Studies about and production of African music have been vibrant agents in ethnomusicological scholarship and performance in the global academy. While the anthropological turn, codified in the work of Alan Merriam, provided the gateway that emphasized functionalism and other utilitarian positions, the installment of drum traditions of West African took center stage in many institutions of higher learning in North American for most of the 20th century in part through Mantle Hood’s advocacy regarding performance for tangible musical experiences. Meanwhile, music educators in their quest to broaden students’ experiences at different learning levels introduced select repertoire and methods of teaching these resources using systematic endeavors through organizations such as the Smithsonian library and developments initiated by educators such as Patricia Campbell.

Recent debates about music (mis)appropriation, culturally responsive teaching and the reductionist role of notation as well as phobias regarding copyright infringement has on one hand led to fear of performing musics of other cultures while at the same time amplified the need for guidelines for those seeking to explore different creative musical systems as part of global exchanges for good. This panel provides responses by culture bearers to expanding resources to mitigate both fear and adoption of African musical arts by drawing on examples from Kenyan repertoire for choral production, vocal music and popular song.

Ethnomusicological debates on gender, labor, and social reproduction focus on different facets of labor, yet they seldom engage with practices and ethics of care. In this panel, each of the presenters explores how performance practices are sustained through gendered forms of care labor. The diverse musical worlds discussed in this panel demonstrate that feminist practices of “caring with,” or attending to others, operate as an infrastructure that makes the social reproduction of musical life possible. Taken together, the papers argue that gendered labor is ethically complex, unevenly valued, yet foundational to collective life across religious, political, environmental, and professional contexts. Drawing on ethnographic research in Turkey, India, Mozambique, and Bolivia, each paper examines different sites and scales of care, from small, intimate religious gatherings to institutional and professionalized settings, collective sonic action, and researcher-interlocutor connections in the afterlives of an environmental movement. By examining women’s care labor, the papers collectively reveal that musical worlds are not representations or performances alone. Rather, they are sustained through forms of social reproduction shouldered primarily by women. Yet this affective, organizational, activist, and artistic labor largely remains invisible to institutional metrics of productivity tied to the success of an event. This panel prompts us to consider: When does care labor enable collective life and solidarity and when does it perpetuate structural inequality within communities and musical worlds?

The last trains passed through Salem, Indiana in 2008. This paper examines the enlistment of noise in the production of local railroad memory. I draw on participant-observation at the Depot, a public museum that invites visitors to imagine the heyday of Indiana’s Monon Railroad. The artifacts on display, from mail hooks to dining car dinner ware, testify to a time when passenger trains stopped along a corridor of nearby farm communities. I argue that a key to the Depot is its appeals to the ear. In this presentation, I turn to an elder volunteer named Jim Smoak as a primary interlocutor and expert practitioner of “train sound.” During the 1950s, Smoak was among a small handful of three-finger banjo stylists to make it in Nashville. At 91, now living in Indiana, he splits his music time with volunteer shifts at the Depot. I approach the social world of the Depot through Smoak, describing multiple activities that elicit locomotive acoustics in the space of the museum. These curatorial gestures range from the performance of loco-motivic bluegrass music to the demonstration of a pneumatic train whistle. Interpreting acoustic practices as a channel of local critique, I consider the sound culture of the Depot alongside authorized social analyses of the railroad soundscape (Leo Marx, Michel DeCerteau, R. Murray Schafer). Additionally, I offer the Depot case as a way to rethink the connection of soundscape to musicality, granting popular traditions of machine mimicry greater purchase with respect to one of ethnomusicology’s core theories: acoustemology.

This paper examines the gathering spaces of string band music as sites where questions of legitimacy, sustainability, and cultural authority are negotiated amid shifting practices of formality and institutional affiliation. As traditional American folk musics increasingly intersect with institutional frameworks, particularly within higher education, new modes of convening have emerged alongside longstanding practices such as fiddlers’ conventions, jam sessions, and regional and national festivals. I analyze multiple institutionalized gatherings across this spectrum, from large, industry-centered bluegrass events such as IBMA to subgroups within existing academic conferences, as well as independently organized meetings including the String Band Summit and the Black Banjo Gathering. These meeting spaces provide a lens through which to analyze the evolving relationship between traditional music communities and the academic and professional institutions that both support and study them.

Through ethnographic inquiry and my ongoing practices of being-in-community as both scholar and participant, I examine how these spaces balance accessibility with tradition, expansion with preservation, and institutional support with grassroots values. While conferences and summits may provide resources and scholarly legitimacy, they also introduce hierarchical structures that can challenge the participatory and intergenerational dynamics central to string band practice. This work builds on and contributes to an ongoing body of scholarship on old-time, bluegrass, and related string band traditions that has reflexively examined the bidirectional impacts of institutionalization on community-based music making.

This paper argues that stylistic fusion in Béla Fleck’s banjo practice operates not primarily through genre hybridization or stylistic borrowing, but through the renegotiation of instrumental roles, technical practices, and performance authority across musical contexts. Through comparative analysis of two contrasting projects—Perpetual Motion (2001), which adapts Western art music repertoire for banjo-centered ensembles, and Thrown Down Your Heart (2009), a documentary project documenting Fleck’s collaborations with West African musicians—the paper examines how fusion is enacted through shifting configurations of leadership, learning, and ensemble interaction. In Perpetual Motion, Fleck’s arrangements of works by composers including Bach, Beethoven, Liszt, and Debussy involve the development of new banjo techniques and ensemble orchestrations that substitute bluegrass instruments for classical ones, resituating Western art music within an American vernacular performance framework while maintaining the banjo’s central musical authority. In contrast, Thrown Down Your Heart positions Fleck as a participant-observer within local musical systems, where authority and decision-making are frequently ceded to collaborating musicians, reshaping both musical outcomes and modes of transmission. By foregrounding sonic structure, instrumental technique, and interactional dynamics, this paper demonstrates how Fleck’s fusion practices reconstitute the banjo from a conventionally leading bluegrass instrument into a flexible, context-responsive musical agent. More broadly, the paper proposes an ethnomusicological approach to fusion that emphasizes performance roles and instrumental identity as socially negotiated processes rather than stable genre categories.

Since the mid-19th century, Japan and the United States have participated in political and cultural exchanges that have influenced Japanese identity. Americana in Japan is a useful means of analyzing Japan’s relationship with the United States and U.S. culture. I argue that Bluegrass music, which has been performed in Japan since the mid 1940s, as a kind of americana offers a particular articulation of imagined class-based, regionalized, and racialized articulations of U.S.-ness. These imagined articulations of U.S.-ness, both temporally contingent and enmeshed in broader cosmopolitan dynamics. By focusing on the imagination, I attend to the complex processes through which Japanese musicians and enthusiasts constitute their identities. 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 music as a type of americana 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.

What does voice do when grief cannot be completed, pain cannot be repaired, and the past cannot be settled? Across ethnographic, archival, and theoretical approaches, this panel explores voice as a medium for inhabiting unresolved social worlds—worlds structured by war, disappearance, ecological catastrophe, diasporic listening, and the unsettled presence of the dead. In this panel, we approach vocality as an ethical, material, and relational practice. Voice takes shape where mourning is suspended, where listening becomes theory, where distributed audiences co-create sonic meaning, and where singing mediates relations between the living and dead in their situated historical and ecological environments. Our cases range from the singing practice of a Kurdish woman inhabiting unresolved loss, to postwar Kosovar Albanian film that stages voice at the threshold of life and death, to Ukrainian ritual polyphony that negotiates ecological and ancestral relations in contaminated landscapes, to transnational listening communities organized across Latin America. We argue that voice is not simply a sign of presence but a practice that inhabits absence, binds dispersed listeners, and materializes historical wounds without resolving them. By attending to vocal practices that dwell in indeterminacy—between life and death, event and aftermath, sound and listener—the panel foregrounds voice as a medium through which communities inhabit ongoing histories of violence, memory, and care.

