of alternative spaces of being and belonging. I observe that the practice of lion dance embeds and is embedded with forms of knowledge that signal a less visible Cuban identity, and comments on the relevance of the White and Black binary upon which Cuban national identity is predicated. Such a claim for an alternative definition of who is Cuban is constructed and reenacted through rituals of movement, sound, and visual displays. I argue that the symbolic power of the Cuban lion-dance performance provides practitioners and community members with a form of non-textual discourse that needs neither to align, nor contest official narratives. Instead it allows to signal an alternative Cuban identity registered in the body through the performative process. My work is based on field research conducted in Cuba since 2016 and constitutes an effort to give visibility to a less known but significant element of Cuban culture.

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.

Ethnomusicological research enabled a politics of sonic extractivism, where the Global North colonial frameworks captured and (mis)represented the sonic cultures of Latin America in sound archives (Ochoa Gautier 2024). The recent digitization of these collections has brought a different “social dynamic” (Hoffman 2015) and strategies for Afro-descendant and Indigenous communities to recast ethnographic sounds into new politics of audibility (Ochoa Gautier 2020). These “refigurations” (Hoffman 2015) and “recycling” (Ochoa Gautier 2020) of the archive open myriad doors to unearth (hi)stories of sound, (un)silencing, and facilitating intergenerational sound exchanges. This panel explores the possibilities of digitized archives for resounding music production, unsilencing women’s voices, and amplifying otherwise marginal stories through their transnational embodiment and re-enactment. The first paper examines the repatriation of Brazilian traditional music archives through a collaboration with a Capoeira group, proposing a performance-based ethnomusicological approach that integrates archival recordings and contemporary practice to challenge colonial legacies and enhance participatory research. The second explores the archival erasure and recovery efforts to amplify Afro-Colombian women’s voices and challenge the hegemonic silencing through a combination of ethnographic research and sound restoration techniques. The third paper discusses how the re-enactment of archival materials can highlight the role of imagination in reclaiming hidden stories while advocating for improved accessibility to U.S. archives to bridge the gap between scholars in the U.S. and Latin America. The panel closes with a discussant building a thread across the papers and underscoring the imperial character of both sound archiving and sound recording.

The roles of music in modernity are complex, especially as digital tools connect global and local communities in new ways. Music can be a lucrative commodity, a space for the solidification of new identities, a location for exchange, and a site of repression and homogenization, all at the same time. The papers in this panel, examining the roles of popular music in China, Japan, the Central American Caribbean and the US, examine different aspects of popular music as a site of complex engagement with structures of power, identity and remuneration. The first looks at the cite of a bookstore, music label and concert venue in Shenzhen, China, as a site of resistance to repression and space of learning and exchange. The second analyzes the open jam as a musical space of growth and self-determination that challenges the hierarchical teacher-student relationship. The third looks at ‘Anime Music’ as conceptualized by Spotify versus the musical tastes of Anime fans and listeners. The author uses the differences between algorithmic choices and fan behavior to critique popular music taxonomies created as commodities. The last paper sheds light on how Garifuna musicians, riding a recent wave of popularity in the World Music market, both participate in a new economy and embrace notions of individualism, but also resist neo-liberalism and embrace Garifuna modes of musical and communal engagement. Together, these papers provide theories and case studies for thinking about popular music as resistance and as a site for critical connection in modern political and digital cultures.

The Pacific War of World War II (1937–45) and its aftereffects profoundly influenced popular culture in both China and Japan, particularly female-led popular music genres. Female singers navigated occupation, censorship, and changing political and cultural ideologies to practice their craft, acting as leading figures of the “new women” negotiating entrenched gender norms. This panel emphasizes the significance of women's popular culture in shaping the sociopolitical landscape on both sides of the East China Sea.

The papers juxtapose case studies from multifaceted perspectives: Japanese performer Yamaguchi Yoshiko as a sonic chimera of Japanese and Chinese popular music through her role in friendship films under the pseudonym Li Xianglan; Shanghai singsong girls and their resistance against social stigmatization in the context of local colonial conflicts and cultural transformations; Japanese female jazz stars and their receptions among the female audiences amid the aftermath of Japan’s war defeat in the late 1940s. The authors draw upon voice studies, gender studies, timbre analysis, archival evidence, and reception history to provide a nuanced glimpse into the experience and agency of female performers during this tumultuous period.

Through this discussion, we encourage new insights into the development of East Asian music in the mid-20th century as well as the significance of East Asian women during political conflicts and historical changes in relation to broader questions such as modernity and transnationalism. Moving beyond their ongoing objectification and marginalization, we highlight their agency within local and transnational music scenes and their contributions to popular music and gender expression.

In his 2023 monograph On Music Theory, music theorist Philip Ewell reveals how through “overcontextualization,” scholars with an investment in the discipline’s status quo can obscure its historical and contemporary racism and sexism. What makes Ewell’s intervention so innovative is his assertion that more context is not necessarily positive. Indeed, too much context can complicate an obvious observation. This panel applies Ewell’s ideas to (ethno)musicology, taking as its starting point the claim that context is neither intrinsically positive nor negative, but is added, withheld, or removed according to the agendas of social actors. Each paper discusses a different case study in which music, musical activity, or music scholarship has been overcontextualized, undercontextualized, or decontextualized in the service of a specific agenda. Paper 1 discusses contradictions between the scholarly overcontextualization of blackface minstrelsy and the presence of songs linked to this tradition in nineteenth-century binder’s volumes. Paper 2 turns to the undercontextualization of the 2007 U.S. tour of the Venezuelan Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra. Finally, Paper 3 considers the academic decontextualization of the scholarship of Black American activist-musician Bernice Johnson Reagan. By addressing the narratives of over-, under-, and de-contextualization in disparate time periods and settings, this panel suggests the importance of further research into ways to continue and expand Ewell’s project of making “music [studies] more welcoming for everyone,” a goal that requires (ethno)musicology to reframe its understanding of context’s potentials and traps.

This panel examines how musical traditions, religious spaces, and social networks shape diasporic identity in Chicago. A city deeply shaped by migration, Chicago is home to numerous neighborhoods strongly tied to distinct cultural traditions. As scholars based in Chicago from diverse backgrounds, we explore the intersections of cultural preservation, adaptation, and community-building. Through three case studies—South Indian Carnatic music, Ukrainian church choirs, and Black migration and resettlement—we consider how diasporic and immigrant communities negotiate tradition and cultural exchange within the city’s dynamic urban landscape. The first paper examines how Carnatic music is taught, performed, and perceived in Chicago’s Devon neighborhood, a historic South Asian enclave. Interviews with educators, performers, students, and temple musicians, reveal how pedagogy, performance spaces, and audience engagement evolves in the diaspora. The second paper explores the analogous traditions between Greek-Catholic and Orthodox Ukrainian churches in Chicago’s Ukrainian Village, underscoring a hybridity of practices evident within the weekly liturgy and secular repertoire of the church choruses. The third paper takes a historical look at how Chicago’s migrant communities affected burgeoning Black musical networks on the south side in the midst of the Great Migration. In all these communities, music serves as the location of cultural memory and by extension identity construction. This panel concludes that explorations of multivalent cultural practices within a specific diasporic context demonstrates a hybridity of practices and interwoven networks within the historic immigrant communities of Chicago.

In the literature on music, capitalism, and value, recent studies address musicians’ labor conditions under neoliberalism and their struggles for economic justice. The presenters in this roundtable propose that greater attention must be paid to the material conditions of musicians’ lives, including the money they (don’t) make, funding structures, and their racialized lived experience. Participants argue that focusing on materiality exposes how musicians are (de)valued not only in economic terms, but also in other value regimes. Presenter 1 explores how jazz musicians in a flown-over midwest city confront racial and economic injustices by defining alternative value systems under capitalist constraints. Presenter 2 considers how professional artists in the Tuareg guitar scene navigate their material needs, global and northwest African racial structures, and tensions between state patronage and surveillance. Presenter 3 interrogates the rise, fall, and shift in post-2020 American politics from racial justice to anti-DEI as a distinct era of new racial capitalism and argues that a “radical revolution of values” in music and elsewhere is needed now more than ever amidst a rapidly collapsing republic. Presenter 4 examines the cultural production of archival value in postcolonial Java, focusing on changing labor conditions in audiovisual archives and the commodification of music made by Chinese Indonesian jazz musicians. These varied case studies should open a discussion on capitalism’s global reach, musicians’ creative tactics to negotiate it, future directions for scholarship on music, value, and racial capitalism, and how this work can inform ethnomusicologists’ research, art, and labor practices.

Archives have long served as critical sites for preserving cultural memory, yet their role in shaping narratives about Black music remains contested. This presentation explores the dynamic interplay between archival practices and the lived experiences of Black music, interrogating how archives can simultaneously act as tools of preservation and instruments of erasure. Drawing on case studies ranging from early blues collections to contemporary hip-hop archives, the session examines how Black musicians, communities, and scholars have reclaimed and reimagined archival spaces to affirm agency and resist dominant cultural narratives.

Through an analysis of innovative approaches such as post-custodial models, oral history projects, and the integration of digital technologies, this presentation considers how archives can more authentically represent the polyphonic histories of Black music. Particular attention will be given to the role of performance, improvisation, and communal storytelling in challenging traditional archival frameworks. By rethinking the relationship between archives and Black music, this session seeks to inspire strategies for more inclusive, equitable practices in the documentation and celebration of Black musical traditions.

This contribution aligns with the conference's themes of resilience and transformation, offering new pathways for ethnomusicologists, archivists, and cultural practitioners to engage with the rich tapestry of Black musical heritage.

The voice is a powerful metaphor for mobilizing the political imaginary. Yet scholarship in music and sound studies increasingly shows how attention to literal, sounded voices complicates the metaphor’s neat political expediency. This owes, in part, to the ways actual voices are ineluctably gendered. Because of its superlative emphasis on the voice, Indian music is a particularly generative field for understanding the complex interplay of voice, gender, performance, and political consciousness. Three case studies listen for the refractory nature of the gendered voice in performatively enacting transnational politics. The first paper analyzes Hindustani tappa, a genre inspired by folksongs from 18th-century Arab trade routes and sung from a first-person feminine perspective. Contemporary tappa singers navigate competing demands to preserve the genre and appease the rigid conservative nationalism of their patrons. The second paper turns to the Delhi-based festival Jahan-e-Khusrau, another manifestation of the tension between transnational origins and national appeal in Hindustani music. In part through the gendered voice of Abida Parveen, the music festival instrumentalizes Sufi ideals toward a vision of friendship between India and Pakistan. The final paper analyzes the Swara Mountain Arts Festival in Dharamshala. Under the auspices of a global feminist movement, festival organizers consciously supplant the religious communitarianism of both region and nation with a secular-liberal mode of vocal performance. In all three cases, singers operationalize a transnational vision of India in ways that both unsettle and enforce national and global power structures, illuminating the politically contingent potency of voices gendered through song.

This paper examines the distinctive social project of the native brass band and the making of the modern musician on Upolu Island at the turn of the 20th century. It considers the construction of the brass band as a status symbol and the emergent band leader as a modified kinship behavior within the context of strategic management of sociocultural capital amid the threats of Euro-American imperialism in the Pacific. The narrative traces how Samoans negotiated social cues in cross-cultural encounters as they sought to remain politically autonomous and agents of their own shifting identities in the age of modernity. Rather than starting with the narrative of colonial encounter, I introduce an origin of Samoan brass bands through the influence of the Native Hawai’ian naval band’s assignment throughout Samoa in 1887, finessing King Kalākaua’s attempt at forming a Polynesian Confederacy with the rival kings of the land. This history rewinds previous timelines offered by other scholars to suggest that the eagerness of Samoan women to have their sons trained as band leaders was propagated by the favorable impression that the large assembly of brown boys playing in an auxiliary of the Royal Hawaiian Brass Band made on them at home and abroad. An analysis of physical spaces where modern musical phenomena developed on Upolu will be examined through Agha’s concept of chronotopic formulations and kinship behaviors to articulate the negotiation of foreign status symbols of colonial power and how Samoans repurposed them to signal their road to national independence.

The codiapi, or the boat-lute, is a two-stringed zither from the Philippines. Although the instrument is still in use in the southern islands of Mindanao, it has entirely disappeared in the central island region of the Visayas. The only proof of its once wide-spread use comes from accounts of Spanish missionaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The most notable and thorough of such accounts is found in Fransisco Alcina’s History of the Island and Indians of the Visayas (1688). While Alcina’s text has been used to reconstruct the organology of the codiapi, I will show that the text can also be used to infer how the instrument was played and sounded. By having retranslated the text and putting this new translation into conversation with more contemporary ethnographies on living boat-lute practices from Mindanao, I conclude that the music of Alcina’s codiapi uses a pentatonic mode. Additionally, based on Alcina’s text, I reconstruct how the codiapi sounded and speculate why its music could have been appropriate for courtship rituals. Used exclusively by men, when played along with its female counterpart, the corlong (raft-zither), the codiapi is described as enabling an extra-musical communication which induces both players to fall in love. Described as being “[deeper] in sentiment or sensuality…than if they were using words,” this extra-musical power must nonetheless be deeply rooted in how this music sounded. This paper will discuss how mode and rhythm could have been used for this communication.

Urban Gilaki popular music genre, from northern Iran, functions as a symbol of resistance against hegemonic musical cultures of the region and as a tool for expressing Gilaki ethnic identity within Iran’s multiethnic society. Focusing on the music of Gilan in the mid-20^th century—a northern province in Iran, near the Caspian Sea and the border of the former Soviet Union—I examine the important role of Iranian radio and the policies of its administrators in redefining local music and legitimizing the presence of ethnic cultures in homogenized Persian public sphere. I argue that the Soviet occupation of Gilan during World War II served as a catalyst for the invention of a hybrid Gilaki musical genre that functioned as a means of cultural preservation and resistance against both the Allied invasion and the marginalizing policies of the Iranian government, while ironically incorporating non-native musical elements—such as harmony, large orchestras, and Iranian classical melodies—in this process. This study examines the archives of Gilaki music that was broadcast on Iranian radio and analyzes ethnographic interviews with musicians and historical documents from an insider perspective. The strategic use of music and the role of radio broadcasting as a response to two dominant cultures, the Soviet influence during the 1940s and, later, the dominant Persian culture prevalent in mass media throughout the 1950s and 1960s, resulted in a musical practice that both participates in and resist against these forces.

The interplay between tradition and modernity is a critical topic in current Iranian society (Jahanbegloo 2004). As Reza Shah’s policy (1920s) of “authoritarian modernization gradually changed Iran’s traditional social as well as political setting” (Katouzian 2007: 49), the practice and performance of music changed accordingly. Modernity in Iranian music is typically attributed to Ali-Naqi Vaziri (1887-1979). Following Vaziri, his students continued to expand the idea of modernization with a variety of perspectives. In 1968, Dariush Safvat established the Centre for Preservation and Dissemination of Iranian music. The Centre has often been categorized as a ‘revival’ endeavour. This paper argues that the Centre only contemporized the ongoing interplay of tradition and modernity. By the late 1970s, a vital music industry had emerged. The 1979 Revolution and significant cultural policy alterations halted such advancement. The evolution of music, however, did not stop but continued in private spaces, and some of the masterpieces of art music were produced in the first decade. Shortly after the Iran-Iraq war and especially following Ayatollah Khamenei’s leadership, the restrictions gradually eased, and multiple schools of thought continue to expand. This paper, supported by recent fieldwork in Iran, argues that the interplay between tradition and modernity in Iranian music has been constructive rather than dichotomous, resulting in many schools of musical thought. Furthermore, it elucidates how, in the past decade, a musical industry has developed that surpasses that of the 1970s, despite ongoing restrictions.

Avoiding overt political engagement has historically been a means of navigating authoritarianism among Iranian musicians. However, in a context that severely limits political expression, music may inevitably be heard as an act of resistance or complicity, placing musicians in precarious positions. Social media has further complicated these dynamics, as users reframe, reshare, and debate musicians' actions, addressing public perceptions and political narratives.

A sentimental song by Alireza Talischi went viral during the Women, Life, Freedom movement after being used—seemingly without his involvement—in a commemorative video honoring a protester killed. Afterward, Talischi became one of the first artists to break the months-long silence in Iran’s music scene and performed this song—some heard it as subtle resistance, others as exploitation of public sentiments or endorsing the regime’s desire to normalize the situation. Since then, the song has held a central place in Talischi’s repertoire without mentioning the protester’s name. Meanwhile, he has achieved unprecedented commercial success, touring nationally and internationally.

This paper focuses on Talischi to open up discussions about the relationships between music career, authoritarianism, and social media. I use digital ethnography and online archival analysis to illustrate how Iranian musicians distance themselves from contentious politics by performing compliance with the regime’s rules while subtly navigating public expectations. Drawing on the work of Nomi Dave, Laudan Nooshin, and Lisa Wedeen, I argue that by playing with the ambiguities of permissibility and accountability, musicians seek to craft careers that can endure within the intricate web of power, pleasure, and ideology in Iran.

In contrast to the rarefied performance settings of conventional concert halls, performances of experimental music in public space can intervene directly on local communities and take a stake in their soundscapes. Aiming to provoke unsuspecting crowds and engage them in often subversive and confrontational performances, experimental artists cultivate symbolic and material dialogues with urban sonic and spatial architecture, at times using the opportunity for social and political critique. Though public engagement has long represented a central dimension of musical experimentalism, publicly situated performances have been seldom examined, especially in Latin America, where artists often intervene directly on the distinct postcolonial legacies that structure public urban space. This panel explores three such instances, focusing on Latin American experimental music performance in the public spaces of the largest cities of three countries. Presenter 1 examines the outdoor sonic installations (1960s-1970s) by Juan Blanco in Havana, Cuba, showing how the composer engaged with leftist and anti-colonial values that resonated with the socialist regime’s promotion of el hombre nuevo. Presenter 2 discusses São Paulo’s Bloco Ruído, which makes use of carnival festivities and the bloco parading tradition to foster novel means of critically engaging with the city’s distinct soundscape. Presenter 3 explores Brazilian experimentalism in the historical metropole of Lisbon, Portugal, examining Ernesto Neto’s percussion installation, which, in taking the form of ship, articulated a decolonial critique of Portuguese coloniality in the Belem neighborhood where it was located and where nautical imagery memorializes Portugal’s “Age of Discovery.”

This panel explores Jewish music as an "architecture of knowledge" (Amin/Cohendet 2009), focusing on the networks, institutions, and individuals that shape its meaning, transmission, and representation within specific contexts and its global implications. It examines the mechanisms through which Jewish music is produced, disseminated, and categorized, offering a framework to conceptualize Jewish music as a repository of both normative (expert) and experiential (folk) knowledge. By framing Jewish music as both a social category and a form of cultural heritage, we highlight how its study has often been confined to music theory, aesthetics, and identity politics. Instead, we foreground the infrastructures that sustain Jewish musical knowledge, scrutinizing how institutions, scholars, and cultural actors define, preserve, and transmit this heritage across generations and geographies. Drawing on Foucault’s (1977) insights on knowledge and power, we argue that Jewish music is not merely an object of study but a dynamic field of knowledge production, shaped by specific pathways and networks that determine its interpretation and reception.

This panel seeks to map the diverse cultural, social, and political forces that influence Jewish musical heritage across different regions, including Europe, the USA and Canada. By incorporating perspectives from ethnomusicology, archival studies, and cultural history, we aim to reconceptualize Jewish music not only as a sound or tradition but as an evolving body of knowledge that reflects broader historical transformations and power dynamics. In doing so, we underscore the role of Jewish musical heritage as an active and contested space of cultural memory, identity negotiation, and intellectual discourse.

The stories of prominent African American band leaders and their contributions to music have historically been underrepresented in scholarly writings and historical narratives of the development of music education in the United States. The purpose of this study is to provide a record of the professional career and accomplishments of Thomas E. Lyle, his influence on the culture and development of predominately African American band programs in the United States, and contribute to the growing body of research on pioneering African American band leaders at Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Data was collected from primary and secondary sources, including newspaper articles, yearbooks, photographs, and memos from Alabama State University and Stillman College archives, scholarly publications, interviews, and archives from the Alabama Bandmasters Association and Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame.

This paper engages the 2024 centennial anniversary of jazz innovator Max Roach as an activist and Freedom Movement leader to explore how his music expressed his Black nationalist political ideologies that rose to prominence in African-America during the 1960s/1970s Black Power Movement. Roach is widely lauded as an innovator who created what the bebop cohort called ‘modern music’ in the 1940s, revolutionizing jazz hence forward, and as a Civil Rights Activist. While many of the 2024 centennial celebrations focused on Roach’s activist legacy, this paper will offer a deeper exploration of Max Roach’s Black nationalism that provoked his persecution by Euro-American music industry rulers who were aligned with the US colonial agenda for African-Americans. By placing Roach’s music in dialogue with ethnomusicological scholarship (Baraka, 1963, Ampene, 2012), Black political science (Dawson, 2001, Harris-Perry, 2004), and Africana Studies (Peniel, 2006, Bracey, 2014), I build on the work of Ingrid Monson (2007) to argue that Roach acted as an African-American Freedom Father who led the Black Freedom Movement using aesthetics that sounded a brand of cultural nationalism that focused on fostering kinship and pan-Africanist dialogue between African-Americans and Africans. Through extensive ethnographic interviews with Roach collaborators Charles Tolliver, Reggie Workman and others, oral history interviews and archival research in the Max Roach Papers and those of his musical partner Abbey Lincoln, I will elucidate how Roach used his musical aesthetics to express this liberation ideology and to usher in the popular era of Black nationalist thought that characterized the Black Power Movement.

