ABSTRACT. Panel Abstract: Performing History: Sinophone communities in Australia and New Zealand

Sinophone communities in Australia and New Zealand share similar migration patterns and historical backgrounds with significant social flows dating from the mid-nineteenth-century gold rush era. With the discovery of gold, Australia experienced its highest number of Chinese arrivals in 1856, and New Zealand's goldrush followed about a decade later. When mining was no longer a viable occupation, Sinophone communities in both countries moved to new ventures, including market gardening, laundering and small business. Musical and cultural performances have played a crucial role in the lives of the diverse Sinophone communities in Australia and New Zealand. By exploring how individuals and communities enact, interpret and transmit historical narratives through diverse forms of performance, including rituals, festivals and cultural practices, this panel on poses the following key questions:

1. Which historical sources and events have been adopted and interpreted? 2. To what extent do these musical pasts inform contemporary performance practices, whether they are continuations or inventions? 3. What roles do these musical and cultural performances serve in bridging the relationships between Sinophone communities within and across cultures?

Case studies include (1) the significance of yangqin (dulcimer) in early Chinese communities in New Zealand and its role in the contemporary historical narrative of the nation's musical heritage within diasporic and colonial contexts; (2) the role of Chinese dragon and lion performances in unifying various Sinophone communities that immigrated to Australia across different historical eras into a collective historical discourse; (3) the incorporation of Antipodean historical events and stories is a crucial element for the creation of new compositions; and (4) while the Chinese and Australian musical pasts may have influenced some contemporary Australian-Chinese music creations, many new compositions transcend the notion of 'history,' embracing ambiguity and fostering meaningful exploration into the contemporary Australian-Chinese context and community.

Individual Abstract 1: Yangqin Narratives in New Zealand: Interpreting Musical Instruments in Archival Context

New Zealand’s Chinese music history reveals a vibrant context of music making throughout different stages of migration dating from the 1860s. Evidence of musical performances, whether within distinct Chinese communities or in locations that brought Chinese and non-Chinese together, regularly featured in regional newspapers, although written through the gaze of a European settler community. By far, the most prominent of such Chinese musicking in the latter half of the nineteenth century was within goldmining contexts. By the twentieth century, Chinese had diversified their occupations, and political associations started to thrive, sometimes including music ensembles as a key part of reinforcing cultural identity in the diasporic setting. Very few Chinese musical instruments have survived the different periods of Chinese migration to New Zealand. Around the country, several museums and archives have preserved some instruments, with many not having detailed information about provenance. This paper explores some of the key archives that have preserved Chinese musical instruments, focusing on the yangqin (dulcimer) as one such instrument that helps show some spheres of Chinese musicking. The aim of the paper is threefold, intersecting different narratives within a critical cultural framework: (1) to offer a detailed organological examination of several yangqin preserved in archive settings, covering physical form to provenance; (2) to discuss the presentation and representation of these instruments in the context of Chinese musicking in New Zealand; and (3) to reflect on methodological approaches in studying these instruments in terms of uncovering their history in New Zealand. Through this approach, New Zealand’s Chinese music history is better understood as a significant part of the nation's musicking within diasporic and colonial context.

Individual Abstract 2: Performing a Collective History: Chinese Dragon/Lion Performances and Sinophone Communities at the Bendigo Easter Fairs/Festivals

The Chinese processional performance, namely the dragon/lion dance, operatic costumes, regalia display, banners and lanterns, accompanied by the unique Chinese festive soundscape of percussive ensemble and firecrackers, has dominated the history of Sinophone communities in Australia in academic publications and collective memories of the communities. “Chinese participation” at the Bendigo Easter Festival is unique, not only because it is said to have the longest continuous history, recently celebrating the 150th anniversary, but the Chinese performances have also become the signature events of the festival. Using newspaper records, audio-visual documentation, archival documents, as well as informal interviews with team members from Bendigo, Darwin, Sydney, and Melbourne, this paper explores the rationales of guest performance teams making their journeys to join the event in Bendigo. The historical context, of teams affiliated with various regional Chinese or/and Sinophone associations/societies traveling intercity or interstate dating back to the early twentieth century, is first discussed. The paper further outlines the statistical data on the numbers of guest teams from different parts of Australia as well as their shows in Bendigo since 2000. Contextualising dragon and lion performances put up by the various local and visiting teams, the paper finally examines what it means individually and collectively to ensure that the “Chinese participation” at the Easter Fair can be continued and how this effort of travelling to Bendigo contributes to members’ own understandings and practices of the performances they engage in. Finally, the paper argues that while these teams may seem to be a collective presentation of Australian Chinese dragon and lion performances, internally – instead of a unified identify formation – these teams from various Sinophone communities are performing a shared historical consciousness informed and reinforced by early records, stories, and museum collections.