Set against South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle, WE ARE NOT AFRAID explores music’s critical role as resistance for political prisoners incarcerated in apartheid prisons over three decades (1960-1990), especially at Robben Island (which held Nelson Mandela for 18 years) and the Johannesburg Women’s Jail. Narrated by former political prisoners, with unseen historical archival footage, 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, community-building, therapy, collective memory, and identity-formation 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 are historically overshadowed in liberation narratives. Through these 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 protesting the violation of human rights under oppressive patriarchal regimes at the intersections of music, resilience, power, violence, gender, race, trauma and human rights.

The film excerpt focuses on highlights from the entire film that touch on the intersecting themes as described in the above abstract. The introduction/discussion will focus on South African field methods for capturing survivor/perpetrator testimonies, ethical approaches to ethnographic research and media-making in trauma-related research, and the importance of documenting crimes against humanity.

"Performing Black & Green: The African and Irish Musical Roots of Montserrat" is an ethnomusicological documentary exploring the intertwined histories of African, Irish, and English influences on the Caribbean island of Montserrat. Through a deep dive into the island’s musical traditions, the film examines how African and Irish cultural elements shape Montserratian identity, particularly during the annual St. Patrick’s Festival.

The documentary highlights the festival’s dual significance—celebrating Irish heritage while commemorating a failed African slave revolt that took place on St. Patrick’s Day in the late 1700s. With a focus on the towns of Salem and Brades, key sites of resistance and cultural expression, the film captures performances, oral histories, and ethnographic insights that bring Montserrat’s unique African-Irish legacy to life.

Filmed between 2023 and 2025, the documentary is currently in post-production. It integrates historical research, interviews, and immersive fieldwork to explore the deep connections between music, identity, and resistance in Montserratian culture.

The in-progress film, titled My Heart Is Not Above My Liver, has an estimated length of 40 minutes. It explores the musical lives of village women from Hubei Province during the 20^th century. Within a patriarchal social structure, instrumental ensembles, mostly consisting of suona (double-reed aerophone) and percussion and performed for rituals and ceremonies, are dominated by male villagers, while women often sing as entertainment. The initial filming began in response to the author’s grandmother’s request to document songs remembered by her elder sister, from whom she had originally learned them. Through revisiting these songs, which include wedding/funeral laments, didactic songs, and group songs, a full landscape of village women’s lifelong experiences gradually unfolds, narrating happiness, sorrow, and moral and marital life. Focusing on the life trajectory of Grandma Wu Jinlan (1934-2023), who was raised as a child bride, this film foregrounds the musical life and creativity of ordinary people (Nettl 2015), arguing for the affective support of song and its significance in revisiting life trauma. The film is in editing, with an experimental attempt to engage ethnographic film as a writing practice, exploring its possibilities above an alternative to a research report or an adjunct to fieldwork (Baily 2009). The excerpt discusses how the subjectivity of actors might be returned from the filmmaker during filming and editing, and how to balance scholarly aims with accessibility for a broader public audience. Conversations and songs in the film are in the local dialect, with bilingual subtitles in Chinese and English.

Within the epistemological framework of Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism, sound is understood not merely as the product of vibration, but as a manifestation and carrier of consciousness. For many Tibetans, sound exceeds the boundaries of hearing: it emerges from multispecies encounters with animals and ritual practices, while also holding affective intensities and sedimented histories.

This short film follows Bayang, a Tibetan environmental activist in Nasuoni village, Qinghai province, China, as she listens for and records the sounds of her homeland. Rather than treating sound as mere atmospheric background, the film approaches it as both method and medium—an ethnographic and cinematic practice of entering local lifeworlds. Through recording, attentive listening, and sonic narration, we accompany Bayang in rediscovering Tibetan ways of knowing: their nuanced classifications of wild animals and profound multispecies bonds; their cosmological understandings of death and the soul; and the ways sound provides a safer pathway for expressing both individual and collective memories of trauma.

By foregrounding listening as both method and cinematic form, the film invites viewers to encounter a world in which sound is not secondary to image, but a living force that binds environment, memory, and Tibetan modes of being.

Anime is usually defined by its machinic conventions delivered through visible elements such as world-building, character design, and storytelling. This panel decenters the visual mode by exploring how sonic and auditory modalities influence the embodiment and perception of subjectivity. Through four case studies of contemporary anime works and their reception by varied audiences, we ask how the politics of race, gender, and sexuality materialize through aesthetic engagement with an animated genre imbricated with Japanese aesthetics. Paper #1 presents a case study on the reception of anime voice dramas to explore voice as an analytical medium, addressing a transmedia production of women’s bodies. Paper #2 investigates discussions surrounding Gachiakuta's adoption of a Black cultural movement to define identity, examining the positive reception to representations of ‘authentic’ Blackness within Blerd (Black nerd) communities. Attention to voice and representation continues in paper #3, drawing connections between vocal audition in Japanese anime voice acting and the Black aesthetic practice of imaginary black coding to examine how politics of race shape Blerd fandoms. Paper #4 uses a psychoanalytic lens to investigate the use of sound/music and its reception among fans in two shounen romance anime that ultimately question music’s ability to situate the listener within a gendered ideological position. The panel aims to present possibilities of thinking through anime, which antagonize the binaries of real and imagined, and how subjective listening in liminal spaces mediates condition. We hope this panel generates consideration in ethnomusicology for genres like anime that ambiguates through allegory and aurality.

​​Trauma cannot be reduced to a universalized biomedical category of distress; it takes shape, is felt, and is coped with in socially and historically contingent ways. And yet, prevailing scholarly and vernacular discourses commonly present trauma and healing in Eurocentric, masculinist, and logocentric terms that neglect non-event-based forms of suffering emanating from structural, systemic, colonial, and racial modes of violence (Kidron 2009; Lewis 2019; Summerfield 1999). This panel suggests alternative models for conceptualizing trauma and how people cope with troubling pasts. One paper interrogates the collective, intergenerational trauma African Americans experience in slavery’s wake by analyzing how images, sounds, and musics in Black horror films index racialized violence while blurring fiction with reality. Another paper shows how Chinese citizens living under cyclical authoritarian traumas resolve and reenchant tabooed histories through vocal practices that delineate negative spaces of public secrecy in rapidly gentrifying urban environments. A third paper analyzes how the acoustic and non-acoustic sounds of Cambodian-Buddhist rituals help people cope with life’s difficulties, including the effects of genocide, by forging relations of mutual care with deities and the dead. The final paper examines how the western binary of silence and speech creates an overreliance on linear testimony in the U.S judicial system, which adversely affects sexual violence survivors, and posits alternate modes of listening for survivor voices. Collectively, we push for an ethnomusicology of trauma that interrogates the manifold repercussions of traumatic pasts and the divergent ways people resolve, express, or live with those challenging circumstances through various sonorities.