Cesária Évora (1941-2011), a singer from Cabo Verde, West Africa with numerous award-winning albums and world tours, was a somewhat unlikely global superstar. When José da Silva became her manager in the late 1980s, she seemed past her prime and unmarketable. Nevertheless, Cesária became a beloved figure within the world music concert circuit and a musical ambassador for Cabo Verde. This presentation describes the communicative strengths, individual agency, and the emerging world music market that made Cesária into the iconic Barefoot Diva, but the primary focus here is her musical repertoire. How did Cesária and her management’s song choices shape the trajectory of her career? Which were favorites of international audiences and why? Cesária worked with several arrangers, composers, bandleaders, and band configurations over the years. How did those individual musicians and styles influence her sound and success? While distinctive to Cabo Verde, Cesária’s core repertoire of mornas and koladeiras utilize rhythms and musical structures common in many transatlantic and Iberian-based styles. Indeed, Fernando Arenas wrote of the cultural “indefiniteness” of Cesária’s sound as a marketing strength (2011:69). As Cesária’s career progressed, this ambiguousness allowed a smooth, successfully expansion to new international repertoire, collaborations, and band members, while remaining firmly Cabo Verdean. New songs like “Bésame Mucho” in Spanish became part of her regular set lists. Just back from new research in Cabo Verde, I discuss Cesária Évora’s successful career path through the lens of the songs she chose and the musicians that helped shape her sound and image.

On the evening of June 5, 1905, spectators crowded the Plaza de Baldioroty in Ponce, Puerto Rico, for a Monday night retreta. These public performances, held twice a week in city centers by municipal and military bands during the Spanish colonial period, continued after the island was annexed by the United States in 1898. They introduced audiences to popular and art music from the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe, as well as works by local Puerto Rican composers. On that June evening, the Banda del Regimiento de Puerto Rico delivered a diverse performance, led by Luis Rodríguez Miranda, a prominent local composer and U.S. Army bandleader. It included the premiere of his danza, “Impromptu op. 10,” a genre tied to Puerto Rican patriotism, alongside American popular music like the foxtrot, European opera excerpts, and Caribbean music such as the pasillo. “Impromptu” demonstrates several distinguishing characteristics of the danza, including common-practice harmony, Afro-Caribbean tresillo and cinquillo rhythms, and the uniquely Puerto Rican “elastic” tresillo. The juxtaposition of culturally significant music from Puerto Rico with genres associated with US colonialism demonstrates the multifaceted nature of Puerto Rican cultural and political identity after US annexation. Within this musical ecosystem, encompassing early jazz as well as European and Afro-Caribbean music, “Impromptu” showcases hemispheric and transatlantic influences while maintaining a distinctly local presence through the danza idiom. In this presentation, I demonstrate how “Impromptu” and the danza idiom complicate genre and reflect Puerto Rican identity and transnational influence during this pivotal period.

The accordion, invented in 19th-century Germany, now enjoys global popularity across Europe and pan-Asian regions, its versatility displayed in international competitions and in classical, folk, and popular repertoires. Tango performance, however, presents a special case. Though historically and sonically bound to the bandoneón—a German button accordion later adopted and reshaped in Argentina—tango is increasingly played on the standard free-bass accordion, even outside Argentina. In many contemporary settings, especially among emerging ensembles and young soloists, the bandoneón is replaced entirely, raising questions about instrument substitution, authenticity, and musical transmission.

This project investigates why the accordion has become a dominant voice in tango far from its Río de la Plata origins. I survey online performance recordings, competition repertoires, and instructional videos to trace how tango is taught and interpreted on the accordion today. Parallel interviews with accomplished accordionists who specialize in tango explore their artistic choices, training backgrounds, and genre perceptions.

My aim is to illuminate both practical reasons—availability, pedagogy, technique—and symbolic or aesthetic implications of performing tango on an instrument not traditionally linked to its cultural birthplace. By analyzing how tango’s identity is negotiated through the accordion, the study contributes to broader discussions of musical adaptation, cultural hybridity, and the dynamics of global instrumental performance.

Over the last quarter century, ethnomusicologists and music theorists have increasingly supported an interpretation of pulsation non-isochrony as a structural metric feature—and not merely an expressive one—in musics from parts of West Africa (e.g., Polak 2010), North Africa (e.g., Jankowsky 2010), and the Americas (e.g., Guillot 2022). This paper extends that work to the Arabian Peninsula, examining pulsation non-isochrony in three musical genres that are often associated with people of African descent and feature what performers sometimes refer to as “Khaliji swing feel” (Yamani and Afif 2017). A timing profile based on chronometric analysis of studio recordings of examples from two of these genres will be presented, demonstrating a superimposition or “nesting” (Polak 2025) of pulsation non-isochrony at binary, ternary, and quaternary levels of beat subdivision that is consistent with “Mode 2” performance in the Mandé region of West Africa (Morford and David 2023). Extended attention will be given to analysis of Liwa, highlighting how pulsation non-isochrony and tempo change interact in processes of metric transformation.

The field of ethnomusicology has begun to invest time into theories and applications of care (Youngblood et al. 2021, Hoesing 2021, Carrico 2023, Danielson 2022). This paper dives into the responses of a music community in Tallahassee, Florida following a series of tornados that affected the Southeast United States in May 2024. These tornados destroyed the local arts district known as Railroad Square, highlighting community anxieties around corporate buyouts and gentrification. Using a rapidly fashioned local benefit show as a case study, this paper asks how music communities support themselves during moments crisis. Due to the increase in ecological disasters, this paper adds to the field’s understanding of how musicians and people organize and make sense of an ever-changing ecology. Drawing upon care ethics (Noddings 1984, Tronto 1993), I examine this concert through the lens of mutual aid and communal interaction (Spade 2020). The benefit show, titled “Band Together,” was put forward by a collection of local bands, artists, small businesses, and vendors on May 24, 2024. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with organizing members, I analyze how musicians and organizers were affected by the creation and collecting of relief funds, giving a deeper look into the challenges and nuance of contemporary mutual aid. I do so not to condemn this moment or the notion of mutual aid, but to show the limits of what communities can do under a government which does not always work in the best interests of said communities.

The Nova electronic trance music festival, held in southern Israel and envisioned as a celebration of “friends, love, and infinite freedom,” was intended to culminate in a joyful sunrise on the morning of October 7, 2023. Instead, it became a symbol of darkness, chaos, and trauma—not only for the 3,400 attendees, but for all Israelis and psytrance communities worldwide. In a brutal attack by Hamas, 378 festivalgoers were killed and 44 were abducted to Gaza, marking it the deadliest assault on a music event in modern history, as reported by Rolling Stone in an article titled, “They Wanted to Dance in Peace. And They Got Slaughtered.” This paper draws on survivor and medical professional testimonies, alongside theoretical frameworks including biopower, necropower, and electronic dance music culture (EDMC) studies, to examine the unprecedented convergence of music and horror at the Nova festival. It explores the psychological and emotional trauma experienced by survivors and investigates how music has functioned as a tool for healing and recovery in the aftermath. Furthermore, drawing on the author’s experience as a radio editor and broadcaster, the paper examines the impact of the event on the Israeli music scene and media, offering insights into how the cultural landscape has responded to this profound collective trauma.

Frameworks for the application of the arts in community settings tend to focus on the development of individuals’ empathy or social bonds. A commensurate level of consideration tends not to be given to the socio-economic, political, and institutional forces that shape such development and to how the arts might help build capacities to manage the impact of such forces. Especially in clinical or social interventions, unrecognized institutional dynamics may introduce or maintain imbalances of power in community and professional practice.

Through fieldwork, interviews, questionnaires, and theoretical analyses of collaborative songwriting projects in community and clinical sites in NYC (2018 – 2020) and San Mateo County (2023 – 2024), I examine how the locus of inquiry shifts from an individual level of development of empathy as a skill—an area of focus in the medical humanities and other arts programming reflecting a liberal conception of empathy—to the institutional level of social interactions that shape an environment for empathy.

The application of an ethnomusicological and performance studies orientation to the medical humanities expands the potential of the arts and humanities to address justice-oriented approaches to the culture of healthcare and the social determinants of health. Participatory music from a performance studies orientation also situates the activity within the community clinical space rather than solely the University or classroom space, defamiliarizing social relations and power hierarchies as co-creation in community praxis. Such praxis with local communities positions art- and music-making themselves as constructivist methodology for participatory action research.

This workshop pairs a Sacred Harp singing from the new Sacred Harp: 2025 Edition, published in September 2025, with a moderated discussion with Sacred Harp singers who played key roles in the tunebook revision to explore how participants in this music culture understand this once-in-a-generation process of renewal. First published in 1844, The Sacred Harp has been sung from continuously and today sits at the center of a transnational music culture. The three workshop leaders are longtime Sacred Harp singers and include the head of the revision-music committee that oversaw the project, the author of the new “Rudiments of Music,” its pedagogical text, and a composer with multiple new songs in the revision written in tunebook’s dispersed harmony style. Panelists will provide practitioners’ perspectives on topics explored in ethnomusicological and related interdisciplinary literature on Sacred Harp singing including songbook editing (Stecker 2019; Karlsberg 2015; Hamrick 1995; Beale 1994), pedagogy (Malone 2009; Kelton 1985; Mitchell 1976), composition (Davis 2016; McKenzie 1989), and navigating Sacred Harp’s pluralistic global network in the twenty-first century (Lueck 2016; Clawson 2011; Miller 2008). After a 45-minute moderated discussion, SEM attendees, panelists, and Atlanta-area Sacred Harp singers will hold a 75-minute Sacred Harp singing from the new tunebook. Held just a month after the book’s publication, this session offers a unique opportunity to sing from the new Sacred Harp tunebook and hear from the people who created it.

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.

At the 2025 Paris AI Summit, VPOTUS Vance declared to world leaders that “excessive regulation” harms the AI industry and will not be tolerated by the USA. His position contrasts with another VP, that of the world’s largest music company (Universal), who denounced AI’s “wholesale hijacking of the intellectual property of the entire creative community.” Indeed, as Suchir Balaji showed, the “fair use” doctrine cannot reasonably apply to the “training” of AI, whether in the form of text, images, or music, since the resulting synthetic products are designed to compete commercially with human-made creations. Law has arguably not kept pace with new technologies, including music AI, which flagrantly violates the spirit of copyright. How are ethnomusicologists to respond to AI in ways consistent with our values? Currently, the US, China, and Europe are the main centers of AI innovation, and of these the EU most explicitly protects privacy and AI safety (e.g. GDPR, EU AI Act). The US is also one of the only major countries that is not a signatory to major international agreements for safe AI development. Since SEM is a US-based organization, its members must consider the impact these US policies will ultimately have on music ownership and music creation worldwide. Based on a decolonial approach to IP in the context of international law, this presentation will identify established ethnomusicological values, then outline the legal arguments (and counterarguments) for regulating AI to protect musicians, promote cultural survival, and even ensure the future of human personal identity.

Court decisions regarding Madonna and Kraftwerk might yet shape the AI music-copyright debate. Of late, copyright's legal balance between corporation and individual has shifted to occlude the author, even as fair-use provisions have been extended, in US and EU jurisdictions, to protect Silicon Valley corporations' practices of harvesting, caching, indexing, and thumbnailing public data online. This paper thus asks how we might better understand "data mining" as a fair-use exception in light of a landmark decision by the US Ninth Circuit, on minimal sampling, and a pending decision by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), on pastiche. Together, the two cases summon urgent questions regarding legal constructions of authorship, artistic agency, and fair use.

While the decision in VMG Salsoul v. Ciccone (2016) promises a renewal of the de minimis doctrine pertaining to sampling of minimal length or extent, the pending CJEU decision, on appeal, in Pelham GmbH, et al. v. Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider-Esleben (2023) promises to rehabilitate the fair-use exception for pastiche. These cases might thereby clarify music-AI copyright: to what extent do training models "borrow" fragments of recorded music under copyright? And, to what extent do AI audio generators reassemble them in their outputs? While Sebastian Stober (2024) has argued that notions of borrowing and pastiche are technically incommensurate with AI audio generators, I argue that—whether or not jurists fully comprehend them—such decisions might yet deliver a legally binding understanding that will shape the direction of music copyright, creativity, and industry to come.

This paper explores what it might mean to "decolonise" AI in the music industry, drawing from case studies in the UAE and Egypt. AI in the music industry is used in music recommendation, to detect copyright infringement, and in music production, as only a few examples. Scholars such as Georgina Born have critiqued the Western centric nature of AI, with most dominant AI systems in the music industry developed by and for Western pop music. Using the Arabic music industry based out of the UAE and Anghami, a Beirut-based music streaming service, as a case studies, this paper demonstrates how the Arabic music industry operationalises AI in ways that both challenge and uphold these relations of power within the region and beyond. Rather than understanding AI as an isolated and coherent object that can be decolonised, it questions whether AI, as a socio-technical assemblage always embedded in its larger cultural and historical contexts, might be better approached through the notion of the colonised coloniser. Developed by historian Eve Troutt Powell, the concept of the colonised coloniser expresses a position of duality in which one both liberates and dominates simultaneously, where the very drive toward liberation is justified through a logic of domination. Most broadly, this paper questions the possibility of decolonising AI, showing its limitations even when starting from the epistemologies of listeners and musicians in the global South. This paper is based on one year of fieldwork in the UAE and Egypt between 2022 and 2023.

This presentation will explore the phenomenon of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-created popular vocal music in the years 2023 through 2025. Through examining both music creation and consumption, I will examine how AI softwares perform humanity-- the results of which purposely blur the lines between AI and human. I also delve into complications that arise when AI performs race and gender. The rise and fall of AI-rapper FN Meka will be used as a case study through which I consider the ethics of an AI software performing Black masculinity with goals of profit and commodification, and other case studies will be used as well. I will also provide potential future developments in the relationship between AI and music, and its impacts on human musicians and listeners.

Recent studies of African music are challenging and expanding the way the field of ethnomusicological fieldwork has been constructed by including physical and figurative locations beyond traditional political, social and cultural boundaries. This panel reflects on the different ways ethnomusicologists working on topics in or related to Africa are redefining the field relative to how it has been constructed in the past and their impact on considerations concerning where knowledge about African music is held and being forged. The four field case studies included herein are Fesfop, a community-led cultural organization in Louga, Senegal, that challenges traditional conceptions of what, where, how and by whom African musical cultural heritage is maintained and preserved; business conferences taking place in the U.S., wherein African popular music is being discursively defined; an archive of Italian postcards and its use in exploring questions about how Tigrinya guayla music has been staged, documented and consumed through the colonial gaze; and nsadwase nnwom, or palmwine music, and how, through Akan cosmologies, it draws our attention to the field site beyond the anthropocene. By exploring these sites and the ways in which they transcend the traditional field in African music studies, this panel seeks to not only consider the ways in which considerations beyond traditional field sites enrich ethnomusicological knowledge, but also the constitutive role African music plays in broader understandings of post-colonial, globalized, economic and ecological relationships well beyond the African continent’s geographic boundaries.

The southern Balkan nation-states of Greece and Bulgaria share a history of state-sanctioned investment in “national” folk music since their post-Ottoman founding. Yet, their contrasting 20th-century political conditions of a right-wing junta and authoritarian socialism gave rise to differing postnationalist cultural legacies amid shifting institutional landscapes. Since the 1990s, a revived urbanite interest in Greek traditional culture contributed to the institutionalization of folk music pedagogy, whereas in Bulgaria, the collapse of its socialist regime saw a decline in state support for folk music institutions. This panel considers how folk musicians respond to the challenges and affordances of institutional change through cosmopolitan creative strategies in performance and pedagogy. We thus strive for a synthetic approach to musical cosmopolitanism scholarship (Turino 2000; Stokes 2007; Collins & Gooley 2017) that considers institutional structure and creative agency together, to underscore the efficacy of cosmopolitan creativities within contemporary folk music scenes. The first presenter contrasts two variants of jazz cosmopolitanism among Epirote musicians in their musicality and self-image. The second presenter examines how leading figures in folk-revivalist music seminars in Greece transcend Hellenocentrism through a pan-regional conception of traditional music. The third presenter explores how two recent Bulgarian folk music recordings draw upon jazz and funk as a source of creative direction amidst the decay of the scene’s folk music institutions. Collectively, these three contributions illuminate the utility of a cosmopolitan creative outlook in confronting the shifting presence of folk music institutions in the southern Balkans.

The Church of Our Saviour (COOS) is an Anglo-Catholic parish within the Episcopal diocese of Atlanta, GA. Founded in 1924, the parish has been an outlier for its preferences for historical liturgy, early music, and orthodox theologies. The mass style for the parish emphasizes a “high church” experience, pairing pre-tonal music with incense, Latin chant, and an East-facing altar. A significant portion of parishioners at COOS identify as queer and/or neurodivergent. Anglo-Catholicism has historically attracted gay men for its campy aesthetic and incarnational theology of the body (Stringer 2000, Bethmont 2006). Alongside queerness, neurodivergence is also prevalent among worshippers at COOS. Drawing from congregational interviews, archival materials, and music survey data, this paper argues that these worshippers have musical/liturgical preferences which are marginal outside COOS. Further, it demonstrates that these preferences have drawn together an emergent community of worshippers that would otherwise be marginalized elsewhere. Taken together, these data suggest that the worshippers’ attraction to the highly-ritualized mass at COOS demonstrates the convergence of multiple marginalized groups that would otherwise not have a worshipping home. Worshippers within the Episcopal Church and Roman Catholic Church honor queerness and neurodivergence in different ways; within both congregations, queer and neurodivergent people can be welcomed more both as separate groups and at their intersection. Ultimately, this paper offers insight for fostering musical communities of welcome for queer and neurodivergent people that would be marginalized elsewhere.

In June 2023, a previously obscure young Roma singer named Vojtik broke into mainstream culture in Slovakia. Drawing on alternative pop and visual aesthetic of Ethel Cain, Lana del Rey, and Marina Diamantis, he stunned Slovak society with his explicit queerness, being a Roma teenager from the industrial Slovak town of Detva with a prominent neonazi scene. "I listen to the city radio, I lie there roaring until I fall asleep. I'm terrified of the future, born to perish..." he sings in Detvian Dream, the viral song that brought him to the limelight. After gaining public acclaim, he stated that he does not enjoy success and will always be "a Rat King". Based on ethnography and media analysis of Vojtik's performances and engagements with his audience, this paper will analyze the various elements of his emancipatory poetics, using frameworks of intimate politics (Stokes 2010, 2023; Stirr 2017), autonomous art (Ranciere 2006), and affective impropriety (Stover, 2020), arguing that Vojtik's interplay of Slovak and Romani folklore, American gothic, alternative pop and subversive appropriation of Slovak national and neo-Nazi references is employed to move beyond representational discourses and to stage a counter-discourse to both ethnonationalist and liberal narratives, the latter viewing Detva (where he developed his unique style and which he significantly never left) as a place of post-socialist decline, from which an outstanding queer pop singer, a Romani one at that, would be unthinkable to emerge.

This paper examines how ‘spliced collage’ serves as a transcoded tool in drag performance, constructing a trans and queer storyworld, demanding audience co-creation, and reflecting the ephemeral, fragmented nature of trans existence. Using ethnographic material from Bristol’s drag scenes (U.K.), I build on queer ethnomusicological approaches (Barz & Cheng, 2020; Garcia-Mispireta, 2023; Maus & Whiteley, 2022) to explore how drag performers engage audiences in collective gender play, making them complicit in constructing a collective, temporary, storyworld. The technique I term ‘spliced collage’ pulls from multiple genres, sound bites, and pop culture references, fragmenting and reassembling them onto a core musical text. Contributing to scholarship on trans cultural production (Rosenberg et al., 2021; Stryker & Curran, 2014; Tourmaline et al., 2017), I explore ‘spliced collage’ as a distinctly transcoded technique which demands audience co-creation for three reasons: Firstly, the compositional process emphasises DIY culture, fostering resistance and community. Secondly, its referential nature, which invites collaborative acts of recognition, interpretation, and play. Finally, it conveys a multiplicity of meanings, containing structural fragility through its bold, fragmented form. This requires audience participation to fill gaps, making worldbuilding a collective, co-authored experience. Using participant observation and interviews, I reconstruct a number deploying ‘spliced collage,’ analyse how musical texts compete and interact, and examine audience responses to the original performance, building on music and drag scholarship (Blackburn, 2024; Heller, 2020). ‘Spliced collage’ represents both individual and collective transness through the storyworld co-created during the performance, expanding discussions on trans methodologies in ethnomusicology and participatory performance.

The aspect of my queer disposition that I have struggled most to understand is not that of my categorical identity (“gay”) but rather how I make sense of myself geospatially as a homosexual living in Texas (Brubaker 2006, Cusick 1994). I feel conflicted by my attraction to the subtle beauty of Texan landscapes and my relative disdain for its politics. On camping and hiking trips, I frequently pair my surroundings (the Texas Hill Country) with the music of American singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens—whose queering of genre, as a queer artist himself, sonically eases my turbulent relationship with Texas.
In this autoethnographic project, I analyze some compositional qualities of three indie-folk songs by Sufjan Stevens to reveal their potential resonance with queer listeners. I draw on Yi-Fu Tuan’s (1974) and Leonieke Bolderman’s (2020) theories of topophilia and musical topophilia—affective relationships between people, places, and music. I conclude that the act of travel, in conjunction with Stevens’s music, provides a mental space and romanticization of a Texas where my queer self can flourish privately and peacefully.
Effectively, these cathartic escapades have established a symbiosis between my consumption of music and experience of place, where each now inspires and enhances the other. I illustrate how playing with affect can foster an empowering and reconciliatory sense of queer embodiment and self-reckoning in a frequently turbulent twenty-first-century U.S. Musical topophilia has become the foundation of my ethics of care; I can now bolster my own everyday mental health through music—and this is my favorite way of “being gay.”

In this paper, I identify new approaches to analyzing flow in Tamil language rap, and through this analysis, argue for broader conceptions of flow and rhyme in rap music. Flow refers to rappers’ lyrical delivery, particularly pertaining to parameters such as rhyme, rhythm, and vocal pitch (Adams 2009; Komaniecki 2019). The art of rap lies uniquely between speech and song, and theorizations of flow must therefore be grounded in rap’s specific linguistic medium. Scholars have examined how rappers in languages other than English have creatively redefined flow and rhyme in accordance with the affordances and limitations of those languages (Manabe 2006; Park 2021). I bring this framework to the understudied body of rap in the Tamil language, which differs significantly from English in its syntax, phonology, and prosody.

