This paper examines how sacred boundaries materially organize choral performance, gendered participation, and musical structure in the Celestial Church of Christ (CCC) Yemetu, Ibadan, Nigeria. While scholarship on African Indigenous Churches has emphasized theology, ritual symbolism, and institutional history, comparatively little attention has been given to how doctrinal regulations shape musical practice at the level of rehearsal, sound production, and ensemble coordination. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and musicological analysis, this study argues that sacred boundaries function as performance technologies that structure spatial arrangement, authority, vocal distribution, and liturgical sequencing. Regulations governing altar access, hierarchical rank, and menstrual purity directly influence leadership patterns, rehearsal planning, cantata execution, and harmonic balance. Rather than operating solely as constraints, these boundaries generate adaptive musical strategies, including flexible part redistribution, anticipatory rehearsal culture, and spatially negotiated ensemble interaction. Hymnody and liturgical flow further reinforce sacred order by sonically marking purity, hierarchy, and divine authority. Engaging theories of the sacred and profane alongside ethnomusicological approaches to music as social action, the paper demonstrates that sacred order in African Indigenous Christianity is not only believed or symbolized but acoustically produced and continually reproduced through choral practice. By foregrounding the intersection of gender, embodiment, and musical form, this study contributes to broader debates on religion, performance, and power while advancing a music-centered understanding of how ritual regulation becomes audible in lived worship.

The Omani state’s imperial expansion along the East African littoral in the nineteenth century secured Arab political and military dominance over the western edges of the Indian Ocean’s vast networks of trade in weapons, spices, and the enslaved. This expansion was conducted by Omani political and mercantile elites, who, from their coastal palaces, balanced South Asian investment capital, enslaved labor on new clove plantations, and Indian Ocean merchant networks with their own naval and military might. This paper traces this imperial expansion through the steps of a particular dance form—the Omani razḥa—which, I argue, was a crucial tool in the expansion of Omani hegemony. I show that the razḥa was the premier dance and social technology that accompanied Omani Arab sailors and soldiers as they cut a bloody wake down the Swahili coast, and, in the eyes of African locals, became a symbol of the Arab empire. Through documentary and ethnographic evidence, I argue that the Omani razḥa served as a model for several Swahili dance forms along the East African coast throughout the nineteenth century precisely due to its centrality to Omani political practice. As many scholars of East Africa have noted, East African societies have long adopted and reframed the images, sounds, and regalia of dominant groups, especially within competitive dance contexts. By putting dance at the center of historical and ethnomusicological analysis, I show how dance, especially but not exclusively war dances, can operate as a social practice of domination in the context of imperial expansion.

This paper presents a preliminary inquiry into Tulod-Damag, a mortuary rite practiced in Central Panay, Philippines. Grounded in the local knowledge system and cosmology, it examines how recurring sounds, ritual utterances, bodily gestures, and spatial movements structure the separation of the deceased from the world of the living. Drawing on ongoing fieldwork, interviews with practitioners, audio documentation, and analysis of ritual sequences, the study treats sound not merely as an expression of grief but as a performative medium through which mortuary transition is enacted and communally recognized. The analysis suggests that recurring sonic and embodied actions form flexible, cumulative cycles rather than strictly metrical patterns. Through repetition and intensification, these actions progressively mark separation, transition, and ritual closure. The paper further proposes that the relationship among sound, performativity, and mortuary passage may be explained by an emic concept rooted in local cultural knowledge. By foregrounding this culturally grounded category, the study contributes to ethnomusicological discussions of ritual sound, temporality, death, and social continuity.