In June 2014, the militant extremist organization the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) invaded Iraq from the Syrian border, initiating a three-year conflict alongside a global campaign to defeat it. Based on its extremist interpretation of Islam, the militant group's presence was marked by the implementation of extreme violence, ethno-religious cleansing, and sexual slavery that created an atmosphere of dread and terror across the country. ISIS propagated and put into action its rigid ideology, including the strict control over women’s corporeal presence and the erasure of music. While military propaganda music in the Arab world typically features slow tempos, deep masculine timbres, and large vocal ensembles, in this paper, I will draw attention to the creative and unprecedented characteristics of anti-ISIS propaganda music, including its dance-inducing rhythms, vivid acoustic design, and representation of female body and voice. Building on my ethnography of civilians about their wartime experience of this music, I will then address how the aforementioned musical characteristics acted as a direct counter to ISIS terror. Focusing on the meaning created by these aesthetic elements for civilians, I will demonstrate how these propaganda music tracks encapsulate the idea of the nation’s immortality and endurance, what I call “musical lastingness”. Finally, in tandem with the recent scholarship on the terror-responsive effects of music (Crandy 2017; Young 2019; Thomson 2023), I will situate the idea of musical lastingness within Terror Management Theory (Greenberg et al. 1986) to expand on the understanding of musicking as an existential practice.

“Boycott or Compliance” is a twenty-minute documentary featuring how the sounds, noises, and silence that unfolded during 2025–26 protests and the subsequent violent conflict between the military forces of the U.S./Israel and Iran provide clues to understand the totalitarian character of the Islamic Republic. By focusing on recorded interviews with artists, musicians, and scholars who had to overcome various types of economic, ideological, social, and political obstacles in their daily lives to survive the horrific and untenable living conditions under a totalitarian regime, this short documentary sheds light on the complexity of justice in the context of a war that seemingly aimed to liberate a nation. In addition, by highlighting the reasons for which the members of Iranian art, cinema, and music communities had decided to either boycott or comply with the Iranian regime’s top-down policies for artistic activities before the latest round of protests in the country, this documentary reveals why a careful study of the social conditions in the years preceding the 2025–26 protests is of great significance for a more comprehensive understanding of the reasons that fueled the rise of the latest round of protests in Iran. With its raw approach, “Boycott or Compliance” makes manifest the disguised angst and veiled turmoil that characterized Iranian society during an extremely challenging period in its history. A bridge between ethnographic, observational, and performative styles of documentary filmmaking, this documentary highlights important ethnomusicological issues such as the relationship between music, violence, and justice in contemporary times.

On the last days of December, 2025, protests started in different cities across Iran. With more people joining the movement, the regime opened fire on civilians with a brutal force worse than ever seen before. With almost two weeks of Internet shutdown and absence of any non-regime affiliated reports, there are no official numbers of deaths, but when the state reports more than three thousand, Iranians know the actual numbers must be much more.

During the Women Life Freedom movement of 2022, revolutionary songs were released from known and anonymous artists. But in January 2026, there was only silence. Everyone knew someone who got killed in the protest. There was no place for music. But after families were able to receive the bodies of their lost loved ones, and when there were burial ceremonies, music and dance began to become part of a new uprising. Justice-seeking families wanted to be as far from whatever the Islamic Republic stood for as possible. Instead of Quran recitals, there was music, and instead of Islamic ceremonies, there were ancestral cultures and dances. Starting from a mother doing a ceremonial dance for her lost son, this ceremony was adopted with Persian songs and dance in Tehran and Kurdish dance and culture in Kurdistan.

In this paper, I am looking at the cultural shift and role of music and dance as protest in the burial ceremonies of the protesters, while highlighting protest music during the 2022 movement and the silence during 2026.

In December of 2025 the Trump administration initiated Operation Metro Surge and sent approximately 3000 federal agents to the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area in Minnesota. The lawless behavior of the agents resulted in illegal detentions, abductions, assaults on civilians and journalists, and the murder of American citizens at the hands of these federal forces. The political institutions that ostensibly existed to curtail these sorts of authoritarian overreaches either capitulated to or were stymied by federal agencies. Consequently, resistance to the federal invasion of the Twin Cities was largely rooted in community-based organizing, as local government officials or agencies (e.g. police departments) were unable or unwilling to protect the communities they served. One particular manifestation of this grassroots collectivism was a number of digital musical compilations from organizations like Community Aid Network MN (CANMN) and record labels like Seawind of Battery. These compilations feature artists of various genres who are connected by common progressive politics. Proceeds from these digital compilations are donated to organizations like Minnesota’s Immigrant Rapid Response Fund or Amnesty International. More than simply a means of fund-raising financial support for critical aid organizations, these compilations provide a model of collective action rooted in the ability of musicians to quickly mobilize, stand collectively, and affect a measurable difference. Through ethnographic interviews with artists and producers involved in a number of these projects, this paper examines how compilations of music act as sites of agency, solidarity, and collective political action in the face of failing political institutions.

In his famous ninth-century treatise, the Tang-dynasty artist Zhang Yanyuan (张彦远) wrote, "To paint landscape is not merely to depict its outward likeness; the true value lies in capturing its spirit and atmosphere.” To Zhang, nature was seen not merely as place, but as a medium through which the life force Chinese call qi could be revealed.

One of the most famous examples of this type of landscape painting is Li Tang’s (李唐) twelfth-century work, Wind in the Pines Among a Myriad Valleys (万壑松风), which serves as the inspiration for contemporary Chinese composer Jia Guoping’s (贾国平) 2014 piece The Pine-soughing Valleys (万壑松风).

Written for sheng, zheng, and orchestra, the work is built around five core sound images that correspond to features in Li Tang’s painting. In a highly detailed approach, Jia organizes its form and pitch structures to convey these sonic images. I will provide a high-level analysis of this work, specifically attempting to connect it to the concepts in Tang and Song Dynasty paintings that define their progression beyond mimesis toward the expression of qi. I will also situate this work within Jia’s larger body of work, many pieces of which also seek to express concepts related to nature, landscape, and the power of harmony between heaven and humanity.

This paper examines how regional xiqu (Chinese opera) production became a vehicle for cultural reformation and propaganda surrounding the first Marriage Law of the People's Republic of China in the 1950s. Focusing on the Shandong Provincial Lüju Company, I trace the activities and trajectories of cultural workers who created new performances to reform local marital norms and values during the national xiqu reform period (1949–1966). I argue that the constitution of marriageability and intimate life was inextricably interwoven with national policy, local histories, and individual experience within this propaganda project.

Following the national xiqu reform, state-owned troupes across China transformed regional performance traditions to align with national cultural standards and convey ideological messages through top-down initiatives. The Shandong Provincial Lüju Company gained particular prominence by adapting the revolutionary novel The Remarriage of the Widow Li Ersao (Wang 1950) for the national stage in 1954. National media frequently cited the production as a model for integrating folk traditions with "socialist realism" and state-promoted marriage patterns. The play reinforced the implementation of the Marriage Law and circulated widely through traveling troupes and opera films. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, this paper illuminates the paradoxical negotiations among local norms, institutional practices, and collective knowledge that shaped — and continue to shape — marital imaginaries and gendered patterns in Chinese society. In doing so, it contributes to interdisciplinary conversations on the cultural politics of intimacy, the performative dimensions of cultural reform, and the enduring legacies of socialist cultural production.