I propose some important rhyming techniques that overcome the challenges of—and exploit the affordances of—the Tamil language in rap. These include: multisyllabic end rhymes, head rhymes, translingual rhymes, and phonetic rhymes. I contextualize these techniques within the phonology and syntax of the Tamil language and existent Tamil prosodic conventions, and illustrate their use in two songs by rapper Paal Dabba: “Kaathu Mela” (2024) and “170CM” (2023). This paper thus not only offers analytical techniques for Tamil rap, but an important lens with which to address the crucial issues of linguistic evolution, creativity, and hybridity in popular musics around the world.

Over the past 15 years, hip-hop has become increasingly popular within Vietnamese youth culture. One of the artists at the forefront is Suboi. I would like to present an article focusing on the representation of gender that Suboi puts forth in her work. As a famous female rapper within Vietnam, Suboi crafts contemporary images of Vietnamese women for a global audience. For instance, her music video for CONG (2018, Suboi Entertainment) philosophically deals with the subject of labor (cong) and plays with images of Vietnamese women factory workers, using lyrics, choreography, and staging to subvert conventional narratives. While there is a vast amount of literature on global hip-hops, hip-hop in Southeast Asia is undertheorized. I will draw from pre-existing literature on global hip-hop (Catherine Appert, Jason Ng) staging gender within hip-hop (Liz Przybylski, Noriko Manabe) and Vietnamese gender and aesthetics (Trinh T. Minh Ha, Martina Nguyen, Ben Tran). My research will analyze lyrics, music videos, and interviews, within frameworks of gender and post-coloniality in Vietnam. I ask: In what ways does Suboi engage with prior representations of Vietnamese women in her work? How does Suboi create contemporary representations of Vietnamese women, and how are they presented to domestic and global audiences? How does Suboi appropriate gendered regional/national symbols and vocabularies in crafting her identity as an artist? I argue that in staging these images, Suboi offers a unique aesthetic of contemporary female Vietnamese identity, while navigating the neoliberal market demands of the music industry.

In Okinawa, hip-hop has emerged as a powerful site of cultural resistance, where young rappers gather weekly in cyphers at American Village, near the U.S. military base, transforming public spaces into arenas of political expression. A cypher—a freestyle rap session where MCs take turns improvising verses—has long been a cornerstone of hip-hop culture, fostering community, competition, and social commentary. Drawing from the global tradition of cyphers rooted in Black musical resistance, these gatherings serve as a disruption of Okinawa’s contemporary political landscape, challenging the lingering effects of Japan’s neocolonial policies and the enduring U.S. military presence. This paper explores how hip-hop in Okinawa—both through independent grassroots movements and the work of prominent artists like Awich and OZworld—interpolates traditional shima-uta melodies, creating a sonic bridge between Okinawa’s past and its contested present. While hip-hop serves as a medium for young rappers to voice their frustrations and reclaim their identity, it has also been strategically embraced by local politicians seeking to engage young voters. Through an ethnographic study of street-level cyphers, independent labels, and mainstream artists in Tokyo and Okinawa, respectively, this paper examines the ways in which Okinawan hip-hop negotiates racial, cultural, and political tensions, positioning itself within a larger global network of resistance. By tracing the intersections of hip-hop, race, and political agency in Okinawa, this study highlights how local artists disrupt dominant narratives and use music as a force for social change, asserting Okinawa’s autonomy within the broader framework of Japanese and U.S. geopolitical negotiations.

When hip hop music and culture reached Aotearoa New Zealand in the mid-1980s local youth quickly adapted the genre to reflect Māori and Pasifika aesthetics and values, resulting in a hip hop environment rooted in Indigenous cultural revitalization and resistance to colonial oppression. Although Aotearoa hip hop artists embraced these aspects of the culture, many also displayed the hegemonic masculine behaviors and traits often expressed in mainstream American hip hop, such as overt misogyny, homophobia, competitiveness, and emotional suppression. Women and LGBTQIA+ individuals bear the brunt of the negative effects of hegemonic masculinity; however, this social construction also places substantial limitations on cisgendered heterosexual men who often struggle to cope with the trauma it causes. Notwithstanding its pervasiveness, I came across a number of hip hop artists during my fieldwork in Aotearoa (2024-2025) who are pushing back against the restrictions and damages of hegemonic masculinity in large part by becoming the role models they needed during their youth. I argue that through music and community engagement these artists reconstruct Aotearoa hip hop to reflect the new masculinity; one that embraces vulnerability, encourages empathy, makes space for others, and uplifts peers. This research is based on observations at live performances, cyber ethnography, and interviews with artists currently active in the cities of Wellington and Auckland on the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand. In this presentation, I expand upon extant studies on resistance strategies in Aotearoa hip hop by providing an in-depth analysis of how gender expression contributes to this discourse.

Global concerns over the rapid extraction of natural, economic, and cultural resources call for a critical examination of the concept and practices of the commons from an ethnomusicological perspective. This panel contributes to discussions on music and the commons by examining transformations in structures of ownership in the nominally socialist or post-socialist countries of former Yugoslavia, Romania, and China. In this panel we trace the complexities surrounding a historical shift in the material conditions for music performing and listening; moving from an emphasis on collectivist, state regulated and public domains toward individual, market-oriented and private ones. We theorize this shift as a telling example of the contested interrelationship between music and the commons. Drawing on scholarship that shows how a politics of infrastructure should not only concern itself with the structures or networks that facilitate the flow of goods, people, objects and the allocation of resources, but also the ideas, practices and distribution of patterns of connectivity, movement and flow (Ong and Collier 2005)—this panel broadens ethnomusicological inquiry and theorization of the commons. We argue that understanding the social purposes of music-making requires careful attention to the infrastructures and public goods that sustain the social nature of music making. We ask: what does a focus on musical commons bring to wider debates about social divisions/ equalities, the production of value and social justice? What are the points of intersection or overlap with related notions (or definitions) of the 'global commons,' 'digital commons', or 'creative commons'?

This paper looks at Latinx opera as a Latinx counterpublic in which joy and optimism take center stage. The history of opera largely coincides with the history of colonization, dating back to the sixteenth century. As European culture spread across the western hemisphere over four and a half centuries, opera’s cultural force directly and indirectly asserted white superiority, and later, became associated with the elite and class difference. Yet, in the twenty-first century, opera’s cultural force is radically different and—quite counterintuitively— Latinx artists are turning to one of the most traditional musical forms associated with whiteness and class privilege to express changing class and culture in the Americas.

In this paper, I address how the intersection of Latinx avant-garde and activist art and the operatic mode enable new possibilities for public address. Here, I examine several examples of contemporary Latinx opera to describe how the form stages an intervention into cultural hierarchies and makes possible a new form of political agency. These operas vary in musical style, from traditional orchestral instrumentation to Afro-Caribbean rhythms and beats. Historically excluded from artistic institutions historically credited with taste making, Latinx artists, musicians, and performers turn to opera’s emotionally-laden performance to create new affective structures that better resonate in our current social milieu. In particular, I focus on the emerging practice of immersive opera as both continuation and rupture of traditional operatic form. The practice of immersive opera stages the shifting cultural and class meaning of twenty-first century opera.

When Cantonese opera performers and fans in Hong Kong discuss Cantonese opera, they rarely describe it as having any connection to their identity. This relative silence is reflected in the academic literature on Hongkonger identity where Cantonese opera is seldom mentioned. Indeed, most studies focus on textual readings of Cantopop, film, and television. Among the few studies that have explored the connection between Hongkonger identity and Cantonese opera, most do so by analyzing explicitly political themes. However, the majority of performers today deliberately avoid political content in their productions, which may explain why the opera is widely overlooked in Hongkonger identity discourses. In contrast to these omissions, this paper argues that Cantonese opera performances play a role in shaping Hongkonger identity but do so through a subtle means of discoursing on authenticity. Whilst performers avoid political themes, they often assert that Hong Kong has preserved various “traditional” Chinese performance elements that signify the authenticity and uniqueness of Hong Kong Cantonese opera. This discourse differs from the dominant frameworks in studies on Hongkonger identity which tend to define the uniqueness of Hong Kong as located in its cosmopolitanism rather than its preservation of Chineseness. By highlighting this subtle process of identity construction, this paper positions Cantonese opera as an important yet overlooked cultural force in shaping Hongkonger identity. In doing so, it also offers a more diverse perspective on Hongkonger identity beyond the conventional portrayal of it as uniformly conflicted by its Chineseness, oriented toward cosmopolitanism, and explicitly politicized.

Some of the most sought-after artists in Bali are performers who cross-dress as the female Liku, a historically comedic character representing the crazy princess in the Balinese dance drama arja. Also known as “Balinese opera,” arja has long been a site for contesting and reproducing local and national values concerning gender through its cross-dressed roles (see Kellar 2003 and Collier 2022). This gender commentary has recently begun to expand beyond the arja stage, as many Liku dancers now have lucrative careers performing as freelance MCs, Instagram influencers, and YouTube music video stars. As a result, the visibility and influence of these performers has expanded to millions of viewers in Bali and internationally. Drawing on interviews with famous Liku dancers and analyses of their performances, this paper explores how contemporary Liku performances have become critical spaces for localized and globalized ideas of gender and sexuality to circulate. Focusing specifically on the social media and music videos produced by these performers, we invoke Sarah Sharma’s (2022) feminist extension of media studies and the ways in which technology serves as a bridge between culture and power, to examine how the media produced by Liku dancers is influencing the social experience of gender and sexuality in Bali. This paper has significant implications for ethnomusicology, as although gender and sexuality have been a major topics of discussion in Indonesian music and dance, more research is needed on the impact of modern technology and mediated expressions of gender and sexuality in the arts.

As far as I can remember, every time I listened to Peking Drum Song (Jingyun Dagu) or some other kinds of Chinese operas, I found the musicians’ abilities to perform from memory fascinating. Regardless whether they performed for thirty minutes or three hours, they played without looking at any musical scores. Why do they have such “super power” is a question that I always wonder and want to find out. As I studied the phenomenon, I found out that the singers had been trained with the method of formulaic composition/performance, a method that has been used for a long time and for many Chinese music genres, including folk songs, Chinese opera, and folk instrumental ensembles, which called “chengshihua”(程式化).

Formulaic composition/performance means musicians use formulaic music elements to facilitate their music composition, memorization, and performance. Formulaic composition/performance is not an unique method of Chinese music. It also appears into other world musics, literature, calligraphy, and other forms of art. What and how musical formulism work? This thesis examines “Three Pre-dawn Scenes”( “Choumo Yinchu”丑末寅初), a Peking Drum song, as a case study. My research aim is to investigate how literary, linguistic, melodic, rhythmic and other compositional elements and strategies constitute formulism in traditional Chinese music.

The history of field recording in Mexico’s Huasteca region reflects shifting intellectual paradigms, technological advancements, and evolving motivations behind musical documentation. Over the past century, recording projects in the Huasteca have been driven by three primary impulses: an anthropological draw, which seeks to document and archive expressive culture for research; an aesthetic draw, which foregrounds artistic appreciation and sonic qualities; and an entrepreneurial draw, emerging in the digital era, in which recordists leverage online platforms for visibility, audience engagement, and revenue.

This paper traces the evolution of regional field recording practices through key case studies, from the institutional work of midcentury researcher-recordists such as Raúl Hellmer, Thomas Stanford, Arturo Warman, and Irene Vázquez Valle to the independent documentation efforts of Eduardo Llerenas, Baruj Lieberman, and Enrique Ramírez de Arellano in the 1970s and 80s. The 21st century has seen a new wave of DIY documentarians—including Gabino Vera Benito (GavBroadcast) and Hector Manuel Delgado Flores (QuerrequeFilms)—who use YouTube and social media to distribute field recordings in real time, engaging with audiences in ways that previous generations could not. Through the analysis of multiple renditions of the sones El Sacamandú and La Huasanga, this paper examines how shifting recording priorities result in distinct sonic representations of the same repertoire. Ultimately, I argue that tensions between institutional, independent, and platform-based approaches to documentation continue to shape the mediation, performance, and circulation of the Huasteca’s musical practices in the present.

In ethnomusicology, fieldwork often focuses on capturing the sounds of culturally critical or eventful moments. However, in studying the soundscapes of social movements, photographs—through colors, signs, banners, bodies in motion, and tears—also narrate sonic experiences. Protest images function as sensory archives, evoking the invisible presence of sound and reactivating sonic memories (Howes 2005; Voegelin 2014). The “silent” Iranian protest photos in the diaspora can be differentiated from those of Iran and amplify different political soundscapes regarding the same movements. Despite sonic exclusion in the ethnographic studies of these photos, they still unite our sensorium and cause affective responses based on our individual lived memories (Hofman 2015; Stirling 2018; Drott 2023). This paper draws on interviews with a professional protest photographer, fieldwork in the U.S., and digital ethnography of Iranian protest scenes following the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. I examine how images provoke the sensorium, allowing viewers to “hear” the past, narrate stories, and experience a transnational sense of solidarity. By interrogating the interplay between sound and image, I discuss that protest photography serves not only as documentation but as an active medium for sonic imagination and political resonance. How do these visual representations empower our sonic memories? To what extent do ethnomusicologists need photographs to expand their discussions of soundscapes in social movements? How are the visuality of protest photos and the aurality of their stories intertwined in the sound study of social movements?

The words that typify the quintessence of the experience of grief in the Qur’ān were uttered by the Prophet Jacob upon hearing of the death of his son, he proclaimed ‘Patience is Beautiful’ (al- sabroon jamil) (The Qur’ān, 12:18). The pairing of beauty and patience articulates a profound principle in Islamic ethics (takhalluq) and roots that conceptualization in aesthetics. Furthermore, one can deduce that by necessity experiences of grief in Islam submit to time, as being patient in grief can nearly be approximated as an experience of suffering, endurance, or forbearance through duration. This paper endeavors a demonstration that Qur’ānic recitation provides the grounding for an authentic experience of grief. Artistically, this is achieved in terms of the aesthetic profile of ideal recitation which places an emphasis on the pathos of grief (huzn) (Nelson, 1989). Additionally, that melody gives authentic intuitive knowledge that a coherent unity can be experienced sequentially through time (Husserl, 1905). Following Levinas (1993), I will argue that death is a trauma that strikes (daraba) against time to sudden-ness and there emerges patience as length of time, where time is deferred and transferred up to the Infinite (God). Furthermore, that deferred patience transforms into existential ethical responsibility to our neighbors (ibid). In this paper, I explore the social activity of Qur’anic recitation as a macrocosm of the prophetic debt reflected in a being-toward-others, re-collected (dhikr) in communal memory. Phenomenologically, the activity approximates the telos of recitation ‘as God’s ‘gathering’ us or re-collecting our distended souls.’ (Begbie, 2000).

Ethnographic studies on forced-migrant experiences in France often focus on cities in the north and south (Calais, Paris, Marseille), overlooking how long-term displaced communities engage with sound and media after resettling elsewhere. While scholars have examined how diasporic communities in France navigate and resist restrictive migration policies through sonic practices (Echchaibi, 2011; Tan, 2024), research on creative sonic practices within settled forced-migrant communities remains limited, particularly in Bordeaux. When studied, forced-migrant music-making is often framed within moments of active transit rather than resettlement. This paper examines how forced migrants now settled in Bordeaux use their craft in sonically creative ways to transform the urban landscape. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Bordeaux, I explore the multifaceted—and often intimate—ways in which forced migrants respond to shifting personal, professional, and political pressures through sound and media. I analyze how migration-related issues in French politics, particularly droitification, are contested in Bordeaux via local community initiatives, fostering spaces of musical allyshipacross the city. Building on Janet Carsten’s (2020) concept of kinship as doing, I propose sonic kinship as a dynamicframework for understanding the intricate interplay of relationships through sound. Informed by the works of Edward Said (1993) and Naomi Waltham-Smith (2023), my analysis listens contrapuntally to Bordeaux, reflecting on its colonial legacies through its present-day audible infrastructures (Western, 2021). By centering the sonic practices of long-term forced migrants in Bordeaux, this paper reveals the creative ways in which those in displacement challenge systemic obstacles and discrimination while shaping their new lives.

This panel offers new perspectives on theorizing jazz encounters both in and outside of the United States. From diplomacy (Von Eschen 2006) to cross-racial musical collaborations (Roberts 2016) to white voyeurism (Monson 1995; Heter 2022), jazz, as a musical genre, functions as an imagined space where social identities are negotiated and cultural meaning is constructed (Jackson 2012; Teal 2021). Extending this scholarship, the four panelists prioritize the affective and political affordances of jazz to ask: how do we as scholars write about moments of encounter?  Working across ethnographic, archival, and music-theoretical methods, we theorize encounters in various times and places including: the contentions of insider and outsider-ness between Creole of color and Black American communities in early jazz formations; American women jazz musicians’ contributions to U.S. Cold War diplomacy; Charles Mingus’s sonic disruption and interactions with white audiences; and Lester Bowie’s cross-racial collaborations with the Polish “yass” band Miłość. Although these case studies differ historically and geographically and span several subgenres, collectively, we focus on moments of encounter to understand how musicians and listeners feel in space together, how cultural hybridity shapes genre, and the ways in which dominant jazz narratives flatten the nuances of these interactions. Our research highlights the complexity and often contradictory nature of these encounters. By challenging one-sided analyses, we orient ourselves toward the multi-faceted and intertwined structures of feeling that have emerged throughout jazz history.

Following Kay Shelemay’s call to approach the idea of community “in action” (2011), this panel explores how musical practices shape communities into groups that espouse an ideology that may inspire political action. We consider three cases in which we do not assume a community’s characteristics but illustrate how different genres and features of music associated with Puerto Rico point to different ways of identifying (Brubaker 2006), whether on a local, national, or diasporic level. In turn, drawing upon Martin Stokes’s recent theoretical discussions about music and citizenship (2023), we demonstrate how these ways of identifying suggest an ideal type of musical citizenship, whether that be in the form of affective belonging, neoliberal resistance, or decolonizing efforts. The first paper examines how Los Pleneros de la 23 Abajo, a renowned plena ensemble deeply rooted in their neighborhood, employed their musical practices to unite local residents into a community of resistance against the threat of displacement posed by planning policies prioritizing industrial development. The second paper offers the example of how the use of Taíno musical and lyric imagery in nueva canción, música urbana, and Neo-Taino movement attempts to invoke a broader community of indigeneity of the Américas to provoke widespread decolonial action. The final paper scrutinizes how community affect for a local version within the national drum-based bomba practice was revitalized through diasporic experiences. Each of these studies contributes to the growing discussion of how different versions of citizenship can be promoted through the process of creating musical communities.

To be released 2025/26, length 60 mins., English/Xhosa/Zulu with subtitles.

Against the history of South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle, WE ARE NOT AFRAID explores music’s critical role as resistance for political prisoners held in apartheid prisons over three decades (1960-1990), especially at Robben Island (the notorious prison which held Nelson Mandela for 18 years) and the Johannesburg Women’s Jail at the Old Fort. Narrated by former political prisoners, with historical archival footage of key historical moments from the apartheid era, it shows how music performance – from indigenous African genres like isicathamiya, maskanda and mbaqanga to Cape jazz, migrant work songs, freedom songs, Western classical, rock, reggae and Indian ragas – provided resistance, critique, community, therapy, memory and identity for political prisoners, transcending political, linguistic and ethnic differences to unite an oppressed people against a common enemy. Women’s narratives and songs expose the deadly gender-based violence that underlay structures of state violence and express their fight against both racial and gender oppression and dehumanizing prison experiences, which differed sharply to a male-centered struggle world. Through these remarkable resilient individuals, new testimonies and music, the film touches on broader questions about cultural expression as advancing social change and the uses of music by individuals suffering and protesting the violation of human rights under oppressive patriarchal regimes at the intersections of music, resilience, power, violence, gender, race, trauma and human rights.

Excerpt:highlights that touch on the film’s main themes.Introduction:ethical approaches to ethnographic research/media-making in trauma-related research, the importance of documenting crimes against humanity.

To pierce through the overwhelming soundscape of Oaxaca, Mexico’s garbage dump, the local workers’ union, Los Pepenadores, developed a system of communicative whistle cadences. As frontline recyclers from 1980 to 2022, they navigated and sifted through the materials that arrived in the dump, collecting items to sell for their livelihood. This system of cadences—practiced and understood by all 130 union members—served as an intergenerational, union-wide, communicative tactic. Drawing on my fieldwork data and interviews, I argue that these whistling cadences were highly effective due to union members’ virtuosic listening and sound-making daily practices, their deep communal bonds, and their shared ancestral heritage as Zapotec descendants. I situate my findings within scholarship on deep and active listening (Oliveros 2005; Kapchan 2017), community sound and music practices (Higgins 2012), and linguistic assertions of tonal nuance present among Spanish-speaking Zapotec descendants (Sicoli 2015). This paper presents Los Pepenadores as a case study of how a deeply bonded community, navigating a hazardous environment, developed and sustained a sophisticated communication system. Their whistling cadences not only ensured safety and facilitated financial gain but also functioned as a cultural and social practice that reinforced their communal bond and collective identity. By framing these cadences within the union’s 42-year working history in the dump, I demonstrate how this sound-making system sustained and reinforced this community’s survival, solidarity, and cultural preservation.