Individual Abstract 3: "The Bone Feeder” and “The Inner Chamber”: Honouring the Ancestors through Contemporary Art Music in Australia and New Zealand

In 1902, the SS Ventnor, carrying the bones and coffins of 499 Chinese gold miners, sank off the coast of the Hokianga harbour, New Zealand. Local iwi (tribes) collected the remains that washed ashore and continue to guard them to the present day. While the miners did not wish to be buried in a foreign land, a significant number produced offspring with local Māori and European settlers. This unique historical legacy is explored in Renee Liang’s The Bone Feeder (2017), a contemporary opera commissioned by Auckland Arts Festival and co-presented by New Zealand Opera. Composer Gareth Farr conducted extensive research to create a score performed by James Webster (taonga pūoro), members of New Zealand Trio, Julian Wong (dizi), myself (erhu) and a specially selected cast singing in Māori, English, and Cantonese. In this paper, I discuss certain factors that led to the success of the production, comparing it with an Australian historically-informed work, The Inner Chamber (2018). This multi-platform piece was inspired by Australian and New Zealander service men and women of Chinese heritage (colloquially known as the ‘Chinese ANZACs’) who struggled against the social attitudes of the day, which branded them as foreign and unfit to serve in both World Wars. The work was commissioned by the Sydney Sacred Music Festival and scored for voice, cello and huqin (bowed fiddle) ensemble. Its historical aspects, as well as the musical inspiration drawn from The Last Post, the Requiem Mass ‘Introit’ and the World War I ‘Trent cello’, are featured in the ABC TV and iView documentary Divine Rhythms (2018). In my analysis, I compare the creative processes involved in the production of these two works, highlighting the complex interplay between agency and identity in the performance of marginalised imagined histories within and beyond their respective Sinophone communities.

Individual Abstract 4: Sounding the Pipa: Contemporary Australian-Chinese Music in “Such Music”

Studies on newly composed works of Australian art music featuring Chinese musical instruments have long been focused on composers' perspectives. In contrast, in recent studies, the scopes and perspectives have broadened. On the one hand, due to generational teachings, cultural and identity affiliations of individuals, as well as social, political, musical beliefs, and economic shifts within the Australian-Chinese music community, the current generations of composers have moved away from the "composition-centered" approach and understanding. On the other hand, performers' creative input is now being given serious consideration. They have newfound autonomy to embrace multiple musical traditions and cultural roots within today’s diverse contemporary Australian-Chinese music scene. As active agents in the complex creative musical processes, these musicians contribute to transformation to varying extents, shaping not only their individual musical identities but also fostering a sense of belonging within their engaged communities. For examples, in the context of contemporary pipa music in Australia, composer Alex Chilvers's creation of the Tang Suite for The Bark Tin Band in 2023/2024 marked a significant departure in his composing practice, inspired by the historical Dunhuang pipa manuscript. As a Sydney-based pipa performing scholar, I have actively initiated and participated the creation of over 30 new compositions involving the pipa, with a focus on premiering the majority of the works, including the aforementioned Tang Suite. Through online interviews with composers, musical and conversational exchanges with musicians, my personal reflection and observation, and musical analysis of compositional processes, as well as textual interpretation on written sources, this paper seeks to uncover the complexities of creating and disseminating new works, embracing ambiguity, and fostering meaningful exploration.

ABSTRACT. The catastrophic Black Summer fires on the east coast of Australia in late 2019/early 2020 overwhelmed a proposed dance study of place. Originally, the intended choreographic exploration was to be a response to my participation in the Bundian Way Arts Exchange, a series of cross-cultural workshops exploring relationships between people and place on the far south coast of New South Wales. The fires significantly changed both my anticipated experience of the arts exchange and my response. The COVID-19 pandemic heightened the challenges.

The resulting choreography in October 2020, entitled Pathway, was an exploration that was therefore influenced by the circumstances of 2020 that included but went beyond the Bundian Way Arts Exchange. The fires compelled a framing of the work that was both personal and political. The response also needed to navigate the dislocated experience of the arts exchange due to pandemic restrictions. My then working environment in deep history further grounded the choreographic response. Pathway was ultimately shaped by the contexts of place, climate change, colonial history and deep time. Loss, grief and hope informed its conception.