This paper explores the complex roles of Chinese dialect-based clan associations in shaping local musical culture in Jonker Walk, Malacca. Located in the heart of a UNESCO World Heritage site, Jonker Walk’s history traces back to the "Guan Chang" (official depots) of Admiral Zheng He's voyages and served as a primary settlement for early Chinese migrants. Since the 18th century, these associations have enriched Malacca’s cultural landscape with diverse traditional Chinese music. In 2000, Jonker Walk was designated as a "Tourism and Culture Street," making Chinese performance the core of its tourism industry, bringing both new opportunities and challenges to these associations.

Based on four rounds of fieldwork conducted between February 2025 and February 2026, this research combines archival study with musical analysis to examine how these associations navigate the interactions between heritage conservation, tourism development, and commercialization. The analysis unfolds on two levels: first, the evolution of musical forms and performance types within the associations and their impact on the local soundscape; second, how the external context of commercialization and "heritagization" has prompted these groups to adapt and transform their musical presentations. By integrating ethnographic data with musical analysis, this study presents the strategic musical choices made by these diasporic communities as they negotiate their practices within a commercialized heritage context.

This paper investigates the historical formation and sociocultural positioning of blind musicians in China and Japan, challenging explanations that foreground sensory compensation in favor of a nuanced social perception of divinity—as well as functions of music that come along with that perception—as central to their musicality and musicianship. This study demonstrates that in East Asia, since at least the sixth century BCE in China and the eighth century CE in Japan, it was the belief in the sacred and supernatural attributes of the blind body that defined blind musicians’ social roles. Drawing on archival, textual, and ethnographic sources, I trace how visually impaired musicians—such as Shaanbei blind bards and Japanese biwa performers—have been alternately revered as ritual specialists with shamanic or Buddhist associations and stigmatized as beggars or socially marginal figures. Through a comparative lens informed by concepts of specialism, professionalism, and social status, this study reveals how perceptions of divinity shaped social understandings of blindness and embodied musical expertise in the two countries. This analysis extends to transformations in the twentieth century, including modernization, state intervention, and cultural heritage policies that recast blind musicians’ roles in nation-building and community preservation. By foregrounding the interplay of religious imaginaries, disability, and musical labor, the paper contributes to broader ethnomusicological conversations about historical and sociopolitical constructions of musicianship and disabilities.

Pittsburgh is a post-industrial city with a storied history of improvisation and creativity based in community venues. Tensions between echoes of this history, particularly from the decades following WWII, inform ever-developing living practices. As musical performer-organizers in this city we explore myriad ways improvisation functions as an axis for cultural memory. Our ethnomusicological approach reads across cultural geography, archive studies, black studies, psychological anthropology, and recent scholarship on jazz. Presenter 1 theorizes improvisation in Pittsburgh’s jazz scene as a community archive of venues; places where social pathways and possibilities cohered in iterative sonic practice during the 1950s and 1960s. Through the case of loft jazz collections, Presenter 2 describes how this community archive is inflected by the presence of university archives in the city’s improv ecology. Presenter 3 focuses on the naming of Roger Humphries Way to show how city-led initiatives memorializing jazz history create contradictory spatial narratives. Presenter 4 details how experiences and memories of participants at a free improv jam session are embodied and distributed in Pittsburgh’s DIY music scene. Across cases, improvisation positions urban change as a tension between grass-roots practices of placemaking and city-led development efforts. Due to the expansive literature on improvisation, we have created a reading list to focus our discussions of improvisation, archives, and urban landscapes. A few of these works include Living Space (Veal, 2024), Contingent Encounters (DiPiero, 2022), Abolition Geography (Gilmore 2022), The Next Shift (Winant, 2021), Loft Jazz (Heller, 2016), and The Archive and the Repertoire (Diana Taylor, 2003).

This panel examines how Kurdish music operates as a dynamic site for negotiating nationhood, memory, sacredness, and transnational belonging across temporal and digital landscapes. Bringing together four papers, the session explores how sound mediates relationships between past and present, life and death, sacred and profane, homeland and diaspora. The first paper analyzes remix practices that digitally recombine archival recordings of twentieth-century Kurdish musicians, demonstrating how cross-temporal collaborations between deceased icons and contemporary producers reimagine the Kurdish nation. The second paper shifts to Kurdish Jews in Israel, examining how digital performances of Chopi (Kurdish line dance) generate a “Digital Kurdistan,” a transnational sphere in which Kurdish identity is rearticulated across religious and geopolitical boundaries. The third paper investigates the online circulation of Yārsān sacred music, arguing that ritual efficacy and communal belonging are not diminished but reactivated through mediated interaction in digital spaces. The fourth paper focuses on a Kurdish anthem written in response to the Halabja massacre and later revived during the 2022 anti-government movement in Iran, showing how collective singing collapses temporal distance and sustains historical consciousness amid ongoing violence. Together, these papers illuminate how Kurdish musical practices challenge linear conceptions of time and fixed notions of territory. Through remix, ritual, digitality, and protest, Kurdish sound emerges as a medium of distributed agency, ethical continuity, and communal resilience. The panel contributes to broader debates in ethnomusicology by foregrounding music’s capacity to produce cross-temporal solidarities and digitally mediated forms of nationhood beyond the framework of the state.

Austronesian-speaking peoples spread across Taiwan, insular Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, and Madagascar, making the realm of the Austronesian language family “the largest in geographical extent before the European colonial expansion of the past five centuries,” as linguist Robert Blust pointed out (2019). While music is a prominent art form among Austronesian-speaking peoples, it has been largely overlooked in comparative studies of Austronesian cultures, and Austronesian music has never become a central subject of musicological inquiry. Under the framework of area studies, the musics of Austronesian-speaking peoples are often divided into Oceanic and Southeast Asian musics. Such a division downplays the diversity of musical traditions within Southeast Asia and Oceania and overlooks cultural and musical connections among Austronesian-speaking peoples across these regions. To address the limitations of the area studies framework, I coin the term Australism to refer to a pan-Austronesian framework that brings together research on Southeast Asian music and Oceanic music. Based on my studies of Taiwanese Indigenous chants, I propose a “PERC” model to examine how the components of “parallelism,” “exchange,” “ritual,” and “chant/dance” interrelate in manifesting Austronesian linguistic, musical, and cultural characteristics. I argue that this model may facilitate consideration of cultural connections among Austronesian-speaking peoples and bridge diverse case studies on Austronesian musics, thereby fostering and advancing Australism as an evolving academic discipline.

This paper explores how identity, resistance, and adaptation are negotiated through Indigenous Amis music and dance, historically shaped by a heterosexual binary ontology and increasingly reconfigured within postcolonial Taiwanese contexts and queer engagements with women’s agency. During the Japanese colonial period and under enduring Han Chinese patriarchal norms, maternal Amis traditions were transformed through political suppression, cultural assimilation, and religious conversion. A corollary of these processes was the shift in heritage transmission—language, surnames, land, and property—toward patrilineal inheritance, reinforcing male dominance and constraining women’s agency within contemporary Amis society.

Against this backdrop of gendered restructuring, the paper asks how women cultural bearers negotiate and reinterpret, or converge with and diverge from, dualistic gender values through music-making today. Drawing on Jodie Taylor’s concept of the “intimate insider” (2011), I reflect on friendships formed during fieldwork since 2019 in the Amis communities of Falangaw and Ciwkangan. These relationships reveal the complex role of (pro-)LGBTQ+ male allies—often influential in local music scenes—in facilitating women’s cultural participation and reshaping gendered musicking (Small, 1999) and performative spaces (Butler, 1990).