Martyrdom has become a central theme in Azerbaijani music in the aftermath of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh war (27 September 2020 – 10 November 2020). Relying on ethnographic research, comprised of interviews with war veterans and mourners, I investigate how local people experience the idea of martyrdom through music. I focus on the composition “bayati shiraz” sung by Tajir Shahmalioglu, which has become the main soundtrack of war and the ongoing post-Soviet conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Juxtaposing recent discussions of voice as liminal, affective, and relational (Eisenlohr 2018; Feldman 2015; Meizel 2020) with frameworks from the anthropology of death (Engelke 2019), I argue that the efficacy of this composition lies in the qualities of its singer’s voice to enact emotional work necessary to make sense of death. In addition to the patriotic poetic text used in “bayati shiraz,” the specific timbre of a child’s voice with its high melismatic register serves as a powerful symbol of the contested region, poignantly evoking themes of loss and sacrifice. I discuss how this voice gives a sense of continuity, as it transcends boundaries of time, space, as well as physical and spiritual realms, providing a chronotope (Bakhtin 1981) to encounter martyrs in one's imagination and understand loss as sacrifice for the nation united in suffering. The voice, in other words, performs a type of transaction and exchange, marking martyrdom as “good death” that is essential to the nation’s regeneration.

The year 2020 marked a turning point in virtual/augmented reality (VR/AR) technology consumption. On October 13, Meta released the Oculus Quest 2, a standalone VR headset with an accessible base price of 299 USD. By the first fiscal quarter of 2023, Quest 2 sales had reached approximately 18 million units, vastly outperforming previous VR/AR systems and significantly expanding mainstream adoption. The marketplace continues to diversify, with Meta and other companies unveiling ever-evolving systems.

Rhythm and dance-based games constitute a major sector of the VR/AR gaming industry. Catering to diverse musical tastes and gameplay motivations—including dance, fitness, socialization, and competition—these games reshape boundaries between physical embodiment and digital performance. Multiplayer modes create dynamic virtual spaces where players can interact in real time, forming self-selected communities around musical preferences, skill levels, and gameplay styles.

Building on discourse surrounding social play in non-VR rhythm games, this paper demonstrates how multiplayer VR/AR rhythm/dance games complicate notions of public and private performance, enhance machine evaluation and feedback mechanisms, and expand the possibilities for embodied co-presence in digital spaces. Examining Beat Saber (2019–) and Synth Riders (2019–) as case studies, this paper integrates insights from digital ethnography (Tom Boellstorff et al.) with ludomusicological perspectives on participatory digital performance (Kiri Miller), social gaming (William Cheng), and game sound (Karen Collins). I argue that these games not only reflect but actively shape new paradigms of musical interaction and social connectivity in the metaverse, positioning player actions within a (meta)diegetic framework where gameplay mechanics and self-expression become mutually reinforcing.

Social media has fundamentally reshaped musical practices, fostering new forms of community, participation, and engagement. This paper explores emerging modes of collective musicking on the Chinese video platform Bilibili, expanding Christopher Small’s (1998) concept of musicking to digital contexts. While Small positioned musicking as a countermeasure to the dominance of Western classical music, this study argues that collective musicking on Bilibili challenges the hegemony of offline music by facilitating participatory, interactive, and decentralized musical experiences.

Three key dimensions of digital musicking are examined. First, Bilibili’s unique danmu (弹幕, “overlaid commentary”) transforms seemingly solitary acts of listening, viewing, and remixing into highly participatory and community-driven engagements. Second, the paper investigates the role of AI-driven voice synthesis, particularly Sovits, as a case study in human-nonhuman musical collaboration. AI-singing technologies allow users to generate and manipulate vocal performances, blurring distinctions between performer, listener, and creator. Third, collective musicking on Bilibili transcends temporal and spatial constraints, enabling asynchronous yet interactive musical experiences that reconfigure traditional notions of liveness and co-presence.

Drawing on long-term participant observation and digital ethnography, this study situates Bilibili’s musicking culture within broader ethnomusicological discussions of virtual communities, digital co-creation, and participatory music-making. By analyzing how users engage with AI and platform-specific affordances, this research highlights the shifting dynamics of agency, authorship, and musical sociality in online spaces. In doing so, it underscores the significance of digital musicking as a transformative force in contemporary ethnomusicology.

After abolishing 38-year martial law in 1987, Taiwan entered a new period in which freedom of speech, publishing, and assembly were no longer restricted. Ever since, political participation has become a part of daily life: people talk about politics, go on the streets to fight for their rights, and exercise their civil rights by directly voting for their presidents, mayors, and legislators. In this flourishing era of civic participation, music plays a crucial role in mobilization and engagement with its feature of bonding people emotionally, expressing their identity, and promoting specific ideology.

With my internet-based ethnography and personal experience, this paper will focus on the role of music and social media in mobilizing the Blue Bird Movement—a significant civic protest in Taiwan that emerged in response to a controversial legislative reform proposal in March 2024. The study explores how participants used cyberspace, particularly social media platforms like Threads, to organize and amplify the movement. The focus is on the use of AI-generated music and the creative integration of digital symbols, such as hashtags and fan culture, to engage the public. These tools allowed for efficient mobilization both online and offline. Additionally, the paper discusses the controversial political statements made by celebrities, including Mayday and Jolin Tsai, during their China tour, which sparked debates within the movement. This research highlights the intersection of digital and physical spaces in modern social movements, illustrating how AI-generated music and online collaboration shape contemporary protest strategies and political discourse in Taiwan.

Recent calls to confront the epistemological and ontological biases upon which normative American music education is based are plentiful in our discipline. In this presentation I will share my attempts to engage these issues through a freshman music ontology course called ‘Speaking of Music’.

What counts as music, who says so, in what settings, and by what parameters are favorite starting points for any world music class. But they are equally relevant to all types of musical training (in a composition, appreciation, studio lessons, etc.) as they forefront the social and aesthetic boundaries that each sub discipline creates. Designed for first-year undergraduate students, this class deploys novel assignments that engage the peripheries of the music concept, translation of sound into visual, tactile, or choreographic modes, multi-species sonication, and the social and biological positionality of listening. This course is an attempt to mark the unmarked structures that guide university music education and open such conversations to students. It infuses ethnomusicological and sounds studies ideas into a foundational first year experience. The class aims to reassess what counts as music rudiments (Ewell 2020), to embrace multiple epistemologies (Robinson 2019), to confront ideological supremacy (Kajikawa 2019, Brown 2020), and to foster a more inclusive music curriculum. The class is an experiment… with successes and failures to be reviewed and shared for those interested in new pedagogies. This presentation will outline the class goals and assignments and will also share some strategies for politicking such a course into the undergraduate music curriculum.

Christian Utz (2010) foresaw Asia's growing role in the future of classical music and emphasized intercultural value of East Asian art music. In his 2021 book Musical Composition in the Context of Globalization, Utz challenges cultural essentialism and advocates for the ontology of a “hybrid, fluid, and transformative constitution of all contemporary cultures in the global age.” This paper explores his framework by proposing the concept of intermusicality, which emphasizes the dynamic, cross-cultural exchange of individual musicians' interactions, transcending rigid cultural boundaries of nationality or tradition. Drawing on Ingrid Monson’s work, it challenges the fetishization of traditional music as an element of authenticity in Korean culture. Music, rather than being confined to cultural or stylistic borders, is viewed as a collaborative space where individual musicians exchange ideas, sounds, and gestures, constructing meaning through their intersecting identities.

This paper explores intermusicality in contemporary Korean music through case studies of female composers. While earlier generations, such as Chou Wen-Chung and Isang Yun, struggled with East-West dichotomies, younger composers reject nation-state-based cultural frameworks. This presentation examines how Chin’s Sheng Concerto (2009) challenges stereotypes of traditional instrument through her collaboration with sheng player Wu Wei, and how Kim’s Ghost Geomungobot (2018) reimagines ancient Korean geomungo in digital space, transcending boundaries of nationalism and Koreanness in contemporary music. Additionally, DoYeon's Existence (2023) redefines gayageum performance in transcultural context, deconstructing its traditionality. Through these works, this paper highlights the aesthetic of intermusicality, offering a dynamic negotiation between tradition and innovation and expanding the contemporary music canon.

Between 1970–1990, the Festival of Political Songs took place annually in East Berlin, the former capital of the German Democratic Republic (GDR; East Germany). During these events, artists, activists, and scholars from dozens of countries around the world descended on the city for a week of cross-cultural exchange and connection. While ostensibly functioning as a site of free and unmediated interaction, all forms of cultural and political activity occurred within an environment that relied heavily on notions of political, racial, and geographic difference. With the majority of activities occurring just a few hundred meters from the lived, physical realities of Berlin Wall, as well as within the broader philosophical and ideological nexus between the East and the West in the twilight of the Cold War, this paper takes the festival as stage upon which a variety of bordered expressions were articulated. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, this paper examines the various ways that borders were enacted, reified, and challenged on musical stages in the former capital. Rather than arguing that the festival operated as a either a site of political contestation or as a device for political propaganda of the East German state, this paper aims to frustrates the binary logic of Cold War geography by considering the musical manifestations of both realities and the ways they interacted within both the real and perceived experiences of borders during the Cold War.

Under direct orders from the President of the United States, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) intensified its raids and targeted deportations in 2025, terrorizing Mexican American communities in cities including Los Angeles. This wave of state violence ignited resistance within the local Chican@ ska scene. In response, bands like 8Kalacas have used their music and public presence to challenge these crackdowns. Through social media, musicians and fans situate themselves and the music within this resistance by posting images of their participation in protests while wearing band apparel alongside use of imagery signifying Mexico and Mexican social movements like the Zapatista uprising. Additionally, activists have incorporated lyrics by 8Kalacas into their signs and song recordings into videos posted from street demonstrations, using ska music as a visual and sonic declaration of defiance. My discussion engages with theories on music as a social movement tool (Manuel 2019), sonic activism in digital spaces (Danaher 2018), and the role of cultural memory in resistance (Melucci 1989, Eyerman and Jamison 1998). Drawing on digital ethnography and interviews with artists directly involved in social protests, I address the questions: how does the Chican@ ska scene frame its protest message through music and performance? How are these targeted political attacks directly felt within the Los Angeles ska community? In what ways does digital activism shape perceptions of artists’ political resistance? How are these current protest practices informed by other social justice movements in the United States and Mexico?

In this presentation, I explore the emergence of a novel performance space within the Islamic Noha (a ritual lament) tradition among Iranian Muslims, which I term “Islamic disco.” Traditionally, the combination of dynamic rhythmic elements and dancing is forbidden. However, to engage youth and attract them to Islamic ideology, the Islamic government inspired a new wave of Noha performances that have deviated from conventional forms by incorporating rhythmic patterns derived from EDM genres with other contemporary innovations, such as the release of professional music videos and the imitation of melodies of Tehrangelesi pop music (inspired by Iranian diaspora). I argue that this reconfiguration is not just a stylistic shift; it is a deliberate strategy aimed at engaging youth and recasting Islamic involvement. As an example of this, I will examine a Noha song, “Che Yali Bah Bah.” In January 2025, this performance drew significant online attention; while the state harnessed modern technology to promote its innovation, many young Iranians appropriated the performance on Instagram to mock the state-endorsed version, thereby transforming it into a tool of protest. Drawing on Homi J. Bhabha’s scholarship on cultural hybridity, I examine how the interplay of religious ritual, popular music, and social media disrupts established norms and exposes deeper tensions between state power and youth dissent. My analysis reveals how a totalitarian regime, in its fervor to promote a narrow religious ideology, oversteps the very red lines it has drawn on Iranian music.

As South Korean youth confront new formations of musical pasts through the ongoing newtro (new retro) trend, the popular emergence of City Pop destabilizes genre boundaries (Bauman & Briggs 1990), not merely reviving but actively reconfiguring musical categories through listening, (re)historicization, and material circulation (Bitter 2023, Feld 2012, Ochoa Gautier 2014). Initially associated with 1980s Japanese pop music and retroactively codified online (Sommet 2020, Wajima 2022), City Pop gained popularity among Koreans in the late 2010s. This revival became politically charged during Seoul’s 2019 Japanese Product Boycott demonstrations, where anti-Japanese sentiment (Ching 2019) spurred a reimagined “Korean City Pop,” crafting a post-authoritarian music history independent from Japanese influence. Yet, the continued appeal of intersecting “City Pop” variants amid this politicized sentiment unsettles nationalist listening frameworks. Drawing from fieldwork across Seoul’s LP bars, I foreground how aural relations between vinyl DJs and precariously employed Koreans foster the generative formation of personal playlists, which become an aural practice to navigate (un)belonging amid their broader alienation from the politics of everyday life in Seoul (Berardi 2015). Eschewing organizational—and national—constraints of City Pop-as-genre, I examine how everyday acts of playlisting, as both an analog archival practice and smartphone-based digital extraction, underscore relational intimacies that challenge reductive political narratives of contemporary Korean listening cultures—whether as national (anti)consumption (Kendall 2001) or an aural fetishization of the colonial Other (Robinson 2021). Writing through the (dis)organizational and (non)relational form of the playlist, I trace throughlines illustrating how these listening practices rework frameworks of sonic belonging in Korea.

Scholarship on nostalgia examines the sometimes adverse impact of romanticizing and longing for a past that existed differently from our memories (Geniusas, 2024). Working with gay choruses, nostalgia appears to emerge as a necessary component in recalling painful memories — for instance, the AIDS crisis. As communities of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991), choruses are entertainers, activists, and de facto families for their membership. Since the late-1970s, LGBTQ+ choruses have contended with social, cultural, and political factors sustaining homophobia, impacting singers collectively and individually. As the singers in these groups work to effect change for the queer community, their recollections of navigating periods of turbulence, the pain of loss and the frustration in countering homophobia are often accompanied and tempered by nostalgic memories. These memories are exemplified by positive, loving, and affectionate reminiscences of specific songs, rehearsals, concerts, events (such as touring politically “red” locales), interactions with one another, and more. Drawing from interviews and fieldwork, I argue that nostalgia, in this case, isn’t merely a romanticized longing for the past. Rather, nostalgia here acknowledges the painful realities of the past and becomes a necessary part of choruses’ and individual singers’ stories of survival and transcendence. Nostalgia frames memories with a multidimensionality, providing stories that can guide LGBTQ+ choruses in navigating a current socio-political climate riddled with homophobia and transphobia. Where choruses and other similar communities of practice are concerned, such studies carry strong implications for ethnomusicology.

Ventura Profana (Unholy Venture) is an Afro-Indigenous Brazilian performance artist, missionary, pastor, and advocate for trans and queer Afro-Brazilian individuals. In this paper, I will discuss how queer religious futurities are enacted through photomontage, music, and mission work. I argue that Ventura Profana uses both their religious background and the teachings of contemporary Christians to situate themselves as portraying the “devil” in liberatory ways. Engaging in both necropolitics and nihilistic futurities, Profana’s music and teaching offer a sexually reimagined religious reality, that encourages disobedience and disorientation. In confronting religious colonization, I argue that Profana’s textual analysis offers an opportunity to both use and decolonize religious-colonial projects through expressions of self, sexuality, and spirituality based in queer Black, Brown, and Indigenous futurities.

Creating narratives of refusal borne from their interpretations of “recolonized” text, Ventura Profana addresses coloniality through biblical interpretation. Profana missionizes to their followers and community the divinity found in transness, based on reinterpretations of neo-Pentecostal biblical texts and teachings. Following the model of evangelization and missionary work, they hope to spread a message of anti-colonial anti-capitalist knowledge. By analyzing their music like in the co-written and performed “Python”, I argue that Profana preaches resistance, sex, sensuality, and decoloniality using neo-Pentecostal and contemporary Christian stylizing. Carefully critical of liberation theology, Profana does not discard prospects of Christianity but uses theological arguments to provide a critique of the capitalist, cis-heterosexual, and white narratives within the Bible.

Bluegrass lyricism is well known for a consistent set of tropes: love, loss, home and religion. Prominently written from the perspective of a man who has left his rural home to work in the urban city, traditional bluegrass standards enact what Boym (2007; 2008) terms “reflective nostalgia” through a heteronormative lens; the writer reminisces and romanticizes their past life in comparison to their current perspective, recognizing that the past cannot be fully recreated or relived either due to the passing of time or changes in society. Only through the possibility of a heavenly reunion can said past be restored. However, bluegrass is not a static genre, and the songwriters of today blend their current experiences into the tropes of the past. Through both lyrical analysis and ethnographic interviews, I examine the songwriting of today’s queer bluegrass artists who reframe reflective nostalgia, recognizing that the “old home place” is not always a place of acceptance, love and loss is influenced by discrimination, and religion can be a topic of hurt rather than hope. Nostalgia, rather than abandoned, is queered. Examining this queering of nostalgia in bluegrass through the analysis of local songwriting, I demonstrate that these queer songwriter extend and expand on the traditional bluegrass canon, rather than separating from it.

How can community-based music activities be deployed to facilitate active citizenship, shared identities, cohesion, and sense of belonging? This paper explores how English locales can increase active citizenship, drawing on examples from a curated programme of interventions and collaborations, co-created with non-academic organisations under the aegis of the ‘Cohesive Harmonies’ project. Over the past 15 years, England has undergone a gradual but deliberate devaluation of music through drastic reductions of school music provision, slashed funding, and aggressive government-led anti-arts narratives. Devaluation processes run alongside economic downturn, widening wealth gap, government service reduction, and increases in anti-immigrant rhetoric. These factors contributed to a decline in community engagement and cohesion. Active citizenship describes the engaged participation of a person in their local community, be that politically, socially, or economically. Cohesive Harmonies challenges the trend of devaluing the arts by demonstrating how music can reinvigorate local communities through its place-based interventions and collaborations. Two key frameworks are explored: Researcher-Driven interventions, such as the Bradford Dhol Project, which uses dhol workshops to bridge community divisions through shared sonic experiences, and Organisation-Driven initiatives, like the collaboration with Dorset Music Hub, which highlights how music in schools can foster well-being and non-musical competencies. Through these case studies, this paper exemplifies how music activities can aid in developing different citizenship attributes. Ultimately, the paper argues that music interventions, designed with local input, can contribute significantly to active citizenship by strengthening community bonds and improving social cohesion.

Christopher Small (1998) views musicking not just as musical work but as a social act and human activity where everyone has a natural involvement, and he posits, through this action, better relationships can be developed between individuals, societies, and humanity. Michael Frishkopf (2021) believes participatory and flexible music-making can create socio-sonic resonance within a communicatively connected social network and that resonance “transmutes social network into social fabric” (49). Like Small and Frishkopf, Thomas Turino (2008) argues participatory performances contribute to social interactions where a participant equally engages with the act of their performance and with other participants “for the processes of personal and social integration that make us whole” (1). Building on ideas of “musicking” from Small, Frishkopf, and Turino, this paper examines how a Community Collaborative Participatory (CCP) Musicking can contribute to stimulating community empowerment, community well-being, and cultural sustainability. In reflecting on results from a CCP Musicking initiative with minority Nepalese immigrant musicians in Alberta, Canada, this paper argues that CCP Musicking can foster community empowerment through enhancing capabilities and reinforcing confidence and self-esteem (Harrison 2020; Lewin 1946); community well-being through positive mental, emotional, psychological, social, and physical advantages (Acquah 2016; Armstrong 2016); and cultural sustainability (in a diasporic context) through tracing roots, evoking history and collective memory (Bohlman 2002; Cohen 2008; Safran 1991), and linking one to their homeland’s culture, tradition, and heritage (Bohlman 2002; Naroditskaya 2019; Stokes 1997). Further, the paper underscores how the CCP model can be a viable tool in community-based research in ethnomusicology.

As the academic landscape shifts—marked by budget cuts, the shrinking of humanities programs, and the precariousness of tenure-track jobs—many ethnomusicologists are rethinking their role within and beyond the university. Historically positioned as collectors and archivists, ethnomusicologists have long worked within institutional frameworks that prioritize preservation and scholarly publications. Yet, in an era where communities increasingly document, share, and write about their own music, there is a growing need to reconsider how scholars engage in their research. Rather than reinforcing institutional hierarchies, how might ethnomusicologists work in ways that center community priorities, redistribute institutional resources, and foster long-term relationships of accountability?

This paper explores these questions through two Seattle-based projects: Carangolo, an album of Capoeira music recorded in collaboration with Mestre Silvinho and the Seattle chapter of the International Capoeira Angola Foundation (ICAF), and the on-going revitalization of the Northwest Folklife archive, which houses recordings spanning five decades of community music-making in the Pacific Northwest. Inspired by Carolyn Landau, Janet Topp Fargion, Michelle Caswell, Jade Power-Sotomayor, and John Vallier’s work on collaborative archiving and equitable scholarship, this paper contributes to ongoing discussions in ethnomusicology about how scholars can engage meaningfully in cultural sustainability efforts while navigating the changing realities of academic and public scholarship.

We introduce Keywords in Black Sound—a collaborative and interdisciplinary project that highlights a diverse set of concepts that shape Black sound studies broadly constructed. Our project broadens the mandate of Keywords in Sound, a critical text analyzing the significance of sound through a range of essays that argued for interconnected concepts, including acoustemology, resonance, deafness, echo, and silence. Black sound studies is a theoretical, conceptual, and methodological framework that centers sound as a mode for thinking through the racialization of the human experience. For this panel, we diagram a growing set of keywords such as scale, sampling, and timbre that outline a series of philosophical, cultural, and placed-based debates for analytical engagement with Black sound. We argue that sound is racialized through social, geographic, political, cultural, and economic processes that have significant implications for understanding the everydayness of racialized living with sound studies as a conduit. Currently, our geo-political climate calls for suppressing dialogue about race and engagement with racialized experiences from varied positionalities, which silences Black life and its sonic expressions. We call for attuning ourselves to sound as a racialized process both historically and in our contemporary moment through sustained attention to the nuance of Black life and its sonic textures across time. By journeying through the chord progressions of Black sound, we amplify the sonic knowledge, practices, and livingness of Black people as a locus of deep inquiry that advances sound studies.