Pathway was a solo work, although I generally dance with Somebody’s Aunt Dance Ensemble. Our choreographic practice includes site-specific contemporary improvisation based in eco-somatic awareness; creating works that respond to the environment, to nature, to place, in order to “engage with life on the inside of the webs and patterns of connection” (Rose 2013). Our almost twenty-year practice has included workshops and collaborations with other choreographers with similar ecochoreological preoccupations, including Elizabeth Cameron Dalman and the Australian Dance Party. This paper therefore intends to prompt considerations relevant to the practice of ecochoreology, drawing on ethnochoreology within the specific contexts of catastrophe, ecology, and history.

ABSTRACT. Research such as that of Alan Harvey emphasises the connection between musical engagement and the health and well-being of human society, including in its potential to foster social cohesion, facilitate trust building, and regulate emotions in response to societal crises. This paper considers these potentials of music in the context of the climate crisis. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork which explored the lived experiences and perspectives of musicians in Melbourne, including members of a local support group for climate-concerned musicians and singer-songwriters. In looking at the ways in which these people deploy music in their engagement with climate issues, I explore how music may serve as an empathetic resource for grappling with difficult emotional reactions to the climate crisis, highlighting their focus on community and solidarity building. I consider music-making as a social act of communication which can provide important opportunities for individuals to make connections and to give and receive emotional ‘uptake’ (Frye, 1983). In doing so, I respond to calls for further engagement with environmental emotions, arguing that music should not be overlooked as a potential resource for creating safe, accessible spaces to explore and cope with these emotions while connecting with community and place, tasks which may become increasingly important as we navigate an uncertain future. Understanding how and why musicians in Melbourne are harnessing the communal power of music at this particular moment in time reveals important insights into music’s entanglement with climate and contributes to moving ideas forward in existing ethnomusicological and anthropological research around the function of music in the context of the climate crisis.

ABSTRACT. After the Yugoslav wars of the nineties that burst from the ethnic conflicts between the former constituent republics of SFRY fueled by the political elites that denied interethnic cultural and otherwise similarities of Yugoslav people (Pettan 1996), newly formed successor states were faced with the refugee crises, as many people were forced to leave the multiethnic places of their origin. Serbs from Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina who poured into Serbia as refugees, formed the communities safeguarding the local traditional music and dance heritage of their lost homes, often agglomerating the folk traditions of several separate regions from which they came (Jovanović 2005). Almost three decades after and facing many challenges along the way, some of these institutions maintain the ‘old traditions’, while also belonging to Serbian revivalist traditional music scene. This paper will present a case study of the female singing group of the KUD “Krajina”, established in Belgrade in 1996, at the moment comprised of the first and second-generation young ethnic Serbian women of Croatian and Bosnian origin. The group carries further the old and recognizable village song repertoire and the style of performance, while on the other hand, it also embraces the influence of new aesthetic, stylistic and ideological demands stemming from the contemporary approaches to traditional music: its public practice sways between the longing for the “old homeland” and generation-specific modes of musicking and identity presenting. Thus, the group’s work might be seen as both materializing the reflexive nostalgia (Boym 2007), but also as translating the complex experiences and multiple cultural identities of Serbs as former refugees to the wider Serbian society, in an interstice between different generational and musical attitudes, the sonic and affective materialization and imagining of a ‘lost space’ and new sociocultural spaces, as “practiced places” (Certeau 1984) of disruptive continuities.

ABSTRACT. Among the lumad (natives) found in the southern part of the Philippines called Mansaka, their expressions are embodiments of life cycle involving birth, courtship, wedding and harvest, death/after life, and back to birth. Such expressions in the cycle are not simply repeated events but have deep resonances in structure and eventual application, a creative practice that challenges a “musical translation”. Through the rigors of field research and participant observation, I reflect on the cycle as a reservoir for a phenomenological understanding, looking deeply into the practitioners’ daily “structuration” of community life and how this parallels with their “established music structure” on gongs and bamboo playing. In my discussion, I present the challenges of musical translations and with these, the recordings of orchestral performances to exhibit points made in the process of forming a found world of indigenous expressions, which I titled as “Padayag (“expression”). This composition is scored for large orchestra piece interweaving colors of western and Philippines indigenous instruments.

ABSTRACT. Tchaikovsky was a Russian composer with high international reputation in the second half of the 19th century. Since the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Russia in the 20th century, his works have been widely circulated in China as a typical representative of Russian music. Chinese musicologists, influenced by the ideology of "nationalism" in the 19th century, often focus on the national character in Tchaikovsky's musical composition, but lack of research on the approach uniqueness of national characteristics in his music. Influence by new musicology of the west, Chinese musicologists adopt multiple approaches in analying and interpreting Tchaikovsky's works. So, how do Chinese musicologists understand the nationality in Tchaikovsky's music from the perspective of new musicology since the mid of 20th century? How does this nationality differ from the general perspective of 19th century nationalism? This paper attempts to discuss these questions from the discipline of the history of music science in China. This study relies on literature review and analysis, archival research to sort out the historical context of the acceptance of nationality issues in Tchaikovsky's music in the Chinese musicology community, aiming to present the research results and differences of this topic in different historical periods.