This analysis applies Indigenous feminist and decolonial frameworks to address Thomas R. Hilder’s call for deeper engagement with Indigenous feminism and cosmology (2016), while critically examining how musicking may intersect with nationalist identity protocols questioned by Roderick A. Ferguson (2004). Finally, I reflect on my positionality as a Han Chinese ethnomusicologist collaborating with younger Amis generations, foregrounding dialogic knowledge-making and avoiding appropriative representation (Robinson, 2020).

Building on earlier discussions of computational approaches to music analysis, recent developments in artificial intelligence invite renewed reflection on how technologies reshape listening and musical knowledge. Drawing on Thomas Porcello’s concept of techoustemology (2004), this study examines how AI-assisted analysis reconfigures modes of listening, analytical practice, and knowledge production in the study of historical recordings, taking Taiwanese Hakka shangezi folksongs from commercially published recordings of the 1960s as a case study. Using AI-assisted tools for vocal–instrument separation, pitch contour extraction, and phoneme-level alignment, the study conducts a detailed examination of singers’ pronunciation and melodic realization at the syllabic level. While shangezi performance is conventionally expected to adhere to a standardized Sixian-accented Hakka, close analysis reveals that individual singers frequently depart from such prescriptive linguistic norms. Variations in consonant and vowel articulation, as well as tonal realization, suggest a more fluid and multilingual vocal practice than the ideal of linguistic purity implies. Rather than presenting AI as a neutral analytical instrument, this study foregrounds how the technical requirements of segmentation and alignment intensify critical listening and detailed transcription. The analytical process does not automatically determine dialectal variation; instead, it creates conditions under which discrepancies between normative expectations and embodied performance become perceptible. AI-assisted analysis is thus proposed not as a replacement for ethnomusicological interpretation, but as a reflexive techoustemological method—one that recognizes technology as constitutive of how we hear, analyze, and understand historical performance practice.

In this paper, I discuss debates surrounding amplification of ritual dance musics, showing how amplification modifies sensibilities produced by dance. I focus on malikoda, a dance genre practiced by ‘amis / Pangcah, one of Taiwan’s 16 recognized Indigenous groups. During annual rituals, ‘amis communities organize the dance spiral along distinctions between hosts and guests, gender differences, and age grade precedence in ways that compel dancers to feel the endurance of ‘amis sovereignty as embedded in the age set system. Whether malikoda should be amplified is an open question. Debates about amplification often focus on ti’eciw, the call section of malikoda tunes. Generally, responsibility for ti’eciw mirrors age set precedence, with elders and other community leaders singing the call and passing this responsibility downward to younger groups. Amplification enables a single singer to lead incredibly large groups of dancers; combined with prerecorded tracks, it may even obviate human callers. In contrast, without amplification entire age sets may perform the call; and dancers must rely on kinaesthetic prompts to coordinate the dance, developing listening habits attuned to this kinaesthetic sense. Yet those on both sides of the amplification argument formed their arguments by linking aesthetic qualities of the dance to the dance’s social effects, including intra-age set rapport and inter-age set mobilization. Amplification restructures relationships among senses, attenuating some social effects while facilitating others. Moving beyond notions of technologies as offering specific affordances, I employ the metaphor of attenuation to consider relationships among technology, kinaesthetic sense, and sovereign sensibility.

Today, the West’s promise of liberal democracy subsists in a normalized state of crisis: disaster capitalism, privatized infrastructures, widened inequality, proxy wars, and profits flowing to political elites through the military-industrial complex. Within ethnomusicology, rethinking democracy, freedom, and liberation requires revisiting the Cold War paradigms that shaped the field’s epistemologies and methods. As the post-1945 Western capitalist world cast itself as postcolonial and modern—an age of independence, democracy, and development—ethnomusicological scholarship often aligned itself with this liberal project, privileging diversity, cultural difference, identity, and agency while sidelining political economy, division of labor, and socio-economic class.

This roundtable asks how ethnomusicology, as a listening praxis, cocreates shared pasts while also producing silences: forms of selective, institutionalized forgetting that shape the field’s present. Building on scholarship that has traced ethnomusicology’s entanglements with representation, geopolitics, and institutional power, we consider how materialist concerns were pushed to the margins and why they now return with renewed urgency at a moment when liberalism’s contradictions are impossible to ignore. The discussion centers on persistent questions of labor, ownership, collectivity, and emancipation. Four participants explore: contributive ethnomusicology and the possibilities and limits of participatory action-research in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas; the imperialism of the German Left and the impossibility of musical solidarity; popular front movements in Cuba and Haiti under U.S. occupation and post-occupation hegemony; and musical amateurism as a political project of popular emancipation under Eastern European state socialism. The session consists of four ten-minute position papers followed by a forty-five-minute moderated discussion with audience Q&A.

The concept of water, much like the river it materially constitutes, is impossible to step into the same way twice. Given the vast cultural scope of its material, political, and cosmological connections, any true “blue humanities” (a term coined by historian John Gillis) must scale from the subatomic through the oceanic, all the while navigating dialectics of overabundance and scarcity, immersion and erosion, hypernatremia and hyponatremia. It must grasp something that, in the esoteric language of Michel Serres (1997), is “inhabiting both banks [of the river] and haunting the middle where the two directions converge.” The participants will wade into the “blue humanities” from the banks of our own disciplinary experiences. We move from shore to depth with each successive paper and engage with a medium that suffuses ethnomusicology through symbolic capital, even as questions of its essence and agency often flow through the literature in the field without sufficient scrutiny. Specifically, we explore how references to the coastline in Jamaican roots reggae exhibit a mentality resonant with a holistic bioethical system; how electronic music can create immersive and empathetic spaces to listen through water; and how an oceanic channel that facilitates the apparatus of modern sonic surveillance also reinvigorates older, mythical conceptions of the mysterious hadopelagic deep. A discussant will help us frame a conversation about invigorating the quiddity in liquidity and sparking a dialogue toward what the contours of a “blue ethnomusicology” might resemble.

In his seminal work, “Cubano Be, Cubano Bop: One Hundred Years of Jazz in Cuba,” saxophonist and scholar Leonardo Acosta noted that Cuban musicians involved in “jazz” scenes on the island from the 1920s onwards were defined most of all by their versatility (versatilidad), in other words, by an ever-shifting aesthetic dexterity towards and bridging of classical art and experimental music; U.S. American, “Cuban” and “Latin” “jazz;” Cuban popular music and Afrocuban ritual genres; electronic music and synthesizers; and beyond. In this panel, we explore the consolidation of the idea of a “Cuban” “jazz” canon on the island beginning in the 1980s, addressing the foundational aesthetic porosity of many of its central figures and troubling the gendered and aesthetic mores of the label. Through an analysis of preeminent “Cuban jazz” legend Chucho Valdés, for example, we explore Valdés’s pre-Irakere experimentations with electronic synthesizers and his emplacement within a network of musicians and institutions that cultivated artistic experimentation, troubling his canonization as a ‘Cuban jazz’ artist and advocating for locating artists within the broader artistic contexts in which they circulate. Looking at contemporary “Cuban” “jazz” “pianist” David Virelles, we likewise explore how Virelles resists all three descriptors in a career bridging Cuba and its diaspora, engaging Virelles’s practices of critical archiving and imaginative, deconstructive play. Finally, we trace the rise of a generation of women instrumentalists and bandleaders from Cuba’s revolutionary art schools in the 21st century, excavating both their repetitions of and interventions into male-dominated mores of gender and genre.