Across cultures and since at least the nineteenth century, commodities and markets have stalked music and musicians. The various ways of commodifying music—and the markets this commodification creates—puts pressure on and reshapes sonic practices, even as it opens new possibilities for practitioners. Thinking with the concept of the commodity implicates technology, from print to streaming apps. Considering the market opens up issues of circulation and the production of meanings. Explicitly and otherwise, such topics have been of longstanding interest in ethnomusicology, especially of the overlapping subjects of the “World Music” and music technology industries (e.g., Feld 1988; Théberge 1997; Meintjes 2003; Greene and Porcello 2010; Taylor 2014). This session returns attention to the commodity and the market as basic concepts, asking how they might serve economic ethnomusicology today. With three papers and a response, it highlights different perspectives for understanding commoditization and the market. The first paper addresses how commoditized spiritual goods affect religiosity when Japanese Buddhist priests–more or less ambivalently–participate in New Age spiritual marketplaces as an “experimental” practice for finding new parishioners as their temples face looming economic and demographic instability. The second paper addresses how son jarocho practitioners navigate the challenges of the music’s commodification–not least that a reputation for anticommercialism has become a trope of its marketing. The third paper lends a historical angle by using the case of nineteenth-century Cuban contradanza to suggest ways of thinking beyond the commodity in theories of music and value under capitalism.

This panel brings together scholars exploring several aspects of Ottoman musical legacy that reflect the imperial hybridity and its post imperial continuity. In particular, the panel seeks to emphasize the historical significance and contemporary relevance of Ottoman music within the study of ethnomusicology.

Ottoman makam music is an outcome of musical practices developed in a multicultural environment in Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa over centuries. By examining archival material, ethnographic studies, oral traditions, and performance, we are challenging the Eurocentric narratives to reassess the place and enduring effect of Ottoman Turkish music as a global musical tradition.

We will present three papers followed by discussant comments on the following: the musical narratives in Evliya Çelebi’s Seyahatnâme in order to challenge Eurocentric accounts that bifurcate “Western” and “non-Western” theoretical traditions; on Yorgo Bacanos, an ethnic Greek oud master in the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic, whose virtuosity embodied the empire’s rich cosmopolitanism, where makam music was a shared tradition among Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Jews, and other communities; and on gazel, an Ottoman vocal improvisational form, tracing its twentieth century trajectory as a living tradition through the rupture and continuity in Turkish classical music.

This panel contributes to critical studies in ethnomusicology, reconsidering the historical importance of Ottoman music and its role in intercultural dialogue, and present-day musical identities and resistance through sound. Particularly, we aim to reassess the Ottoman musical legacy as a living tradition that continues to inform global musical exchanges.

Brazil faced one of the most extensive official slave trades in the world. This process forcibly brought around 5.8 million Africans to the country between 1500 and 1850. This historical trend has substantially impacted the Brazilian music scene, especially in the context of musical expressions created and performed by Black communities (Lucas, 2002; Queiroz, 2023; Sandroni, 2001). However, although structural racism is still intense in Brazil, the fight against the oppression of black people and their culture have increased considerably over the last two decades. Considering both the reality of the exclusion that characterizes Afro-Brazilian culture and the reaction of these people to this reality around the country, this paper analyzes how Black communities have promoted music performances focused on activism and social awareness to surpass racism in Brazil (Moraes, 2024; Santos, 2022). This research project encompasses a qualitative four-year ethnographic study (2020-2024) in four Black communities in Northeastern Brazil, highly immersed in diverse Black music culture expressions. The results show how these people live in a vulnerable social situation and have historically faced a trajectory of inequality and exclusion. However, their music practices and critical performance initiatives have expanded enormously over the last two decades, incorporating awareness and strategies of resistance, antiracist attitudes, and the construction of collective Black identities in contemporary society. The paper brings out some essential ideas and propositions to reflect on how ethnomusicology can create dialogues among these musical actions built outside the universities and the academic initiatives focused on combating racism, prejudice, and exclusion.

Irish music festivals in the Midwestern United States are a key component of the annual migrations of touring musicians in the Irish traditional music scene. Oftentimes, outside of the official time-space of the festival and after paid duties are completed, musicians gather, away from larger audiences, and play in “sessions” late into the night. Against a backdrop of more commercialized and commodified performances of traditional music on festival stages, I suggest that these afterparty sessions deliberately foreground a sociality and being-in commune. In particular, audience-performer boundaries are blurred, and melodies are heterophonically sounded in productive dissonance with the commercialized ideals of polished unison and harmony (Taylor 2024; Kaul 2013). In a musical tradition where a loss of the principles of collective stewardship and common ownership are lamented by practitioners and scholars alike (Ó hAllmhuráin 2017), I draw on extensive ethnographic fieldwork to argue that the afterparty session re-asserts a communitarian orientation—“reclaiming the commons" (Smith 2006)—in an environment where it is most roundly criticized for ignoring such values—the highly-commodified US Irish festival. This paper underscores the importance of recognizing how musicians' public performances and more privately facing musical practices can sound in mutually constitutive ways, in turn leading to richer ethnographic data. Further, drawing on Cashman (2016), this study explores how some of the wider conventions and norms of a collectively maintained musical genre can potentially impact one’s way of being in the world.

There exists a common sentiment among contemporary Muslims that the ummah (global Muslim body) is in crisis(es). While prior research in music/sound studies has attended to “religious” vocal performance genres of Islam or “secular” or “political” music/song traditions of Muslim-majority ethnic groups, less attention has been directed at forms of music/song that center Muslim religiosity and contemporary material or political realities simultaneously. This paper theorizes global tarana as a meta-genre of sung or recited poetry that centers the plight, collective memory, national identity, patriotic sentiment, religiosity, and/or political aspirations of a given Muslim-majority ethnic group—or the ummah as a whole—that understands itself as being collectively oppressed. I take the tarana music/poetry of contemporary Rohingya refugees living in Bangladesh as a starting point from which to construct global tarana as a multilingual conglomerate that subsumes the broader South Asian Muslim category of tarānā (anthem, Urdu; song/tune, Farsi) and comparable lament cum anthemic vocal practices most often categorized as nashīd (anthem/chant/song, Arabic) among non-South Asian Muslim-majority ethnic groups. This repertoire interweaves key Islamic concepts such as ummah, qurbān (sacrifice), hijrah (migration), jihād (holy struggle/war), and al-ākhirah (the afterlife) with core aspects of the nation including national homeland, language, and culture. I argue that an orientation in music/sound studies toward global tarana can help elucidate the overlaps between the ways in which Muslims throughout the ummah embody, make sense of, and/or respond to shared senses and experiences of dehumanization, colonial subjugation and extraction, ethnic cleansing and mass displacement, and genocide.

Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Within months, Repair Together was founded, a grassroots organization that mobilizes volunteers to rebuild areas impacted by the ongoing military conflict. One of their signature work programs, Project Toloka, shuttles 150-300 volunteers each weekend to affected areas, where they collectively clean up rubble from homes, cultural buildings, and youth centers while deejays spin electronic dance music. Donating their time and services, the deejays sustain the volunteers through two days of back-breaking work with the energizing beats of Ukrainian techno.

This presentation explores the impact of the ongoing military conflict on the Ukrainian rave scene and the ravers’ impact on restoration efforts. As a scholar of electronic dance music (EDM) scenes, I consider how this commitment to volunteerism manifests the EDM community’s values of peace, love, unity, and respect. Drawing on Jill Dolan’s theory of utopian performances, I suggest that these clean-up raves are important ways of imagining and actively working towards a better world, even in the midst of a dystopian present. While volunteers have been criticized for raving in a war-torn country, I argue that these embodied responses to the ongoing violence are meaningful cathartic experiences during which participants celebrate life, recovering a small sense of normalcy, enjoyment, and fulfillment. With evidence from interviews with Project Toloka volunteer workers and deejays, I demonstrate how raving is helping Ukrainians restore their homes, their culture, and themselves during this crisis.

This roundtable discussion is focused on the work and legacy of Georgia native and SEM Honorary member Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon (1942-2024). Founding member of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Freedom Singers, the Harambee Singers, and Sweet Honey in the Rock, Reagon was a musician, composer, song leader, activist, historian, professor, curator, innovator, and creator whose life experiences informed her philosophical and methodological approaches to Black music research and practice in cultural spaces and academe. Her blend of art, scholarship, pedagogy, and activism inhabited multiple domains that will be explored in the panelists’ remarks. Topics include Reagon’s heritage ecologies, the legacy of Black female orality, Reagon’s work at the Smithsonian, the SNCC Freedom Singers, and Reagon’s theorization of the impact of Black singing and Black sound on the Freedom Movement, Reagon's collaboration with Anne Romaine and their musical advocacy for the acquittal of Joan Little, and an exploration of how Reagon’s pioneering methods and programs facilitated the research, broad exposure and validation of the work of emerging Black scholars and practitioners of Black music and culture. We envision a robust discussion of Reagon’s life work, how her contributions challenged and extended the field of ethnomusicology, and what we can do in our research and practice to continue her legacy.

In Guyana, Trinidad, and North America, “Madrasi Religion” is known by Indo-Caribbeans to consist of relatively unrestrained styles of Hindu goddess worship. “Madrasi” was an appellation for South Asian indentured laborers who embarked for the New World via the southern port of the Madras Presidency of the British Empire between 1838 and 1917. Despite the prevalence of Kali worship in the Caribbean among different groups and similarities with obeah, “Madrasi” reemerged in Hindu reform efforts to hierarchically categorize and differentiate North Indian-derived orthodox Hinduism from South Indian-derived ecstatic worship. Like Afro-Caribbean religions, the identification of spirits and deities who “manifest” people is central to Madrasi Religion and facilitated by sonic practices of tappu and udkay drumming, animal sacrifice, alcohol and cigarette offerings, and fire oath-taking ceremonies. And yet, Madrasi sonic practices remain a source of anxiety and ambivalence. Throughout colonial and post-emancipation plantation indentureship periods and post-migration North American contexts, Madrasi sonic practices have been negatively associated particularly by Indo-Guyanese with blackness, obeah, superstition, and sorcery. Given a genealogy of listening practices rooted in West Indian British Orientalism, “correct practices” and narratives about the “ancient Tamil” origins of Madrasi Religion produce prestige as “sound knowledge” (Kapchan 2017) that capitalize on notions of purity within “representational economies” of Hindu heritage (Inglese 2024). Despite a disavowal of mixing, I argue Madrasis maneuver within Tamil sonic diasporas via transformative performances of the sounding spirits and an ontology of vibration to transduce and transcend being derivative, imitative, and instead known through sonic presence.

‘Xiansuo Beikao,’ a compendium of musical notations in Gongche notation from Beijing, was compiled by the Mongolian scholar Rong Zhai in 1814 during China’s Qing dynasty. This manuscript meticulously documents thirteen suites for string ensemble featuring the Huqin, Pipa, Sanxian, and Zheng, providing an historically important record of the era’s popular music among the elite and literati. Once widely appreciated, this musical tradition gradually faded amidst shifting social transformations. From the perspective of cultural heritage preservation and transmission, ‘Xiansuo Beikao’ holds a distinctive historical connection with the Prince Gong’s Mansion in Beijing. In the 1950s, musicologists Anhe Cao and Qihua Jian translated these works into Western staff notation, leading to their publication. By 1984, a Central Conservatory of Music research team began reconstructing this music. Today, efforts continue to reintroduce it to modern audiences, exploring new models that adapt to contemporary society while maintaining its authenticity.

This paper investigates how ‘Xiansuo Beikao’ transcended hierarchical divisions among the imperial aristocracy, literati, and public life within historical social strata. It examines the challenges of reviving this repertoire in contemporary paradigm of “authenticity.” Drawing from theories of cultural memory (Assmann, 1995), music revival authenticity (Haskell, 1988), and heritage studies (Schippers, 2015), it interrogates how competing authenticity narratives influence its reintegration into modern Chinese musical discourse. Additionally, it investigates how conservatories, state-sponsored heritage initiatives, and the music industry mediate its reception, adaptation and recontextualizations.

Since Park Chung Hee’s 1964 address on revitalizing minjok munhwa (ethnic-national culture), the state has funded the establishment of the National Gugak Center (NGC), with the aim of the promotion and preservation of traditional performing arts of Korea. In 1979, the NGC founded a folk music ensemble, underneath the pre-existing ensemble for court and literati music. While folk repertoires were less canonized than court music and marked by improvisation rather than rote performance, folk instrumentalists mobilized to Seoul, contrived musical suites based on folk singers’ melodies to validate their work ethic to the director.

Borrowing on Chakrabarty’s concept of “provincializing” (2008), this paper examines the process of purifying folk music within a state-led, urban, and institutionalized system (Howard 2016) and its impact on the ecology of elite Korean musicians. Despite folk music’s rural origins (Maliangkay 2017; Kwon 2024), vernacular music has been standardized to the point where timbre is the primary personal musical attribute that distinguishes individual artistry (Pilzer 2012). My ethnography of urban-based folk instrumentalists engages with the “schizophonic” (Feld 1994) environment in hyper-globalized South Korea (Kwon, ibid) where contemporary folk music ensembles are separated from quotidian rural life. I argue that the privileging of Seoul-centered sonic practices constitutes a form of “triumphant negligence”—a condition in which instrumental techniques featured in Seoul have attained disproportionate authority, as musicians who “successfully” settled in or acquired the cultural capital of this key node have come to define and represent the sound of folk music in kugak (traditional-national Korean music)’s entirety.

In 1892, Eastern Cherokee traditionalist Will West Long wrote a list of tunes and page numbers in his Cherokee language journal. Amid surrounding pages of Sequoyan script, the list of English tune names stands out. At the bottom of the list, Long wrote, “this is Christain [sic] Harmony.” The seven-shape Christian Harmony tradition of shaped note singing, already becoming anachronistic in 1892, nonetheless persists today as a historical cultural practice across the American Southeast, particularly in the lower Appalachian region. Eastern Cherokees in Western North Carolina engaged in shaped note singing in the Cherokee language, taking texts from the 1831 Cherokee hymn book. Currently, only a very small number of Cherokee elders know or remember the practice of shaped note singing. In 2023, Uweti Tsalagi Dininogisgi, the Cherokee Language Repertory choir, was established in partnership with Western Carolina University and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians to revitalize and expand historical and contemporary Cherokee language singing practices. The choir’s repertoire includes shaped note tunes, hymns, gospel tunes, secular popular songs, and newer compositions. With fewer than 140 first-language Eastern Cherokee speakers still living, the choir contributes to Cherokee language persistence even among non-speakers. In this performance demonstration, the Cherokee Language Repertory choir will perform songs from their repertoire accompanied by discussion of performance practices, language-specific variations for shaped note singing, and historical and contemporary cultural perspectives on group singing in the Eastern Cherokee community.

Women musicians teach and perform at the intersection of gender and race. What are the consequences and fallout from oppression, and how do women of color work through, respond, refuse, and sometimes transmit their conflict to future generations? The presenters propose new approaches to observe and address historical traumas embodied in the performance. The panel offers four case studies of how Asian/American women performers have addressed the lingering trauma of containment and erasure, with papers tackling issues such as “yellow woman” stereotypes; the display and popularization of Asian stereotypes in theater; Japanese American incarceration survivors’ legacies; the racialization of Asian/American women’s bodies on stage; and a literal loss of voice signaling larger themes of absence. All four presenters take an intersectional and historically-situated approach to how Asian/American women have been seen and heard, and how their agentive responses sometimes redirect the very terms for memory. The presenters draw from critical Asian Studies, Asian American and feminist of color critique, and abolitionist thought to view these performers differently and to position Asian/American women’s subjectivities as methodological sources for historical and ethnographic research. Using Asian/American cases and critical questions, the papers spotlight long-lived stereotypes that fuel the oppressive histories of Asian/American women, noting the real and also metaphoric absence or involuntary silence of women over time. What productive, liberating methodologies for cultural work in these communities emerge from Asian/American women’s responses to containment and silencing? How is Asian/American presence and erasure recast through performance by women?

This session brings together four separate short films made in close conversation during Fall 2024 that variously explore filmwork as fieldwork, ethnographic “slow cinema,” film as cinésensory reflexive autoethnography, and film as nonlinear documentary. From Colombia’s Sibundoy Valley to hurricane-ravaged North Carolina to Bloomington, Indiana, each filmmaker brings an inquisitive regard to sensing sound, space, history, memory, tradition, ambiance, and environment. The first film, Tabanok (2024, 25 min, Spanish, Kamëntšá, and Inga/Quechua with English subtitles), addresses social and ecological change in Indigenous territory in southwest Colombia while interpreting the ethnographic filmmaker as a liminal actor. The second film, (Re)Building: Crafting Relief for Victims of Hurricane Helene (2024, 25 min, English), documents a midwestern luthier’s art and act of care in making a mandolin for relief efforts from an eco-organological perspective. The next film, How I Hear the Blues: The Oral & Aural Narrative of Black America (2024, 15 min, English), presents a living archive of history, identity, and resilience through the lens of the filmmaker, a noted bluesman dedicated to honoring the blues as storytelling. The final film, Walk Over Here: Walkover Sounds and Stones and the People Who Love It (Part 1) (2024, 24 min, English), immerses the viewer in the ambiance of a local record shop, shaped by those who patronize, meet, and pass through. Together, the filmmakers will reflect on their experiences engaging with film as ethnography, elaborating on the themes depicted in the films and discussing the affordances of multimedia research-creation in a historically text-based discipline.

This article dissects the Dong people's diverse imaginaries of cicadas in Dong music, and further seeks to show how the sonic features of cicadas help construct Dong people's ecological consciousness and mediate their own personal sentiments. The analysis mainly draws on one-on-one interviews conducted with Dong-ethnic interlocutors of various professions and age groups, complemented by ethnographic observations as part of field trips to the Qiandongnan Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture of Guizhou, China. In this paper, I analyze various ways in which cicadas are imitated and contextualized in the Dong songs with musical analysis. Moving beyond the focus on transcriptions, I document how cicadas are perceived in the folk tales of the Dong people, depicting the indexical/iconic nature and sonic ubiquity of the cicadas from a macro-perspective. Lastly, through a micro-perspective, I demonstrate the Dong people’s diverse imaginaries of cicadas and draw similarities between them. Based on this analysis, I argue that the cicadas provide terms of knowledge that are significant to the Dong people’s life, and also, are perceived as creatures of humanistic sentiments that strengthen the ethnic identity and preserve the culture of the Dong people.

Beekeepers listen to the sounds of bees to understand beehive health and monitor ecosystem biodiversity. Bee sounds indicate to the beekeeper when bees are dissatisfied, when they might swarm, and when honey flows (a phenomenon known as "the song of increase"). Bees recognize the voices of beekeepers and communicate with each other through sonic vibrations and dance patterns. The globally declining bee population adds urgency to listening to bees and comprehending their sounds. This study positions the bee as a central figure struggling against the effects of war, ecological pollution, and climate change. It draws on ecomusicological fieldwork among Ukrainian beekeepers who have lost their hives due to Russia's war in Ukraine, Mayan beekeepers whose bees have perished from pesticides in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula, and American beekeepers in the southeastern United States whose honey yield is affected by drastic weather changes. By placing the bee at the center of discussions on war, ecological pollution, and climate change, this study explores what musicians can do to assist bees, whose beeswax has significantly contributed to musical developments like the early wax cylinder. Bees can detect sound frequencies up to 500Hz and are attracted to music ranging from 250-500Hz, which resembles the sounds they produce in their hives. This presentation argues that bee-focused ethnomusicological scholarship can positively contribute to apiology, the study of beekeeping, by enhancing sound-based language and analysis among apiologists working to save the bees.

In the years leading up to Hawai‘i statehood (1955-59), jazz musicians in the hotel bars of Honolulu created a genre of music marketed as “exotica.” With birdcall vocalizations and diverse global percussion instruments, exotica provided a soundtrack for touristic fantasies of tropical jungles. While exotica seems to emblematize the extractive designs of U.S. empire on Hawai‘i and the anthropogenic climate change it has wrought there, this paper tells a different story. Drawing on ethnographic and historical research, I demonstrate that exotica’s birdcalls grew out of Native Hawaiian and Hawai‘i-Puerto Rican musicians’ reciprocal sonic relationships with Hawai’i birds and animal life. Even while working within a tourist-facing genre, musicians Arthur Lyman and Augie Colón used performance to establish anti-colonial cartographic relationships to Hawai‘i, emulating longstanding Kanaka Maoli strategies of “sonic sovereignty” (Reed 2019). As Renee Pualani Louis (2017) shows, ancient hula lyrics and choreography chart atmospheric networks of beings, environmental processes, and relationships in Hawai‘i in extreme detail. From the 1980s to the present, Lyman and Colón’s son, Lopaka Colón Jr., have incorporated the calls of endangered and extinct forest birds from around the Pacific in their performances, reimagining exotica as a conservation tool. Building on Hi‘ilei Hobart’s (2022) concept of “ambient sovereignty,” which asserts the Kanaka Maoli right to determine the thermal infrastructures of Hawai‘i, I argue that Lyman and Colón Jr. practice “atmospheric sovereignty” by claiming control over the affective and vibrational dimensions of Hawaiian space and multi-species relations.

Ideas of “the human scale” have inspired (or hidden behind) research in ethnomusicology for some time. When John Blacking (1973), for example, defined music as “humanly organized sound,” he tied that insight to an ideal of music that could not include the rhythmic sounds of machinery, because “their order is not directly produced by human beings.” The human scale in that regard, frequently centering ideals of restraint, individuality, modesty, and a recognition of limits in contrast to the gargantuan facelessness of urban industrial modernity. As with work in early music and folk music, for example, the concept becomes a benchmark to calibrate and value musicking as an expression of the human community in its most presumptively significant state: the small-scale, face-to face interactions of intimate collectivity. In this paper I explore the history of this concept and its influence on thinking about musical activity. I trace the notion to three sources: the philosopher George Santayana (1916/1998), sociologist Helmuth Plessner (1924), and political scientist Leopold Kohr (1956). From there, I explore some ways in which notions of the human scale have drawn upon musical ideals in support of the concept’s empirical materiality. Vocabularies of ratio, balance, and “harmony,” for instance, bound approaches to architectural space and together with approaches to music, with appeals to the common mathematics of the harmonic series and Fibonacci numbers. I conclude with a discussion of some examples that erode the human scale’s emphasis on the miniature, the modest, and the self-contained as music’s natural predisposition.

This panel offers an introduction to and discussion of the new edited volume Yogic Traditions and Sacred Sound Practices in the United States (forthcoming in 2025 from SUNY Press). Several chapters will be introduced by their authors, and a discussant will comment on the volume as a whole. This book brings together diverse but related disciplines that have long remained exclusive – Sanskrit studies and Ethnomusicology– to illuminate yogic lineages, thought, and philosophies underlying sacred sound practices in the American context. In addition, this volume helps to define the emerging scholarly domain of sacred sound studies, as well as music, religion, and spirituality. Many chapters exhibit an ethnomusicological bent, utilizing participant observation to document the devotional practices of different yogic lineages to better understand the meanings they offer to modern practitioners. The volume examines a broad range of yogic communities from local groups to global networks, spanning cloistered communities to yogic lineages and societies that have become highly revered and widely recognized in the American landscape over the last century. This volume examines how Indian yogic concepts of sound and musical devotion are translated into contemporary sacred sound practices in distinct ethnographic communities in the United States. While previous studies have been published on the theme of sacred sound in the context of established religious traditions, none of the prior publications deal extensively with the sacred sound practices of a wide array of Indian yogic traditions disseminated within the United States.

Inspiring a contemporary crosspollination of anticolonial theory and praxis, Haunani-Kay Trask (Kānaka Maoli) (2004) and Patrick Wolfe (2006) advocated for a now widely recognized conceptual shift, framing colonialism as an ongoing process rather than a singular event. Settler colonialism transforms space by replacing Indigenous inhabitants with settlers and colonizers. In the realm of music and sound, Dylan Robinson (Stó:lō/Skwah) (2020) expands this understanding by introducing space as a component in the tripartite intersubjectivity between listener, sound, and space. Building on Robinson’s model, this panel examines how settler colonial soundscapes sustain and reinforce settler colonial regimes. We intentionally disrupt the normalization of settler colonial agendas—genocide, dispossession, and erasure—by interrogating the role of acoustics, sound, music, and silence in constructing settler colonial sonic spaces. Conversely, we highlight the ways in which Indigenous performers unsettle these sonic spaces in ways that are decolonial. The first panelist analyzes how the silence of sonic modes of Indigeneity in the soundscapes at the Idaho State History Museum contribute to Indigenous erasure. The second panelist provides a close listening of Indigenous sonic protocols enacted at federal government events, including the Pentagon and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The third presentation opens space to listen for pop music production as process rather than product in order hear the intergenerational relationships musicians bring forward, as well as to respect the bodily sovereignty of Indigenous artists and their family histories. This panel contributes to ongoing discourses of sound and decolonization in ethnomusicology and sound studies.

This panel explores the musical manifestation, performance, and archiving of grief and suffering among Latine/x and Latin American communities. We are especially interested in how sounded and embodied forms of collective mourning transcend geopolitical, linguistic, temporal, and cultural fronteras (borders). We introduce multilayered definitions of grief to interrogate how humans process sorrow to invoke remembrance of loss, incite witnessing, and invite diverse audiences to participate in “radical empathy” (Lowry 2019). In gathering scholars who engage with music traditions across the Americas and U.S. migrant communities, we propose nuanced methodologies for exploring individual and communal grieving, contributing to ethnomusicological approaches to the study of how experiences of loss and mourning intersect with themes such as nostalgia, displacement, intercorporeality (Sumera 2020), and relations of the living with the dead (DeNora 2012). The first presenter offers a methodological framework of attentiveness for researching amongst individuals still mourning the passing of Chilean folklorist Margot Loyola. The second presenter analyzes the testimonial reinterpretations of a 1920s Mexican song as it has resounded across the U.S.-Mexico border, tracing the loss of homeland(s), transgenerational sorrow, and collective grief for immigrant and post-migrant women. The third presenter examines individual improvisation of grief-singing in the collective space of indigenous ritual of Q’eros, Peru, underscored by concepts of intercorporeality and lending insight into an indigenous theory of musical expression of loss. The final presenter examines the role of restorative and reflective (Boym 2001) Cuban-American nostalgias in musical works depicting loss associated with Operation Pedro Pan.

This ethnographic study explores how the khushboo (fragrance) of music functions as a central mechanism in the musical enculturation of Namdhari Sikh children in the UK, specifically in the diasporic communities of Birmingham and East London. Using Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, the research examines how various environmental factors such as family, local community, transnational ties, and parental biographies shape the children’s musical development.

A key component of this process is the languaging around Namdhari music. The study argues that the language used to describe and engage with music, imbued with spiritual, emotional, and doctrinal significance actively influences the children’s connection to their heritage. Terms such as khushboo (fragrance), khushiya (joy), and rasa (emotion) create a semiotic framework that transforms music into a sacred and spiritual practice rather than a mere aesthetic experience. This languaging fosters affective attunement, deepening the children’s emotional bond to the music and its spiritual dimensions.

Additionally, the study examines the semiotics of Namdhari music, focusing on how elements such as lyrical themes, rhythmic patterns, and tonal qualities reinforce cultural continuity and emotional expression. Through interviews, participant observation, and analysis of intergenerational transmission, the research demonstrates how these semiotic practices preserve traditional music while enabling adaptation to hybrid identities in the diaspora.

Ultimately, this study highlights how language, semiotics, and music intersect to preserve and adapt Namdhari cultural heritage within diasporic communities.

English musicians’ connections with Wales/Cymru have received little attention, perhaps because Wales/Cymru’s coloniality is obscured by the lack of a dividing sea between it and the metropole (Bohata, 2004), while the term “Britain” masks the UK’s inherent power relations (Young, 1995). My research maps a history of early-20^th-century transnational musicking, individuals, institutions. Drawing on Welsh cultural theorist, Raymond Williams’s critique of metropolitan perceptions of the periphery, I examine archival materials (recordings, manuscripts, newspapers), the Welsh folk-song society’s dissemination of community-based oral traditions, and the music festivals (Aberystwyth, Gregynog) which attracted musicians to cross Offa’s Dyke (Welsh-English border).

Through bicultural analysis and readings of correspondence, I demonstrate that “Welsh” compositions by English composers, long marginalized/misinterpreted in the vested interests of imperialist historiography, do reveal roots in Welsh traditions. I trace the pivotal role of folk singer Dora Herbert Jones in English-Welsh musicking – her collaborations with Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan-Williams, who delighted in her erudite London lecture-recitals (given at their invitation), and who composed for, and conducted, her choir in Gregynog (Vaughan-Williams’s Welsh folksongs have recently been discovered, along with Holst’s late part-song, “For Gregynog”). Through an analysis of Holst’s Welsh folksong arrangements (1930-31) grounded in indigenous musico-poetic practices (cynghanedd, penillion), I contest dismissive claims made by a century of scholars.

Finally, what is at stake in the history of trivialising/denying this transnational Welsh creativity? Decolonial listening plays a vital role in the mutual reconstitution of, and inseparable act of rewriting, English music history through the music-making of formerly-colonised countries.

Dissent in Hong Kong has been muted since the enforcement of new security laws following the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Protests in 2019. However, the voices of freedom still resound among Hong Kong migrants worldwide, and diasporic groups have continued to demonstrate for Hong Kong’s democratization. In 2019 alone, global rallies connected Hong Kong with 22 cities (June 12), 36 cities (August 17-18), and 65 cities (September 29) (Ho 2023). These transnational protests express a feeling of urgency, an intensified desire to protect Hong Kong’s freedom and maintain the Hongkonger identity (ibid.)—a sense of localism that constitutes a “political consciousness” (Hung 2022) that has motivated cross-generational migrant communities through their “emotional responses” (Ho 2023) to escalating authoritarianism. Diasporic rallies incorporating practices borrowed from earlier Hong Kong demonstrations, such as chanting banned slogans and singing protest songs, recreate the energies and affect of disappeared local protests. This growing transnational “affective solidarity” (Tang and Cheng 2021) toward Hong Kong localism has become a source of global Hong Kong identity through collective memories, musicking, ritualistic performance, and symbolic objects.

This paper argues that the “diasporic subjectivity” (Yip 2021) of the Hongkonger identity is articulated and strengthened in the collective public presence that performs (banned) vocal utterances and music in transnational protests and Tiananmen commemorative candlelight vigils. Focusing on the 2019–2025 protests and June 4 vigils in the northeastern US, this paper studies how musicking and symbolic objects build an emerging sense of collective affect and “long-distance nationalism” (Fong 2021).

Drawing on three years of ethnographic research in Chile, this paper examines how sound mediates necropolitical relations among hinchas (soccer fans). These men belong to the communities most viscerally affected by the neoliberal deterioration of working-class life in the country. Through carnival sounds and contrafacta of popular music, hinchas not only cheer for their teams but also construct hyper-masculine imaginaries and make audible their precarious social conditions. However, their hostile vocalizations, aggressive movements, and necrotic songs—filled with death threats, stories of combat, and discriminatory slurs—also radicalize subjectivities and hostilities within and between fanbases, making death the defining marker of a necropolitical reality.

This presentation argues that fan violence has given rise to a necropolitical acoustemology. A source and expression of necropower (Mbembe 2019), hinchas deploy sound not only to represent material violence but also to enact it. Sound operates as a means of disrupting neoliberal inequalities while simultaneously reinforcing internal hierarchies and exerting social control. Mediating the political and social relations of fanbases, sound enables hinchas to navigate deadly conflicts in which force serves as the primary mode of resolution. Engaging theories on the productive nature of violence (Benjamin 2021; Clastres 1994; Fanon 2004) and ethnomusicological perspectives on musical performance as both violent and culturally generative (Daughtry 2015; McDonald 2013; Meintjes 2017; Millar 2020; Ochoa 2006), this paper reconceptualizes violence as not merely destructive but as a creative and transformative force—the social engine of a vibrant soundworld.

The French-Malian singer Aya Nakamura stirred a revealing controversy leading up to her performance at the opening ceremonies of the 2024 Summer Olympics Games in Paris. Those on the French right criticized Nakamura’s inclusion on the program on the basis that she was nothing more than a “rapper,” saying that she sang in “who knows what” language and that her participation would “humiliate” the French public. Nakamura, whose music blends together contemporary Afrobeats, zouk, pop, and r&b, responded on social media, in brief, “You can be racist but not deaf,” and went on to deliver her Olympic performance in front of the Académie Française, the state institution responsible for governing matters pertaining to the French language. In this paper, I analyze Nakamura’s performance with a focus on her music’s use of “sound and sense” in the context of postcolonial language ideology. Drawing on virtual ethnography, I focus on her 2018 song “Djadja” (Liar) and her use of vernaculars such as Nouchi from the Ivory Coast; and verlan, a French street slang which reverses the order of syllables to create new words. I show that Nakamura’s poetic use of language is part of the song’s complex sonic texture, deepening its semiotic impact and expanding its audience. I situate Nakamura’s music in conversation with a revived interest in language ideology in linguistic anthropology (Woolard 2020, Cavanaugh 2020) and related research in ethnomusicology (Berger 2003, Perullo 2003) to analyze new contexts where Afrobeats is challenging national, cultural, and linguistic boundaries.

From the roar of the crowd after a goal to the chanting and drumming of hardcore fans, from the players’ grunt while fighting for position to the whistle of an exasperated referee, sound is a conduit for the circulation of emotions in Argentine soccer stadiums. Sonic events mediate experience through an affective economy that conjures collective memory, shapes behaviors, and intensifies or dulls the stadium’s atmosphere. These are not discrete affective events but episodic dramas. Each string of plays, game half, match, season, and club’s history establishes an affective disposition that grounds the appraisal and expression of emotion. This paper uses phenomenology and (auto)ethnography to expand the notion of sonic affective economies within sports by bringing together two bodies of scholarship: emotion-enhancing excitation transfer theory (EEETT) and the concept of affective atmospheres. EEETT explains how sound’s affective value increases through circulation (Ahmed 2004) within short spans of time (Zillmann 2008; Cummins and Berke 2017; Cummins, Wise, and Nutting 2012). The concept of sonic affective atmospheres (Abels 2022, Eisenlohr 2022; Ashmore 2017; Jack 2021; 2024) shows how acoustic events connect bodies through vibrational materiality and “energetic flows that affect felt-bodies while allowing for the mediation of the sonic through auditory cultures, semiotic ideologies, and other historically and social embedded traditions” (Eisenlohr 2018, 51). This work adds to recent ethnomusicological studies showing how sonic practices in sports and fandom operate as meaningful sites of political and social life (Jack 2013; 2021; 2024; Herrera 2018; 2024; Achondo 2022; 2024; Wells 2023).

This roundtable brings together graduate students, early-career scholars, and established researchers to critically examine the intersections between ethnomusicology and late capitalism. We explore how sound, movement, and musical practices actively engage in resisting and transforming neoliberal structures of oppression—racism, sexism, homophobia, and labor precarization—and the rationalities that shape both academia and global societies. Grounded in ethnographic and historical studies from a historical materialist and dialectical perspective, we challenge the ideological naturalization of capitalism as the sole social paradigm, engaging with Mark Fisher’s concept of “capitalist realism.” The discussion will critically assess ethnomusicology’s ideological and historical limitations while proposing new theoretical approaches and, more importantly, contributing to sound praxis—the articulation of discourse, actions, and practices around sound—to confront the global order and imagine anti-capitalist and socialist futures. Panelist 1 examines the rapper as an organic intellectual in Rio de Janeiro’s hip-hop scene, analyzing the limits and possibilities of counter-hegemonic praxis in neoliberal contexts. Panelist 2 explores the intersections of race, class, and musical practices in Brazilian Pentecostalism, focusing on its expansion among working-class Black communities. Panelist 3 analyzes Argentine independent labels using cassettes to resist neoliberalism and foster collective engagement during economic crises. Panelist 4 explores studies on music in Brazil and Latin America that illuminate the intersections between labor and precarity in late capitalism, while pointing toward new social, political, and aesthetic possibilities. Panelist 5 considers musical fantasy in Bombay as a lens for neoliberalism’s fissures, proposing attention to the implausible as an anti-capitalist ethnomusicological method.

This panel brings into conversation the multifaceted expressions of contemporary Black music cultures across Afrodiasporic communities in three countries in Southern Europe: Portugal, Spain, and Italy. Amidst the rise of Europe’s far right alongside continuing challenges of discrimination, marginalization, and anti-immigrant sentiment against Europe’s Black populations, panelists respond to calls for the sustained study of Black cultures in European nation-states (Hine et al. 2009), offering new perspectives on the diversity of Black European musical contributions. Moving across geographic, aquatic, socio-cultural, and methodological boundaries, this panel examines how Black artists in Southern Europe from a variety of genres deploy Afrodiasporic consciousness, whether it be by musically and culturally reimagining the metropole, making themselves audible and visible in the digital age, or connecting to global struggles of oppression. The first panelist explores how a monthly Afro-electronic dance music party in Lisbon, “Noite Príncipe,” becomes a political space where the city’s Afro-descendant communities re-imagine and perform a new Lisbon. The second panelist examines the impact of Black-led music collectives on the Catalonian cultural scene, arguing that these collectives reconceptualize what it means to be Black in Spain. The final panelist explores how Black-Italian artists connect Southern Italy to the Global South, in ways that complicate earlier Southern Italians’ claims to Global Southernness, and, by extension, Blackness. From Europe’s Atlantic coast to its northern Mediterranean shores, this panel ultimately asks “Where does the Black Atlantic meet the Black Mediterranean?”, expanding the scope of traditional studies of the Black diaspora.

This panel explores the pedagogy of the South Asian classical and classical-derived arts, specifically Carnatic music, Hindustani music, Bharatanatyam, and Tamil kirttanai, in the context of their transmission within the United States. How are traditional South Asian pedagogical practices adapted in their diasporic context, and to what ends? Each of these papers discusses challenges faced by transnational instructors of South Asian music and dance in their efforts to make these traditions accessible to an American student population, as they must contend with the institutional norms and political ideologies of the United States while also working to preserve the classical South Asian heritage on a global scale. This results in localized translations of traditional South Asian pedagogy, including a renewed emphasis on sensorial and embodied experience, inductive rather than deductive pedagogy, and participation in broader socioeconomic and political narratives of liberation. Diasporic practitioners also work to subvert the gendered, classed, and casteist norms emphasized by traditional practice through their pedagogical innovations, in service of expanding the accessibility and inclusivity of the South Asian arts from a global perspective. Crucially, however, as all three of these papers demonstrate, the translation and modification of traditional practices in diaspora is not seen as a rupture with tradition but as a means of sustaining a global community of practitioners who are active participants in these genres’ ongoing transnational development.

Busking, i.e., street performance in public spaces for donations, has been associated with cultural activities and urban life for centuries. While some buskers play for fun, acknowledgment, practice purposes, creative self-fulfillment, and the realization of an alternative and romanticized lifestyle, others are in constant struggle for survival. For the latter, the most lucrative places, the attention of the fleeting public, and the ability to earn their living through busking are of existential importance. The situation for buskers is becoming increasingly complicated as public spaces worldwide have been transformed under rampant neo-liberal conditions where market-driven policies dominate. These conditions also more directly affect buskers’ living conditions through ever-rising rents and the lack of insurance – especially in times of crisis, as the (after)effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have shown. This paper illustrates that older artists are particularly affected by these transformation processes. Based on online ethnography, participant observation, and narrative interviews conducted with buskers in New York City, this paper focuses on the realities and well-being of older buskers. Using a narrative-biographic approach, it provides insights into their life paths and associated self-concepts; it identifies their individual physical and psychological challenges associated with these transformations and examines the (stress) factor aging itself and its effects on musicianship and artist performance practices. Rooted in Ethnomusicology and Public Health, this paper forms the basis for an effective debate on the deficits and challenges musical life in urban spaces faces and highlights buskers’ dependence on governmental and societal support to maintain their well-being.

This paper explores pumba performance as a site of negotiation between class, gender, and digital economies in contemporary South Korea. Once associated with itinerant performers and working-class survival strategies, pumba has been increasingly performed by elderly artists. While state-supported silver culture promotes senior participation in cultural production, pumba remains an overlooked genre within this institutional framework. Beyond its marginal status, pumba is also undergoing a transformation through digital platforms, where livestreamed performances, fan-driven economies, and online donations reshape performer-audience relationships. While pumba’s improvisational humor and vocal exaggeration resonate with elements of K-pop fan culture—such as direct engagement with audiences and the proliferation of fancam-style videos—its aesthetic and sociopolitical position remain distinct.

Drawing on Butler’s (1990) performativity and Berlant’s (2011) affective labor, this study examines how elderly pumba performers construct alternative forms of celebrity that challenge dominant imaginaries of aging and artistic legitimacy. Additionally, informed by Bourdieu’s (1984) notion of cultural capital, I investigate how pumba negotiates hierarchical distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ performance cultures, particularly as its visibility grows in digital spaces. Through ethnographic research and performance analysis, this paper situates pumba within broader discussions of sonic labor, digital economies, and performative labor, arguing that it disrupts binaries of tradition and modernity, street performance and online entertainment, marginality and mainstream recognition. Ultimately, this research contributes to ethnomusicological discourses on the evolving intersections of performance, technology, and aging in late capitalist societies.

In northern Mozambique’s coastal provinces, veterano (veteran) night clubs are a pillar of social life for the 50+ demographic, and in particular, the generation of Mozambicans who came of age in the 1960s and 70s and lived through the civil war. On weekends and holidays, elders dance to popular music from their youth, and host events with other clubs where dancers show off their skills, while also forming and maintaining relationships. For many participants, listening and dancing to old songs with friends “kills nostalgia” for the past, and in so doing, rejuvenates the body and emotional wellbeing. In this paper, I draw on ethnographic research in veterano clubs and interviews with DJs and dancers in the coastal district of Pebane to examine how, in night club spaces, music is a “technology of care” (Sykes 2018) that heals and uplifts, and is central to how aging people mediate relationships with others, the self, and those who have passed on. I analyze how musical care is enacted within two relationships central to dance-floor activity: first, in the relationship between the DJ and audiences during song selection; and second, as dancers care for their aging bodies by ‘playing ’at being young on the dance floor. Bringing together anthropological theories of care with scholarship on elderly social dance cultures, I argue that in the absence of formal care institutions for the elderly, veterano participants engage in musical care to imagine and prepare for their futures by revisiting their pasts in night club settings.

Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM) will offer a 90-minute workshop on research techniques with focus on bibliography, historiography, online databases, and research tools relevant to ethnographers and practitioners in the field of ethnomusicology, especially graduate students and junior scholars. Depending on participants’ interests, the workshop may include discussions on navigating databases and online resources, dictionaries, encyclopedias, popular music primary resources, and reference works and conducting research in languages other than English. The topic of abstract writing may also be covered. Through short research project presentations, guided discussion, breakout groups, and other activities, the workshop offers a unique setting to engage in global dialogue and exchange and expand critical debate on recent research within the field of ethnomusicology while acquiring or bolstering solid research techniques. The workshop will be led by RILM staff. Those wishing to participate should send an abstract summarizing their research interests and a short bio via Google sheet that will be sent out on 1 October 2025.

The annual Las Cruces International Mariachi Conference, established in 1994 with the additional name “Festival de las Américas,” was once one of the highest attended mariachi conferences at the turn of the twenty-first century. Although attendance has waned due to multiple cancelations from 2014 to 2016, the first two decades of the conference were co-sponsored and hosted by New Mexico State University—a public, land-grant university founded in 1888 and is New Mexico’s oldest institution of higher education. The events hosted included the conference workshops, the student showcase concert, and main concert. The concerts both took place at the Pan American Center, Las Cruces’s 13,140-seat arena, which New Mexico State University uses, primarily, as a sports and entertainment facility. Drawing from my experience as a participant-observer from 2002 to 2008 as well as archival research and utilizing Christoper Small’s concept of musicking and Josh Kun’s idea of audiotopias, I argue that by holding the student showcase concert and the main concert on the same stage and making them both ticketed events, the hierarchy of expert validation was obscured effectively redefining the performative space for semi-professional and student mariachi groups and vocalists. Additionally, I explore how the reinscribing of space through music both affirmed and subverted audience expectations and became a site where local, young musicians were granted prestigious visibility within their own city, thus also becoming a place for identity building.