This roundtable will provide a space to discuss resonances between ethnomusicology and music teaching and learning. Positioned at the intersection between these domains, the Education Section has long been interested in generating conversation about past, present, and future convergences between SEM and music education. Participants will reflect on the Education Section and their work in both informal and formal music teaching and learning; K-12, higher education, and life-long contexts. Participant one will review the history and ongoing activities of the SEM Education Section, highlighting its evolving mission, initiatives, and contributions to the field. Participant two will discuss the Education Section’s mission to promote “intercultural music education and instruction,” arguing that the future relationship between music education and ethnomusicology would benefit from centering musicality and pedagogies of musical traditions rather than a sole focus on the music itself. Participant three will consider Black girls as curriculum architects and knowledge producers, not merely subjects of culturally responsive music education. Centering Black social dance as embodied practice, their stance will cultivate relational intelligence attentive to interoceptive awareness and social-emotional learning. Participant four will ask how we can build curricular structures that make community music and folklife practices more accessible and sustainable while training students to engage music learning as collaborative, community-grounded practice. Participant five will expand these considerations into higher education, addressing the benefits and challenges of teaching ethnomusicology at the undergraduate level. All five participants will reflect on the ongoing relationship between ethnomusicology and music teaching and learning in our contemporary climate.

In the past two decades, scholars in “New Citizenship Studies” have developed an interdisciplinary vocabulary that takes on citizenship’s “violent histories and imaginative possibilities” in addressing the imbalances of socio-political status (Hydes & Spires, 2024). Concomitantly, musicologists have connected citizenship with audibility, noting music and sound’s centrality to questions of “listening in assembly” (Stokes, 2023). Building on this convergence, this panel examines how communities constitute themselves politically through listening, especially in territories that do not meet the standard criteria for nationhood. Voice, as a symbol of individual autonomy, vehicle for public discourse, and proxy for democratic representation, has long served as an analytical category within discourses on Euro-Western modernity. But in the Global South, where representative institutions have been historically foreclosed and human rights unevenly applied, listening emerges as an embodied and enacted political practice through which communities form against or despite a centralizing polis. The papers in this panel chart how listening practices and their everyday technologies structure political subjectivity across terrain marked by colonial violence. Taking Patrick Wolfe’s formulation of colonialism as a structure rather than an event, we combine historical and ethnographic methods to interrogate architectures of listening in three acoustemologies: the present-day Rohingya-language mediascape, Palestine’s system of media capitalism during the Great Revolt (1936–39), and discourses of gendered nationalism in Post-Imperial Egypt. We ask, what can listening reveal as an index of collective agency that, like voice, is grounded in particular cultural phenomenologies? And how might this reframe, or remap, understandings of sonic modernity?

This roundtable features five scholars presenting original research drawing upon social associations, affective meanings, symbolic inventories, and material economies of musical instrument construction in different regions of the African continent. Individual areas of study include the following: the feminine gendering of the inzad fiddle and tende drum among the Tuareg of Niger, and the subversion of mores by the internationally renowned interethnic group, Etran Finatawa; the materiality and politics of local scarcity and global visibility in the construction of the electric likembe (Bakongo lamellophone) and baguitare ya biso awa in contemporary Kinshasa, DRC; the postcolonial negotiation of meaning and intangible cultural heritage surrounding a collection of musical instruments gathered from the Mandé region of West Africa and currently held in New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art; the role of the individual and community memories of builders and players of the àgídìgbo (Yorùbá lamellophone), and how this dialogue articulates issues of physical and social infrastructures; and the sonic development of the abangala (Kunama chordophone of Eritrea) that is mutually constitutive with the ceremonial inscription upon and adornment of specific instruments as a musician progresses to mastery. For this roundtable, the panelists will contextualize their work within their analytical approaches in short presentations. The table will then expand to general discussion with a senior scholar acting as respondent, and then open to general discussion with attendees.

In most ethnomusicology graduate programs, current debates in philosophy of education tend to receive little to no attention. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the application of a new philosophy in the teaching of world music, a common responsibility of ethnomusicologists in higher education. While previous books (e.g. World Music Pedagogy, VII: Teaching World Music in Higher Education) offer helpful methods for collegiate world music instruction, the purpose of a philosophy text is to provide foundations that empower us to reconceptualize the meaning and ultimate purpose of instruction in this field, while illuminating new resources for sustained inspiration, thereby reducing professional “burnout”. The presenter’s twelfth book, co-authored with a Chinese ethnomusicologist (Routledge, 2026), is concerned with how music educators can respond to the array of novel challenges coming from generative AI, and serves as background for this paper. Our book applies a systems science approach to global philosophy of history by arguing how and why human narratives evolved in particular ways across time, which ultimately engenders a new perspective on musical meaning in relation to both personal identity and AI. This matters for ethnomusicologists teaching world music, particularly as the popularization of generative AI tools challenges us to reconsider what quality education entails and what we could hope world music students might learn to do and understand through our teaching. AI prompts us to rethink not only classroom activities and approaches to assessment, but also notions of creative originality, ownership, and music heritage, demanding a new educational philosophy.

As bone-rattling Dongba chants collided with jarring guitar distortions at Wacken Open Air 2023, Five Penalties' performance projected a public display of musical rebellion. The band infuses glottal vibrations and microtonal lamentations into distorted, aberrant riffs, openly subverting Eurocentric expectations of Chinese "folk" music and creating a powerful, eerily surreal clash of cultural contexts. Moreover, while dressed in bone-adorned Dongba attire, performing on an industrial stage surrounded by mosh pits, they strive to redefine cultural representation through a bohemian performance. This study explores how Five Penalties challenges and confronts both traditional approaches to cultural preservation, which emphasize "authenticity" in world music, and China’s state-driven "museumification" of ethnic cultures, which often reduces music to a static, archival form. By fusing metal’s transnational energy with Naxi heritage, the band disrupts dominant cultural narratives through an empirical, theoretical strategy of anti-essentialism-rejecting fixed, narrow definitions of "authenticity" to produce a more fluid, dynamic, and novel expression of culture. This study explores whether this hybridization promotes cultural agency or risks co-optation, using the genre’s perceived "foreignness" to defy cultural commodification. Through textual analysis of live recordings and ethnographic interviews, this paper illustrates how the band’s sonic practices confront the commodification of heritage, positioning their work as a decolonial act of cultural resistance. Five Penalties offers marginalized communities a dynamic model for preserving and reinterpreting heritage through music, actively resisting global homogenization. This case highlights music as a site of cultural reclamation, redefining heritage as an evolving, insurgent force rather than a static artifact.

This paper examines the evolution of The Wounded Hussar from its eighteenth-century origins to contemporary circulation in Irish traditional music, using the song and its air as a lens through which questions of transmission, authenticity, and performance practice are raised. Beginning with the Romantic-era poem and early instrumental settings, the study traces the processes through which text and melody were fixed in print, detached, recombined, and recontextualized. Particular attention is paid to collectors and revivalist mediators whose editorial decisions shaped the separation of air from text and subsequent privileging of instrumental transmission. Drawing on comparative analysis of twentieth-century performances and methodologies of Irish song scholarship (Williams and Ó Laoire 2011), the paper examines how musicians negotiate declamation, ornamentation, and variation in mimesis of an implied or remembered text. These analyses reveal the relationship between air and song to be neither stable nor hierarchical but rather continually renegotiated in performance. The revivalist assertion that airs form legitimacy from fidelity to song (Ó Riada 1982) is shown to function less as fact than ideological claim embedded within discourses of authenticity. By foregrounding multiformity and the politics of mediation (Caldwell 2025), the paper contributes to ethnomusicological discourse on the construction, authorization, and reproduction of tradition. It argues that slow air performance constitutes a critical site in which archival authority, aesthetic ideology, and individual agency intersect. In doing so, the study challenges essentialist narratives of continuity in Irish traditional music and advances a more historically contingent account of stylistic evolution and expressive authority.