This paper examines the All Bengal Music Conference (ABMC), initiated in 1934 in colonial Calcutta, as a site of both continuity and rupture, foregrounding its role in redefining musical sociality. This event was not merely a gathering of musicians but a crucial turning point that signalled a shift in the spatial and social dynamics of Hindustani music—from the intimate, private spaces of the salon (sangeet baithak) to the public, performative arena of the music conference. Drawing on archival materials and personal narratives, I interrogate the sociality and spatiality of the conference, juxtaposing it with its predecessor, the salon, to argue that the move from private to public spaces was not merely logistical but symbolic. The conference also marked a negotiation of power, where musicians reclaimed agency within modernity’s cultural framework, reflecting the tensions between a hereditary elite of performers, who shaped their identity through lineage and tradition, and a newly emerging public, which comprised a more diverse and nationalistically charged audience. Musicians not only adapted their art to these shifting dynamics but actively sought to shape their audiences through curated repertoires and the performance of mood (rasa) that resonated with the aspirations of a modernizing Bengal. My paper concludes by situating the ABMC within the broader context and culmination of Bengali musicology’s modernist moment, contending that the conference epitomised the intersection of music, space, and sociality, offering insights into how colonial modernity reconfigured artistic traditions and their publics.

Collective singing has long played a central role in fostering social trust, reinforcing cultural identity, and navigating crises in the Scandinavian and Baltic regions. This study examines how collective singing has contributed to both social cohesion and exclusion during periods of upheaval. From Denmark’s WWII resistance songs and Norway’s post-2011 terror attack musical responses to the Baltic Singing Revolution and contemporary Ukrainian refugees using song to navigate displacement, this research interrogates the complex relationship between music, trust, and crisis.

While ethnomusicology has long examined the unifying and identity-shaping potential of musicking, this study emphasizes its role in shaping social trust—both in terms of inclusion and exclusion. Singing can create a sense of belonging, yet it can also serve as a mechanism for delineating cultural boundaries and reinforcing social divisions. Through ethnographic fieldwork, archival analysis, and computational methods, this study investigates how collective singing has been mobilized in different historical and contemporary contexts to foster trust while also defining cultural “insiders” and “outsiders.” A key innovation is the integration of digital ethnomusicology, employing large-scale textual analysis and neural word embeddings to trace shifts in song-related discourse over time.

By incorporating contemporary case studies, including the role of singing in refugee integration, this research contributes to broader discussions in ethnomusicology about how musical practices shape social trust during crises. It offers new insights into the power of collective singing to negotiate belonging, resilience, and exclusion, providing a comparative perspective on its enduring role in shaping cultural memory and social relationships.

This panel explores the role of sound and music in shaping communal identity, religious practice, and political resistance among minoritized communities in Iran. By examining the ritual music of the Yārsān, the sonic legacy of Kurdish singer Hasan Zirak, and the sacred soundscapes of Yārsān spirituality, these studies collectively explore how musical and vocal practices become sites for cultural expression, social cohesion, and defiance against hegemonic forces. The first paper analyzes Yārsān ritual music through Thomas Turino’s participatory performance framework, demonstrating how Jam ceremonies foster spiritual ecstasy and reinforce communal solidarity. The second paper investigates Hasan Zirak’s vocal aesthetics and their deep association with Kurdish identity in Iran. It explores how his distinctive vocal style serves as an auditory marker of Kurdishness and as a rejection of state-imposed cultural assimilation. The third paper examines the Yārsān sacred soundscape, applying R. Murray Schafer’s concept of soundscape and Edward Said’s antithetical discourses to explore how sound is both a spiritual medium and a form of resistance against dominant auditory hegemony. Together, these papers illustrate how sound—whether through participatory music-making, iconic vocal timbre, or sacred soundscapes—functions as a powerful tool for identity formation and political resistance. This panel contributes to broader discussions on music, sound, and power, demonstrating how minoritized communities reclaim their sonic spaces to assert cultural and religious autonomy.

The Austronesian world refers to the geographical and linguistic realm encompassing Taiwan, insular Southeast Asia, and Oceania. Do the speakers of these languages share not only linguistic but also musical markers? I suggest an examination of Austronesian chants as a starting point for considering this question, as chant is closely related to speech. Drawing from my studies of Austronesian chants among Taiwan’s Indigenous groups, I will explore possible connections among chants across various Austronesian regions from two perspectives: parallelism and cognates. Principles of parallelism are manifested in Taiwanese Indigenous chants through common features such as couplet formats and dualities between vocables and lexical lyrics, call and response, and syllabic and melismatic singing, features that mirror chants or ritual speeches across the Austronesian world. Cognates referring to Austronesian chants, such as olic (Taiwan), oli (Hawai‘i), and oriori (Aotearoa), suggest that chanting traditions in these regions may derive from a common lineage. To examine these connections, I will employ a “transported soundscape” framework, inspired by Elizabeth Matisoo-Smith’s “transported landscapes” theory. Matisoo-Smith argues that Austronesian ancestors constructed “transported landscapes” through introducing “culturally and economically important plants and animals” to the islands they settled, thereby facilitating the dispersal of Austronesian-speaking peoples (2015). By examining how chant, as a culturally and economically important component, relates to Austronesian transported soundscapes, I aim to shed light on little-known aspects of Austronesian musics and facilitate a deeper understanding of the relationships between music and language.

This paper examines the song Jump Down, Turn Around, Pick a Bale of Cotton as an American work song using Walter Benjamin’s concept of Aura. Investigating field recordings from prison farms, Fannie Lou Hamer’s childhood experience of singing the song, Huddie Ledbetter’s commercial recording, its subsequent success in popular entertainment and use as a pedagogical tool, we see a clear delineation of the song’s trajectory at the point of commercial reproduction. Before market success, the song, tempo and lyrics were fluid, however once recorded became fixed. Indeed, the embrace of a cheery version of this work song fits the historiography of American slavery. Additionally, in researching music of the enslaved, I also suggest that this song likely originated well after 1865 in penal colonies, given the popularity of African American songs composed by laborers enslaved in antebellum America. I argue utilizing the established, upbeat version of Pick a Bale of Cotton not only undermines the contribution of labor and skill of enslaved, diminishes the importance of the cotton industry to the national economy, but romanticizes the conditions under which cotton was produced. Finally, implications for ethnomusicology are the importance of historical context when using music as a pedagogical tool, even when ethnologically authentic, and that by broadening the scope of research we can present a fuller picture of any creative work.

Power relations fundamentally shape the study and translation of culture in ethnomusicology. Drawing on Philip Ciantar’s observation that collaborative processes remain bound by societal power dynamics (Ciantar 2013, 30), this paper examines how colonial frameworks continue to influence ethnomusicological research. Beverly Diamond’s analysis of missionary accounts of Indigenous North American music (Diamond 2013, 158–159) and Kofi Agawu’s critique of Western interpretations of African musical practices (Agawu 2016, 36) demonstrate how colonial perspectives distort cultural understanding and documentation. Using my forthcoming book Interpreting Court Song in Uganda: Musical Meaning, Power Relations, and Political Life (University of Rochester Press, 2025) as a case study, I analyze how contemporary scholarship can actively work to dismantle colonial practices in ethnomusicology. I argue that conventional academic methodologies often obscure and misrepresent the priorities of studied communities. The privileging of certain authorial voices frequently marginalizes research collaborators’ perspectives and renders scholarship inaccessible to broader audiences. This paper not only identifies these colonial legacies in current methodological approaches but also presents concrete strategies I have developed to advance decolonial practices in ethnomusicological research.

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.

Early modern courts employed musical spectacle, instruments and ceremonial practices as displays of agency, identity, power, and conspicuous consumption, and the royal court of the kingdom of Kongo was no exception. Yet detailed research on indigenous musical practices in early modern West-Central Africa is still scarce in ethnomusicological studies. Many challenges disrupt the study of early modern African music due to problems with traditional methodologies limited by Western paradigms, traditional academic disciplinary orientations, the nature of sources available, and disciplinary conventions that largely privilege written evidence and sources emanating from the elites and powerful, while casting suspicion on oral histories and traditions of knowledge that emerge ‘from below’. Drawing on new 16^th- and 17^th-century documentary narratives containing both textual descriptions and illustrations, together with local oral traditions, this paper reconstructs early modern indigenous Kongo musical practices in the wider context of Kikongo spirituality, social hierarchies, political power, and cultural identity in Afro-European encounters. It provides significant new insights into local representations of Black performance and their articulations of local power dynamics and Kongo worldviews that transform our understanding of early West-Central African music, spectacle, and cultural representation, musical encounters with foreign powers outside of a colonial context, and their substantial contributions to the multifaceted identities of the early modern musical world. By excavating these African voices in the colonial archive that holds a plurality of voices, we can direct a decolonial lens that opens the possibility for more nuanced counter-hegemonic interpretations of musical production in the early modern African world.

In 1971, French producer Michel Bernholc remixed field recordings of ngoma drumming from Burundi, to create a dance track called “Burundi Black.” Soon, this rhythm was heard in hits like Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll” (1972), and Joni Mitchell’s electronic experiment, “Jungle Line” (1975). Two British post-punk bands, Adam and the Ants and Bow Wow Wow, took the “Burundi Beat” to the top of the charts in the early 1980s, paired with a look dubbed “The New Romantic,” combining feathers and warpaint with pirate shirts and military jackets. Considering the horrors of genocide occurring in Burundi during these years, this cultural appropriation was arguably ghoulish, yet the unlikely popularity of Burundi drumming ushered in an era of fascination with African music that peaked in 1986 with Paul Simon’s Graceland. The first WOMAD (World of Music and Dance) Festival in 1982 featured The Royal Drummers of Burundi, a group from the capital city of Gitega who capitalized on their music’s notoriety, recording three albums, and touring the world as musical ambassadors of their culture and pioneers in the “Global Pop” circuit. This paper will explore how pop music acts in the 1970s and 80s used signifiers of the “tribal” to convey sympathy for the colonized, while depending on colonial hegemony for their power. I draw attention to places where unequal power structures exploited communities and cultures ravaged by colonialism, while also noting ways that those communities counter-appropriated the culture of the colonizers to reclaim power for themselves.

This paper examines the reform of the Miao lusheng, a traditional reed instrument that plays a central role in the music and cultural identity of the Miao ethnic group in southwest China. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and a historical analysis of state policies, the paper explores the state's ideology and discourse behind the lusheng reforms, the power dynamics between the state and the Miao, and the ways in which Miao musical elites participated in these reforms to negotiate ethnic identity and contribute to the shaping of national musical modernity. It argues that, in the process of constructing a modern national identity, the state imposed European musical principles, such as the twelve-tone equal temperament, onto traditional instruments. This approach, which positions Western music as the standard of modernization, emerged from the colonial modernity of the twentieth century. In response, Miao musicians actively engaged in the reform to redefine Miao music and secure a voice in the development of China’s modern soundscape. By situating the lusheng within the broader context of national music reform, the paper contributes to ongoing discussions on state-minority relations and the intersection of music modernization and state building in China.

The European Early Music movement has flourished since at least the mid-20th century, gaining widespread popularity in the United States and Europe through numerous festivals, educational programs, and active practitioners. In contrast, a similar movement for early Ottoman/Turkish music, despite efforts beginning in Turkey in the late 1980s and early 1990s, has not been able to establish itself. One of the most notable efforts in this vein was made by the Bezmara ensemble, which emerged in the early 1990s attempting to mirror the European model, particularly in the reconstruction of period instruments and performance practices. However, despite these and other similar efforts, a lasting early Ottoman/Turkish music movement never took root. While classical Ottoman/Turkish music has a rich history, with sources dating back to at least the 17th century, the movement’s failure to gain traction is puzzling. This paper will analyze the potential sociological, musical and cultural reasons behind the failure to establish an early Ottoman music movement in Turkey while including interviews with key practitioners of both European early music and classical Ottoman/Turkish music. As a result, this paper aims to uncover why the early Ottoman/Turkish music movement, despite its potential, failed to establish itself in Turkey, while early music has thrived in Europe and the U.S.

This paper introduces “multispecies eco-organology” as a theoretical framework that integrates approaches from multispecies ethnography (Silvers), ecomusicology (Allen), and critical organology (Dolan) to examine the ecological entanglements of musical instrument making in son jarocho circles. Drawing from ongoing fieldwork in southern Veracruz, I explore how the crafting, decoration, and sounding of son jarocho instruments reflect human and non-human intersubjectivity and environmental precarity. Focusing on the jarana jarocha, I examine the work of luthiers such as Pablo Campechano, Héctor Campos, and Edson Roca, who employ adaptive strategies to navigate ecological constraints while maintaining sonic and aesthetic traditions. For example, specific material choices, like using young, locally salvaged cedar instead of high-end tonewoods, demonstrate the ecological awareness that guides local making practices. Additionally, the intricate animal motifs and symbolic carvings that adorn these instruments, as seen at fandangos, suggest that non-human entities are not just represented, but actively woven into son jarocho musicking contexts. Building on recent literature in ecomusicology and critical organology, I move beyond sustainability discourses to explore musical instruments as active participants in multispecies assemblages. This perspective challenges anthropocentric models by centering the agencies of materials, ecosystems, and local sound worlds. I argue that musical instruments are more than cultural artifacts; they are dynamic sites of negotiation between humans, forests, animals, and generations-old sonic practices. By foregrounding the entanglements of craft, sound, and ecology, this paper examines son jarocho instruments as vibrant, relational entities within a multispecies sonic sphere.

Examining a unique localisation process in musical style called "cantonisation," this paper explores the endangered performance techniques of the violin and Hawaiian Guitar in Cantonese music from the 1920s. Although these Western instruments have played a significant role in Cantonese music for almost a century, the loss of transmission between generations poses a serious threat to their distinctive performing styles. I suggest that, despite the scarcity of written documentation, the combination of historical recordings and oral accounts from remaining elderly practitioners provides critical evidence for reconstructing these traditional performance techniques. This research examines and theorises the complex adaption processes these instruments underwent through the examination of historical recordings and in-depth interviews with senior performers. Building upon existing scholarship on Western instruments applied in Cantonese opera (Yung 1989; Chan 2012) and widely discussions of musical hybridity in twentieth-century China (Jones 2001; Lau 2008; Yang 2017), this study reveals how local musicians developed distinctive technical innovations to accommodate Cantonese musical aesthetics. By presenting previously unexplored early Cantonese performance styles, providing fresh insights into Chinese musical modernisation that go beyond the typical Westernisation narrative, and offering in-depth case studies of instrumental adaptation in early 20th-century urban China, this study advances ethnomusicology.

The history of the charango has been the subject of intense political and cultural controversies, particularly regarding its possible Bolivian or Peruvian origins (Centellas 2000, Baumann 2004, Cavour 2010). However, little attention has been paid to the assumptions underlying these historical constructions, which have fostered the proliferation of unreliable narratives in popular media, digital platforms, and even ethnomusicological literature. This presentation examines these histories by analyzing the methodologies that sustain them. Building on previous studies (Mendívil 2002, 2018, Turino 1983, 2008, Stobart 2009) and aligning with the narrativist philosophy of history from the late 20th century (Danto 2014 [1985], White 2001 [1978], and Koselleck 2012), I will focus on two dominant strategies in historical discourse about this small Andean chordophone: (1) the reification of the term “charango” and (2) the symbolic reduction of the instrument in historical narratives. Reification refers to a “phantom objectivity” (Lukács 1971) that transforms a term originally used to describe various instruments into a fixed and paradigmatic concept within specialized literature. Symbolic reduction, in turn, involves a metonymic shift (White 2001 [1973]), reducing the vast diversity of charangos in Bolivia and Peru to a single type—one with a concave resonator made from an armadillo shell—despite ethnomusicological evidence to the contrary. I argue that these strategies have led to a persistent contamination of historical data, hindering source verification. Finally, I propose alternative research methodologies to refine our understanding of the charango’s past beyond nationalist or exoticizing discourses.

The strum and drone of the sape’, a traditional Bornean chordophone, continue to resonate from East to peninsular Malaysia and beyond. From roots in healing and ritual to its evolving modern ecological significance, the sape’ illustrates the interplay of cultural exchange, identity formation and performance, as well as the value of advocacy in the life and care of culture. As Malaysian musicians explore Indigenous roots, national identity, and a changing landscape, the sape’ has sounded into the 2020s on both local and world stages. In this presentation, I map the terrain of the sape’ in Malaysia, exploring themes of migration, memory, mobility, and adaptation. Noting the instrument’s history and functions, and acknowledging Virginia Gorlinski’s extensive early 21^st century research, I explore the settings, mechanisms of cultural transmission, and a brief analysis of stable and malleable elements. I conclude that socio-political factors, intercultural, and multigenerational participant organization have contributed to the resurgence, preservation, and adaptation of the heritage instrument. The musical cultures of Malaysia as influenced and exemplified by the sape’, I assert, are worthy of further exploration and ethnomusicological consideration as we enter the second quarter of the century.

The study explores the interplay between emotions and the experience of music and dance in trance states. By highlighting the unique and significant role that music plays as a catalyst for stimulating empathy, it examines how the body’s senses are engaged during these experiences while illustrating the subtle distinctions of emotions. It revisits the theoretical frameworks presented by Judith Becker and Martin Clayton concerning "trance" and "entrainment," respectively, through the lenses of biology, psychology, and neuroscience.

Focusing on the folk dance "Dage" from a Thai-Myanmar immigrant community in Taiwan as a case study, the research utilizes concepts from gene-culture evolution and enactivism to investigate the trance experience elicited by the body's movement in "dage". The study examines the materiality of sound and the environment, combined with body movements, to explore how this trance process reflects the coordination between the body, brain, and environmental systems. Additionally, it elucidates the dynamic interactions with social and cultural contexts and delves into the actively immersive emotional expressions involved. Overall, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of the embodied nature of emotional experiences in cultural practices and provides a framework for further interdisciplinary exploration of music and emotion.

This paper explores how maqsum—a foundational rhythm in Middle Eastern music—is adapted within predominantly white, feminist spiritual drum circles across North America. In these settings, maqsum is recontextualized as a “universal” rhythm, often detached from its cultural origins and reframed to fit Western pedagogical and spiritual paradigms. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Ontario, Canada, the study asks: (1) How is maqsum rhythmically and pedagogically simplified to align with North American learning styles, thereby severing ties to Middle Eastern traditions? (2) What ethical and epistemological tensions arise when facilitators who promote feminist ideals assert spiritual authority over a rhythm drawn from historically marginalized contexts?

Engaging scholarship in ethnomusicology, affect theory, and decolonial critique (Ahmed 2004; Arewa 2006; Mignolo 2020; Stoever 2016), the paper theorizes this process as sonic reterritorialization: the absorption and transformation of non-Western forms within colonial frameworks of meaning and value. Facilitators often invoke affective language—describing maqsum as “healing,” “intuitive,” or “viscerally familiar”—to justify its use while obscuring its cultural embeddedness. The conversion of complex rhythmic structures into standardized 4/4 time increases accessibility but also reflects a logic of extraction rooted in colonial pedagogies.

Ultimately, the paper argues that such affective framings universalize and abstract maqsum, transforming it into a tool for individualized spiritual expression. In doing so, they reproduce epistemic erasures that echo colonial histories of cultural appropriation, even under the guise of inclusive and feminist spiritual practice.

Since the Syrian conflict began in 2011, Türkiye took in the largest number of Syrian refugees in the region, with over 3.6 million currently residing in the country. This large-scale displacement has reshaped many facets of Turkish society, including rising anti-refugee sentiment. Against this backdrop, this research explores how Syrian musicians navigated displacement through cultural production, asserting 'aesthetic agency' (Bohlman 2011) to confront challenges such as racism, economic marginalisation, and cultural assimilation. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research conducted in Istanbul and Gaziantep from 2020 to 2022, I explore diverse musical spaces—from street performance and music schools to cultural organisations and the lived experience of individual musicians—highlighting how musical creativity functions as a vital form of resilience amid increasing hostility. This study builds on recent scholarship on the politics of Syrian music and displacement, including Silverstein’s (2024) work which examines how embodied musical practices articulate shifting socio-political realities. By reinterpreting Philip Bohlman’s conceptualisation of ‘aesthetic agency’ to center the musician’s subjectivity (not just her musical output) in the transformative and challenging process of displacement/emplacement, this study expands theoretical discourse in ethnomusicology by integrating analytical frameworks from forced migration studies, particularly theory related to agency and the politics of belonging. Although conducted before Syria’s recent political shifts, this research remains vital as some Syrians begin returning to an uncertain homeland. The evolving dynamics of migration do not erase the cultural transformations of the past decade; rather, they underscore the enduring impact of displacement on artistic practices and diasporic belonging.

Choreographic methods enhance our understanding of place by engaging bodily memory, environmental rhythms, and community narratives. This movement-based workshop explores the intersection of music, dance, environmental narratives, and site-specific choreographic inquiry. Drawing from interdisciplinary approaches integrating music, dance, and film, participants will investigate how movement-based practices serve as tools for spatial and cultural exploration.

Building on site-specific performance studies (Kloetzel & Pavlik, 2009) and ethnomusicological perspectives on embodied knowledge (Sklar, 2000), this workshop introduces (a)shore (2024), a cinematic short dance film, as a model for exploring the intersections of movement, environmental narratives, and interdisciplinary collaboration. (a)shore utilizes shorelines as liminal spaces between land and ocean, and between progress and preservation. Through movement, the film serves as an interpretive tool, revealing layered histories and contemporary concerns tied to specific geographies.

Using (a)shore as a framework, the workshop unfolds in four phases:

Conceptual Foundations: Participants engage with embodied ethnography and site-specific methodologies, exploring how movement responds to environment, history, and cultural narratives.