This paper examines the role of magic in shaping gendered trajectories within the Huanchaco festival in Baños del Inca (Cajamarca), celebrated in honor of the Virgin of the Nativity (Cánepa Koch 1993, Martínez & Rodríguez 2014)). The ritual performance is organized around distinct dance groups: the chunchos (adult male dancers associated with Amazonian inhabitants), the pallas (young, unmarried women representing Inca maidens), and the incaicos, who are often schoolboys (Reichlen 1953). Although publicly framed as Catholic, the festival incorporates indigenous conceptions of magical efficacy.

Drawing on repeated field visits conducted over three consecutive years, I analyze how male dancers account for their withdrawal from performance. While pallas cease dancing upon marriage in accordance with norms of female chastity, and incaicos withdraw as the boys reach adulthood, chunchos often explain their discontinuation to having been harmed through magic. This belief also motivates protective practices undertaken privately by dancers and musicians in preparation for the festival or during the making of instruments.

I argue that magic operates as a discursive framework that externalizes masculine decline. Rather than interpreting bodily limitation as personal failure or social regulation, male withdrawal is attributed to occult aggression. Ritual masculinity is thus symbolically preserved even as participation becomes precarious.

The pollera has historically been a gendered, racialized clothing object in the Peruvian context. In its various situated designs, it has been associated with low-class, primarily rural, indigenous women, establishing a distinction between elite and grassroots women, and embroidering considerations of class, race/culture, and territory. Indeed, “pollera” could be understood as a “metonimic object” that names otherness derogatorily. Nevertheless, during Milena Warthon’s (MW) concerts, we can observe many girls wearing this traditional garment and singing her songs. MW is a singer who performs a genre that she calls the New Andean Pop. During her performances (in concerts, music videos, and social media), she wears polleras and sings about the struggles of the women and girls who wear them. I argue, echoing Silvia Citro’s understanding of performance, that MW’s performances are the convergence of poietic artistic objects that articulate social critiques with political goals. This happens through (sonic) political interruptions (Rancière) that invite her audience to hear an alternative discourse and therefore relate to the social life of this object in a different affective way, generating new aural affective commonalities (Ochoa-Gautier). If we consider the pollera as an object that represents an instituted hierarchy, MW’s performance uses the pollera as an instituting object. In other words, if the hierarchized pollera represents “politics,” the pollera that this artist wields expresses “the political. This ethnography aims to contribute to discussions concerning the intersections between aesthetics and politics as a means of creating alternative spaces for the political and the decolonization of feelings.

Performing in the Chinese New Year (CNY) celebrations of Lima, Peru is painful. The frenzied crowds push against us, and elderly women aggressively grab, and even rip at my clothing. After two years of fieldwork as a Chinese lion dancer, I have experienced firsthand the excitable atmospheres of this event, and the fervent crowd behaviors that accompany them. This paper is an examination of the atmospheres created by Peruvians around the CNY season in Lima, Peru—a perplexing fieldsite that despite having the most Chinese people in Latin America, has CNY events attended mostly by non-Chinese Peruvians.

Based on participant observation and atmosphere theory from Benjamin Anderson (2014) and Kathleen Stewart (2011), I theorize the performance of Chinese lion dance as a space around which a carnivalesque, mobile atmosphere forms. Like a planet with satellites in orbit, our traveling troupe has an atmosphere that moves (literally on wheels) and gravitates audiences towards and to move with it. However, because Peruvians invent traditions (Hobsbawm 2014), I argue that that atmosphere is effectively orientalist. As these atmospheres become more exaggerated, the barrio chino acts as a sort of amplifier whose orientalized facade fuels the audience’s fervor and emplaces lion dance into its musical topophilia (Bolderman 2020). Examining this phenomenon I ask: What kind of atmospheres does orientalism make possible, and how does performance intensify that desire? In doing so, I contribute to studies on Chinese diasporas in Latin America as well as affect and atmosphere theory in ethnomusicology.

This paper examines how Highland bagpipers in Texas construct individual and collective identities through participation in a diasporic heritage music practice. Drawing on qualitative survey data from pipers across the state and informed by scholarship on music and identity (Stokes 1994; Turino 2008; Frith 1996), it argues that piping functions not merely as musical performance but as a socially embedded process of elective cultural affiliation and self-fashioning. The analysis demonstrates that participants engage the Great Highland Bagpipe as a symbolically charged instrument through which belonging, authenticity, and personal transformation are negotiated, often independent of direct Scottish ancestry. While prior research has explored musical identity in diasporic and subcultural contexts, Highland piping in the American South remains underexamined. Findings show that pipers mobilize tradition, competition structures, and band participation to construct layered identities that are simultaneously heritage-oriented and locally situated. The study further reveals that musical self-concept and community participation operate in a recursive feedback loop, reinforcing commitment and social cohesion. These results contribute to ethnomusicological debates on elective ethnicity, participatory music-making, and the adaptive life of heritage traditions, suggesting that Highland piping in Texas represents a dynamic site where global symbols are recontextualized within regional cultural ecologies.

In the Northern California Bay Area, the band Terga creates a site for connection for several North African diasporic communities, most notably the sizable Amazigh diaspora, a broad term encompassing North African indigenous groups. Choosing most of their repertoire from traditional songs and the music of prominent North African artists, the band’s interpretations of these pieces both connect the members of the diaspora with the idea of home(land) and generate structures of cultural emplacement specific to this community. Scholars in ethnomusicology have located the idea of diasporic community maintenance within musical scenes (Fuarros 2013, Goli 2019) while Amazigh studies has primarily focused on the importance of linguistic, cultural, and legal recognition of the Amazigh people within North African countries. (El Guabli 2023, Lazhar 2017) Grounded in these fields, in this paper, I expand the discussion surrounding diasporic music communities to the context of indigenous groups outside of the United States (Shah 2010) and their patterns of movement in relation to the postcolony. (Mbembe 2001) Drawing on several months of fieldwork in the Bay Area, I situate Terga’s performances and performance practice within this framework to show the complex interplay between sites of cultural articulation in the creation of homelands (and the associated imaginaries) and the work inherent to establishing an Amazigh diasporic presence. Doing so, I trace my interlocutor’s modes of engagement to understand the work of recontextualizing the idea of self and homeland within the context of diaspora.

Recent demographic estimates suggest approximately 6,500 Brazilian residents in the state of Colorado. Within Brazilian diasporic communities in Colorado, many people engage actively in Brazilian social networks and transnational media to learn about cultural events and services and to create ties with other Brazilians. Some members of this diaspora have been especially active in promoting Brazilian cultural events along Colorado’s Front Range. Scholarship on Brazilians in the United States has focused largely on major metropolitan areas and coastal states. Consequently, the musical lives and community-building practices of Brazilians in the Mountain West have remained underexplored. I argue that, in many of these events, Brazilian music functions as a key medium for building ties and negotiating belonging in the United States. This paper investigates how Brazilian migrants in Colorado integrate Brazilian events into their daily lives and what functions this integration serves, as well as how these events become sites for experiencing and expressing saudade. It also traces the history of Brazilian communities along Colorado’s Front Range through Brazilian cultural organizations and their events. I treat saudade as a lens for understanding how these migrants negotiate community, belonging, and identity in Colorado. Focusing on the northern and central areas of Colorado’s Front Range, particularly Denver and Boulder, I examine Brazilian pop-up markets with live music, Carnival celebrations, and Brazilian music shows at the St. Julien Hotel through participant observation, interviews, and media analysis of social media, websites, and promotional materials from Brazilian cultural organizations in Colorado.

Worldwide, the architects of nationalist projects and the “burning souls” (Livingston 2014) of folk music revivals have long turned to imagined rural pasts as wellsprings of cultural authenticity. At Müzik Köyü (Music Village), a summer music seminar founded in 2017 in Türkiye, amateur and professional musicians alike derive belonging, emplacement, and meaning through music-making in various rural sites around the country while negotiating two seemingly opposed entities: the Turkish state on one hand, and anti-nationalist sentiments valuing pluralism and diversity on the other. Both positions uphold a phantasmic vision of rural Anatolia as the pure source of authentic folk music.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at Müzik Köyü in 2023 and 2024, this paper explores the experience of musicking through the lenses of the phantasm (Agamben 1993; Favero 2003; Girgis 2007), diasporic nostalgia (Boym 2001), and Alevi cosmology as it is expressed in the lyrics of various Alevi song forms frequently played at Müzik Köyü such as nefes (hymn; lit. breath), deyiş (lit. saying) and unattributed songs like “Heredîya.” The paper further examines how these Alevi musical-poetic forms articulate an affective orientation toward longing, non-arrival, and ongoing seeking. I argue that this orientation helps explain both the centrality of Alevi repertoire at Müzik Köyü and its broad resonance among participants of all backgrounds. More broadly, this paper situates music seminars within scholarship on nationalism, rural imaginaries, and folk music revivals, demonstrating how phantasmic yearnings continue to shape musical practice far beyond the Turkish context.

In the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the city of Tbilisi, Georgia, became a major migration hub for hundreds of thousands of Russians as they left their homeland. Drawn to the city’s reputation for beauty, free thought, and the arts, many young creatives decided to take up residence in the city, creating a rapidly evolving and wholly unique music scene. Among these were many members of the Russian Federation’s various ethnic minority groups, whose presence further contributedTbilisi’s diverse cultural and creative milieu. This paper explores the works of two of these musicians (one Buryat, one Circassian) as they grapple with the new realities of their lives in self-imposed exile. It builds on the author’s doctoral research and is derived from two years of ethnographic fieldwork (2023-2024) conducted in Tbilisi. Through a media-rich presentation accompanied with video documentation and theoretical visualizations, it provides an in-depth analysis of several of their individual works, allowing for a comparative study of how they adapt their respective folksongs to meet the challenges of their new context. While these two artists come from very different regions, lifestyles, religions, and political ideologies, the author demonstrates how both are grappling with the idea of folk heritage as something static (which keeps the artist rooted in a personally-meaningful past) and dynamic (which opens up new possibilities for the future and invites others to participate). These insights expand the wider ethnomusicological discussion of the interplay between innovation and tradition.

This lecture-demonstration examines the "instrumental cry" as a medium for translating the gendered affective power of the vajtim (Albanian women’s funeral lament) into the solo violin repertoire. In traditional Balkan mourning, the female voice serves as the primary vessel for communal grief, characterized by a sonic morphology of melodic sobbing, rhythmic gasping, and microtonal "breaking." This session argues that the violin, through its unique capacity for sustained tension and fluid pitch, does not merely imitate these vocal gestures but actively re-voices them in a new performative space. Through live demonstrations, I analyze how specific violin techniques—such as heavy-pressure bowing to mimic a constricted throat and downward portamenti to replicate the ritualized sigh—function as a form of "instrumental ethnography" that preserves the visceral emotional response of the original ritual. By performing transcriptions and improvisations based on rural fieldwork, I explore the ethical and aesthetic implications of moving a private, gender-segregated mourning tradition onto the public concert stage. This presentation challenges the boundaries of traditional organology by treating the violin as a secondary "female" voice capable of articulating collective trauma and memory. This work contributes to ethnomusicological discourse on affect, gendered performance, and the politics of grief, illustrating how the physical act of playing can archive ephemeral vocal gestures. The session concludes with a performance that bridges the gap between raw ritual and formal artistry, offering a sonic meditation on the resilience of Albanian mourning traditions.

Ethnomusicological scholarship has long emphasized the symbolic significance of musical instruments as icons of national identity and the evocative power of their sounds in shaping collective memory (Bates 2012; Dawe 2003; Doubleday 2008; Howard 2022; Rancier 2014). This panel brings together three case studies of the revival of musical instruments in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan to examine how material sounding objects become sites for negotiating history, identity, and cultural continuity in post-Soviet Central Asia. Engaging debates on musical nationalism, “invented traditions,” revival movements, and the materiality and agency of objects, the panel foregrounds the social lives and entanglements of revived instruments across shifting historical and sociopolitical contexts. The cases span stringed, wind, and signaling instruments whose traditions were disrupted or transformed during the late imperial and Soviet periods and are now being revitalized within new cultural and institutional frameworks. Revival unfolds in contexts of both socialist and postsocialist modernity, where heritage regimes, state cultural policies, and global cultural flows shape the meanings attributed to instruments. The papers explore how concepts of tradition and authenticity are negotiated in practice, and how instruments are reinterpreted as carriers of ancestral memory, living, sentient beings, and emblems of national heritage. Collectively, the panel demonstrates that instrument revival in Central Asia constitutes a creative reinvention of material sounding objects in the construction of national music cultures. By reimagining instruments as mediators between past and present, human and other-than-human realms, musicians and instrument makers construct new senses of cultural belonging and identity in contemporary social worlds.

Few if any technologies in the twenty-first century have so profoundly impacted the production of popular musics globally as Auto-Tune. From bedroom setups to Bollywood soundstages, digital pitch correction technologies have become part of everyday production practice and are taken for granted as a strategy of vocal mediation. However, pitch correction software and artists’ and engineers’ labor mediate the politics of embodied identities, historical lineages of local musical practice, and imaginaries of audiences in a globalized musical marketplace. Auto-Tune is a mobile, roving representation of the politics of vocal production in the twenty-first century, even as it carries its own material and political precedents. This roundtable emerges from an anthology-in-progress with interdisciplinary scholars who study pitch-mediation genealogies across cultural, industrial, and musical contexts. We ask: in which genres and traditions has Auto-Tune become a stylistic signifier, and which accepted modes of expression do these entail? How can a range of perspectives reveal Auto-Tune’s use as a mediator of vocal politics and affect? Panelists explore, in turn: Auto-Tune’s role in shaping French popular music, identity, and contemporary cultural politics; “saturation” metaphors for Auto-Tuned voices that originated in oil-sounding technologies, explored through Cape Verdean Mayra Andrade’s music videos and transoceanic collaborations; gendered geographies of Auto-Tune in Morocco’s global rap marketplace; the use of Auto-Tune live in American megachurches; technologies of cover-ups and orchestral support in India’s contemporary mainstream vocal music industries; and interviews with Puerto Rican producers who achieve international visibility by adopting Auto-Tune conventions while cultivating a distinctive Puerto Rican aesthetic.