Video Screening & Reflection: Excerpts from (a)shore prompt reflection on movement choices, spatial relationships, and the dancer-environment interaction.

Guided Discussion: Participants reflect on how movement and setting shape meaning and emotions.

Embodied Exploration: Participants engage in guided exercises exploring bodily communication and environmental rhythms, culminating in collaborative movement creation.

This workshop demonstrates how choreography bridges dance, sound, and spatial practice while advancing performative research methodologies. By foregrounding movement as embodied ethnography, it contributes to interdisciplinary discourse on environmental justice and the role of the body in knowledge production.

In 1994, Jan Axel “Hellhammer” Blomberg, drummer of the notorious Norwegian black metal band Mayhem, professed in an interview that “Black metal is for white people.” This sentiment speaks to how and why the genre of black metal has become an international hotbed for neo-Nazi activity and propaganda. An associated sub-genre, National Socialist black metal (NSBM), began with a handful of bands in Europe and the United States in the early 1990s, with a steadily growing presence ever since. Despite this growing foothold, NSBM’s impact on the metal scene often goes unacknowledged or unrecognized by many of its participants.

In recent years, however, several anti-fascist black metal (AFBM) bands have formed in response. This paper analyzes these burgeoning oppositional voices in black metal as a form of contestation against the metal scene’s “white racial frame” (Feagin 2009). To examine this phenomenon, I draw on public discourse in the metal scene among music critics, bands, and fans, as well as interviews that I have conducted with members of the Anti-Fascist Black Metal Network. I also explore AFBM’s sonic characteristics and lyrical themes to shed light on the ways in which these bands manipulate black metal conventions to subvert its white patriarchal order. This paper reveals how members of a music scene with diametrically opposing political ideologies navigate these tensions and, in some cases, work to reconstitute the genre to make it more inclusive for its otherwise marginalized participants.

Women in country songs are often represented as one of a myriad of hyper-feminized characters. Since the late-1990s, women have responded to these tropes via an unnamed category of angry country music that stands apart from earlier songs about revenge by telling explicitly violent stories that speak to the real experiences of many women. Artists such as The Chicks and Miranda Lambert tell stories about being victims of abuse and infidelity via songs that sound much harsher than their more “ladylike” counterparts. In this paper, I argue that the stories that are told in what I refer to as revenge anthems draw clear boundaries between what is and is not acceptable within the confines of idealized behavior in North American country music (Pecknold and McCusker 2004; Hubbs 2014; Leap 2020). Building on conceptions of authenticity and sincerity in the genre (Goldin-Perschbacher 2022; Peterson 1997) I perform brief narrative analyses of three revenge anthems: “Goodbye Earl” (The Chicks, 1999), “Gunpowder and Lead” (Miranda Lambert, 2007), and “Martha Divine” (Ashley McBryde, 2020). I argue that when the man in these stories deviates from the ideal masculine archetype, his bad behavior provides the woman license to behave outside the norm, an opportunity they then take full advantage of. Working within this framework, I demonstrate a possible line of thinking that moves away from the woman-as-victim trope that arises in other violent song types, and towards a way of thinking that highlights women’s agency as they loudly and violently reclaim power in song.

This paper explores how musicians and media workers contend with contemporary radio and make it their own. I focus on how Black artists respond to the virulent discrimination they face in country radio (Watson 2021, 2023) and ask how musicians whose sounds, life experiences, and identities sing their countryness, but who are nevertheless deemed unworthy of the genre’s label, contend with radio’s exclusion. I explore this question primarily through the genre-redefining efforts of Nashville-based country music collective Black Opry. Drawing from four months of ethnographic fieldwork in Nashville, at Black Opry Revue shows in the southern and northeastern U.S., as well as ongoing digital and in-person ethnographic research, I explore what radio means to Black country artists and how its materialities, practices, and aesthetics are sounded in their songwriting and performances, orientation towards fans and industry, and community building. I argue that Black Opry responds to radio discrimination by forming collective physical and digital spaces independent of mainstream industry, by exploring radiophonic alternatives, and by sounding the medium in their music. This work is inspired by contemporary literature in radio studies that seeks to expand and deepen definitions and conceptions of the medium (Fisher and Bessire 2012; Lacey 2008; Hilmes 2022; Bottomley 2020). Through an exploration of radiophonics in Black Opry’s sounds, performances, and social framework, this chapter brings attention to how musicians contend with radio in their everyday lives, finding meaning in a medium often deployed to further segregate American life.

Fifty mariachi bands gather in a rural Texas town to play corridos. Twenty Florida students write songs and release an album. Teenagers across the country reimagine Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream.” Separated by geography and genre, tying these performers together are their musical responses to school shootings. In recent years, musicians impacted by school rampage shootings have invoked singing, performing, and recording to cope with the aftermath of firearm catastrophes, revealing how expressive cultures unified by action can form a social network of mutual aid and advocate for change. In this space, people sound a resistance against violence and counter institutional and political inaction with song. While these musicians have clear reasons to invoke art for collective coping, healing, and recovery, understanding how to document and theorize these events as a community of practice is important. Here I attempt to frame the growing collection of songs and performances addressing school rampage shootings as a distinct and emerging musical tradition. Rooted in applied epistemologies and disaster studies that foreground expressive cultures as tools for coping, this paper argues for the field to archive and critically explore these sonic enactments. Towards realizing that concept I reflect on the robust musical responses staged by the communities of Uvalde, Texas and Parkland, Florida, where defiant acts of hope answered firearm catastrophe. Through conceptualizing a cultural practice tied to school shootings, this paper strives to show the transformative capabilities of music as cultural action and its potential to center an unnerving yet crucial discourse.

Among African democracies where the “postcolonial incredible” has emerged as a regime of normalized crisis and morbidities that are “too improbable, astonishing, and extraordinary to be believed” (Olaniyan 2004), music serves as a crucial site for assembling publics who exchange information, debate ideas, and advocate for change in a variety of spaces –virtual and physical. This panel examines the nature of musical publics throughout postcolonial Africa, where the search for the meaning of democracy is ongoing in the face of challenges, including histories of trauma, dominant and subordinate linguistic regimes, neo-colonial foreign interventions, and entrenched autocratic governance. The first paper discusses how Nigerian youth are assembled through musical practices to reflexively negotiate daily permissibilities –as an avenue of evoking transformative social change. The second demonstrates how the “people power” movement and counterpublic of Ugandan youth employs Bobi Wine’s music as a site for reflecting upon and participating in civil society. The third paper reflects on the overlapping or nested character of musical imaginaries, exploring how musicians in central Cameroon attempt to create space for underrepresented languages and sounds in dominant or mainstream musical publics. The fourth paper examines how an emerging didacticism in Senegalese hip-hop responds to decades of “policy capture,” a phenomenon where critical areas of national-level decision-making are taken out of the public's hands and given to international institutions and local elites. Collectively, we engage with questions of how music is used as a site for negotiating identities, mounting political opposition, and transforming social change in contemporary Africa.

The research presented in this panel explores some of the complex narratives and power dynamics that underlie the jazz tradition, examining how jazz musicians, past and present, negotiate issues of identity, community, and cultural heritage. From the role of women in early jazz to the experiences of junior musicians in contemporary jam sessions, these works provide glimpses into the intricate web of social relationships and cultural norms that shape the jazz world. Exploring the intersections of power, music, and storytelling, these four papers offer nuanced insights into how jazz reflects and refracts its broader social and cultural contexts. Focusing on distinct aspects of the jazz tradition, "Jazz Stories" presents a multifaceted exploration of complex interplay between musical performance, social identities, and cultural narratives.

In his prison diary on January 17, 1938, Dr. Hussein Fakhri al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, lamented, “We have been straining our ears, I and Fuad, tonight to hear Palestine.” In his diary entries, al-Khalidi often complained about his inability to hear his beloved homeland, which at the time was experiencing a period of popular uprising marked by escalating violence, mass imprisonment, and martial law. During their fourteen-month exile in the British-colonized Seychelles, al-Khalidi and his fellow political prisoners would often tune into Arabic music programs from the BBC London, propagandized news bulletins from the Italian Radio Bari, and occasionally, snippets of Palestine Broadcasting Service PBS programs, which betrayed their distance with the agonizing noise of “atmospherics.” He also described listening for more intangible connections—the beat of the daff (tambourine), the rage of a snowstorm, and on one day, the “resounding voice” of Arab justice. This paper considers what it meant for al-Khalidi, a diligent public servant and ardent supporter of Palestinian self-determination, to strain to listen in exile. Martin Stokes notes the Arabic word for “vote” is sawt [voice]. Drawing on musicological scholarship about aurality as a political act (Ochoa Gautier 2014) and musical citizenship (Stokes 2023), I explore what the radical act of listening has to teach us about political community for a people denied the criteria for nationhood. I ask, how might we reframe the aurality of political belonging when the voice is suppressed, and the act of resistance is instead choosing what to listen to?

While often framed as an invisible and violent structure, white supremacy is also an audible force, shaping how we listen, whose voices are heard and listened to, and what sounds are deemed legitimate. Building on ethnomusicological (Harris 2022; Mahon 2019; Martin 2021; Roberts 2016) and sound studies scholarship (Eidsheim 2019; Stoever 2016), my research explores the sounds of white supremacy through what I call “the Canadian sonic imaginary,” a normative framework of listening and sounding that is mutually constituted by white supremacy and settler colonialism (Kheshti 2011). I argue that the Canadian sonic imaginary orients listening practices and mediates perceptions of difference within representations of Canadian national identity and idealized forms of citizenship (Giroux 2021; Ochoa Gautier 2006; Robinson 2020). Drawing on recent ethnographic fieldwork in Ottawa, Canada’s capital, I employ an anti-racist feminist listening methodology to consider how the Canadian sonic imaginary is constructed, reproduced, and resisted on Parliament Hill, the home of Canada’s federal government. By analyzing grassroots protests and state-curated events, I trace the resonances of white supremacy, from the implicit background hum or “white noise” of white supremacy to the explicit thunderous roars of whiteness that demand attention. I ask: How can we listen to white supremacy? How might the register of sound provide alternative pathways to resist and dismantle white supremacy? Through this paper, I explore how an anti-racist feminist listening methodology might contribute to practices of anti-racist resistance within and beyond the academy.

In Hong Kong, localism and nationalism are on the opposite ends of a widening spectrum. Localism has been reinforced by the contrasting values between Hong Kong and China. Nationalism, meanwhile, is the idea of incorporating Hong Kong into one Chinese nation. This paper provides an overview on current Cantonese music communities in Hong Kong as compared to that of mainland China to understand how Cantonese music can be both local and national and what dynamics are at stake.

There are mainly two approaches to Cantonese music. The first approach, emphasizing the accuracy on stage performance, is national. Musicians are required to be compatible in sight-reading staff and cipher notation because they usually perform arrangements. This approach can be traced back to the Cultural Revolution, when traditional music was banned, and pieces had to be rearranged and renamed before they could be played. The second approach, to play in an improvised way, is more local. Members in the ensemble follow a music leader to perform the same melody and embellish it with ornaments. This approach has been adopted in the Cantonese music communities in Hong Kong since the early 20th century. Whereas in mainland China, it has been gradually fading since 1949, and it is currently seen only to a limited extent.

In this paper, I discuss how individuals and groups represent Cantonese music through different approaches. I argue that the notion of Cantonese music being both local and national, is a sonic counterpart to existing political situation in Hong Kong.

The periya mēḷam, an orchestra of shawms, drums and cymbals, is today the last ensemble to perform a repertoire of Karnatak (classical South Indian) songs and instrumental pieces during religious services in high-caste Hindu temples. In Tamil Śaiva temple complexes, such as those of Chidambaram, Madurai or Tiruvarur, this repertoire is strictly codified and passed down through generations. Each piece, whether adapted from a song or not, corresponds to specific ritual actions or sequences, thus providing a vibrant and contrasting soundtrack to both daily rituals and seasonal festivals. While these codifications seem stable over time, a systematic and well-contextualized study reveals their ongoing adaptation – whether by force or necessity – to aesthetic, socio-economic and political changes. This is particularly evident in a set of ritual songs absorbed into the periya mēḷam repertoire but formerly performed by the devadāsīs – the hereditary courtesans, dancers and musicians who, in the wake of vociferous social reforms, were officially banned from Hindu temples in the first half of the 20th century. Through a sonic, musical, and performative analysis of these songs in their contemporary instrumental forms, this paper explores how the present can illuminate the past and enrich our still fragmented, historically driven understanding of the devadāsīs' artistic and ritual function within the Hindu temple. It also aims to reassess their auspicious nature and social status, highlighting the injustice of their erasure by colonial authorities and sections of the South Indian elite.

This video will blow you away. Anyone who spends time online has encountered some version of this message, whether in a friend’s post, a corporation’s advertisement, or a video’s own description. When the promise is fulfilled, we experience virtuosity: skill made apparent and socially meaningful. This paper combines first-person phenomenology with critical voices from music and media studies to explore how streaming platforms in general (and YouTube in particular) structure mediated encounters with virtuosic bodies. Navigating between techno-determinism on one side and an over-emphasis on individual agency on the other, I examine how digital architecture and the algorithms operating within it exercise a social power that we regularly experience, even if their technical workings remain opaque. Drawing on phenomenology’s description of the ways that values and judgments are already temporally “on all sides” of experience, I argue that algorithmic recommendations increasingly replicate these subjective contributions to experience in the media objects themselves, leading to overlapping intensifications and crises of value. Their power is “soft” but extraordinarily strong; in surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2019), algorithms effectively produce and monitor conduits for viewer’s attention, which functions simultaneously as leisure and digital labor. The very intimacy of the encounter—platforms provide individualized recommendations for content that we stream in our homes on devices that serve as constant companions—frequently turns listeners’ concerns back on themselves. Our everyday being is at once the reality we escape through streaming entertainment, the engine of the economic environment, and the experience’s interpretive focus.

On May 16^th, 2024, the Kurdish Exile Museum in Stockholm, Sweden received a three-month lease termination notice following the sale of their unit’s building at Dalagatan 48. The grassroots museum spent its remaining days experimenting with digitizing the spatial configuration of its collection at Dalagatan 48 with hopes of rebuilding the museum using virtual reality and artificial intelligence technology to help mitigate difficulties in finding an affordable location. However, the process of digitization and maintaining open access to the museum online brings a new set of economic challenges in maintaining data storage on servers. Drawing on in-person and digital ethnographic research conducted in Stockholm, I analyze how the abrupt physical displacement of the museum’s audio collections mirrors the experience of the museum founder’s displacement that initially brought the museum and the audio materials into virtualized being outside of the Kurdish borderlands. The audio collection itself contains a substantial amount of music written by exiled Kurdish musicians who routinely highlight their own experiences of displacement. Additionally, many of these audio materials have physically moved in and out of the Kurdish borderlands, maintaining sonic cultural connections between displaced and home communities (Reigle 2013 and Aksoy 2006). I argue that rather than ensuring Kurdish cultural survival against political and economic odds, the virtualization (Deleuze 1966) of the Kurdish Exile Museum’s displaced audio collections through digitization reflects and adds to multiple layers of displacement within Kurdish cultural memory.

This paper illuminates how frameworks and repertoires rooted in Western musical practice—e.g. staff notation, keyboard instrumentation, the MIDI format, and the canonical corpus of musical works (as embodied in scores and recordings)—constitute a self-reinforcing dominant system that limits the analytical and creative scope of both human and AI musical praxis. The underlying logical structure shared by these frameworks—their implicit data architecture—is taken as the lingua franca when encoding musical data for training AI models and for computational music research more broadly (Savage, 2022). Inevitably, systems trained on a dataset incorporate remnants of the cognitive frameworks used to structure that data, effectively forming the “environment, the world that it navigates” (Miller, 2022). As scholars of diverse musical cultures know, many traditions are based in non-notated yet idiomatically precise theoretical paradigms that are incompatible with this Western-centric model—a notion echoing longstanding debates over the limitations of staff notation in transcribing diverse musical practices (Seeger, 1957; Hood, 1971; Ellingson, 1992). This misalignment leaves these traditions vulnerable to underrepresentation—or exclusion—in the AI systems that increasingly shape how music is created, disseminated, and consumed in the 21st century (Drott, 2018; Shin, 2024). In highlighting this representational gap, this paper calls for a reimagining of music data architectures tuned to the unique structures of diverse traditions. As a case study, it discusses how the dominant model is ill-suited to Hindustani music and presents the Interactive Digital Transcription and Analysis Platform (IDTAP)—software developed to fit the logics of Hindustani music—as one such intervention.

Pop music is a site where gendered expectations are often reinforced yet can also be subverted. My research draws parallels between the U.S. and Mandopop/C-pop industries, examining how music technology, particularly electronic sound design, has enabled female producers in both industries to reclaim creative agency, challenge entrenched norms, and blur traditional gendered sonic boundaries. Tools like DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) and synthesizers empower women to disrupt stereotypes tied to historically gendered associations of sound, reshaping the production process.

Using ethnographic insights, the study examines how women leverage electronic production to explore bold, synthetic textures that defy sonic conventions. By comparing Mandopop producers like Lexie Liu to U.S. pioneers such as SOPHIE, the research highlights how both challenge gendered sonic traditions in their cultural contexts. SOPHIE’s hyperreal soundscapes and manipulation of synthetic textures created a gender-fluid sonic identity, questioning conventional binaries. Similarly, Lexie Liu’s use of glitchy beats, layered polyrhythms, and pitch-shifted vocals straddles and subverts “masculine” and “feminine” sound.

While both industries demonstrate disruptive potential, China's platformized ecosystem, dominated by interactive platforms like QQ Music and NetEase Cloud, adds excessive algorithmic pressures and audience scrutiny, complicating female producers' navigation of creativity and agency. This comparison reveals how globalized music technologies empower women to redefine identities, experiment with electronic arrangements, and challenge long-standing gender norms while presenting unprecedented obstacles in their navigation of the audience-led industry environment driven by algorithm and AI in the near future.

Practitioners and fans have highly criticized the commercial category of urban music in the US. However, diverse localized communities in Latin America have accepted and embraced the Spanish concept of música urbana. What is understood under this frame changes depending on places and generations, yet some genres have been coined inside this broad category, such as reggaetón, trap, and reparto. In today’s transnational contexts, música urbana emerges in a collision of cross-cultural aesthetics, technology, and social and sonic flows due to migration and online movements between different continents. By centering producers, DJs, and performers across diverse geographic realities, this panel engages with música urbana’s production, circulation, and reception as dynamic processes shaped by cultural, technological, and economic forces. The first panelist examines reggaetón producers in Puerto Rico, highlighting timbre as central to the genre’s creative and social dynamics. Staying in the Caribbean, the second presenter investigates música reparto, a hybrid of Cuban timba and reggaetón, which formed as a response to cultural tensions in Havana’s working-class neighborhoods. Moving south, the third proposal focuses on Chilean producers’ use of sampling and “reverse beat-making” to link local practices to Puerto Rican roots (la mata). Far from the Americas, the fourth panelist explores reggaetón’s reception in Japan, where intermediaries and event spaces foster cross-cultural musical exchanges. These studies illuminate música urbana as a global phenomenon, reshaping notions of sonic flows, production, and cultural connectivity.

This panel interrogates the dynamic interplay between music, sound, and spiritual practice in the Caribbean, drawing on ethnographic research and historical inquiry to reframe our understanding of spiritually-powered political endurance. Building on previous work on the transformative potential of musical performance, we argue that Caribbean music functions not only as an aesthetic but also as a dynamic arena where the spiritual sonopoetics of ritual practice produce experiences of collective belonging that contest dominant power dynamics and monolithic national identity discourses.

Based on case studies from Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba, our contributions explore several interlocking themes. First, we analyze fuerza (strength/force) as a spiritual technology that redefines espiritistas marialionceros’ endurance to violence and (in)humanity through sound. Second, we explore how Dominican bachata, through amargue (romantic bitterness), operates as a form of velación (funeral rites), mirroring Black sociability from plantation ecologies. Third, using sonic gestures (Herrera Veitia & Levine, Forthcoming), we examine the public and private character of urban Afro-Cuban music as a historically situated spiritual, affective, and territorial emplacement. Lastly, we consider the mind-body split of African forced migrants and highlight the enduring legacy of African rhythms in the reclamation of Afro-Cuban identity through Abakuá music specifically.

Through an engagement with ethnomusicology, postcolonial discourse, affect theory, Africana religions, and social anthropology, our discussions call for innovative methodological approaches that embrace the fluidity of bottom-up political endurance and use sound and music to upset assumptions of legibility in traditional notions of power and the sacred.

This panel features ethnographic case studies that examine how trendsetting contemporary musical establishments such as international music festivals and music conservatories are continually shaped and transformed by accelerating currents of globalization and transnational politics. By focusing on four geopolitically distinct localities from the U.S., Europe, and Central Asia, the presenters of this panel demonstrate how global and transnational forces inform the development of these localities’ diverse cultural practices, values, and identities. Drawing on ethnomusicological methodologies, the panel underscores the complexities that underlie the convergence of locally-determined traditional attitudes and personal and institutional efforts to attain cosmopolitan ideals. In “African American Jazz in Diaspora,” the author illustrates how jazz conservatories in Denmark serve as preeminent sites to observe one confluence of racial strains and ethical principles that guide the institutionalization of African American jazz in diaspora. Similarly, in “See Local, Listen Global,” the author presents a case in which an internationally acclaimed, locally-organized music festival in East Tennessee capitalizes on traditional Appalachian aesthetic parameters to achieve its cosmopolitan aspirations. “The Colorado City Music Festival” represents the clash between religious creeds of an orthodox Mormon community in Southern Utah and secular ideals of a cosmopolitan world. “Zamanvi or Emruzi Music,” a twenty-minute, ethnographic documentary, showcases how traditionally-trained musicians in the geopolitically isolated countries of Iran and Tajikistan strive to gain global status by participating in international music scenes and by creating music that adapts their traditional repertories to globally accepted musical criteria.