ABSTRACT. In this paper I will enquire how sama mehfils (music assemblies) in Sufi shrine spaces across North India and Uttar Pradesh become possible sites for cultural mingling and inclusion in the context of rising Islamophobia. I identify such spaces that enable cultural synergy as jagahein joh jodti hain (‘places which unify’). This contradicts the governing logic of Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) - Hindutva Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is popularly addressed as the todne waali party (‘party which breaks or dismantles’) referring to their divisive communal politics. The inauguration of the Ram temple in Ayodhya by the RSS - BJP on 22 January 2024 was a defining moment in this divisive politics and unprecedented in multiple ways. Firstly, it signaled the transformation of a democracy into a theocracy, wherein Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of a “sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic” participated and led a ritual aligned with a particular religious and ideological thought. Secondly, the consecration ceremony heralded amrit kaal (‘pure time’) and ram rajya (‘pure space’) for the sanatanis, or followers of sanatan dharma, an eternal religion. This “imagined community” (Anderson, 1983) of sanatanis, are considered as the principal claimants and rightful occupants of this pure land. Everyone else, especially Muslims are seen as antithetical to this system of Hindu purity and belonging. The construction of “pure space” in “pure time” coincides with the destruction, demolition and vandalisation of real, tangible and historical spaces of religious acculturation, integration, and co-mingling, bringing musical processes which unite into confrontation with processes which break and foster hate.

ABSTRACT. In Deaf culture, music is roughly understood in a twofold manner: First, hearing music that d/Deaf people (The word “Deaf” with upper case “D” refers to deaf people who see themselves as a linguistic and cultural minority and as members of Deaf community) can perceive through tactile senses or with the help of hearing aids. Second, art forms of sign language that are considered as “visual music” or “eye music” in Deaf community, performed only visually and independently of hearing music. Signed songs that Berlin Sign Choir (re)compose and perform belong to the latter type of “music” and are primarily intended for Deaf audiences. Berlin Sign Choir was established 1999 and consists of five Deaf and three hearing members (as of 2024). This choir was/is always led by a Deaf person and the communication among the members takes place only in DGS (German Sign Language, which was legally recognized in 2002). The sign choir mainly performs in worship services due to its church attachment and partly in other occasions, especially at events that emphasize (political) issues such as inclusion or diversity in the society. How do they sing together? What does their singing voice look like? As a member of Berlin Sign Choir myself since 2017, I want to talk about signed songs that are either originally composed in/for sign language or translated versions of songs from hearing culture, our joint composition and rehearsal process.

ABSTRACT. The tiny island of Bali has a rich, dynamic culture that is intimately linked to its environment, and over more than a millennia rituals and ceremonies involving gamelan music and dance have been essential to this connection. However, things started to change during the early 20th century on the back of colonization with the introduction of tourism: an industry that has been exponentially increasing to this day. Over the past two decades, there has been marked overdevelopment and environmental degradation particularly in the tourism areas focused on the densely populated south. The attraction of the tourist dollar as well as supposedly better welfare prospects in this part of Bali has led to a mass exodus of young people out of the villages.

Directed by Agung Yudha and co-produced by Mekar Bhuana and BPNB Bali (a government body responsible for identifying cultural heritage that needs preservation), this documentary short entitled 'Nyejerang Swara' (Bringing Sounds to the Surface) features an extremely rare type of Selonding gamelan tradition in East Bali dating back more than 800 years that has been negatively affected by such issues.

The film zeroes in on the environmental and social issues threatening the very existence of the ancient music performed on this sacred ensemble essential to agricultural rituals that have little relevance to the younger generation. As there is only one living musician from the hereditary line who may perform the repertoire, gamelan researcher and longtime Bali resident Vaughan Hatch investigates potential solutions: including regeneration of musicians, production of a duplicate set for practice, as well as repatriation of archival materials from overseas.

This first-time collaboration between Mekar Bhuana and the Indonesian government serves to expose a critically endangered art-form to the public in Bali and overseas – both to create awareness as well as generate financial support.

ABSTRACT. What is the role of tertiary education in training the indigenous dance professionals of tomorrow? To address this questions, the Dancing Ocean project has brought together four institutions, in four different locations in the Pacific, to collaborate on a short film and explore and share indigenous pedagogical approaches to creativity and performance. Brought together through UNESCO’s Chair in Dance and Social Inclusion, each of these insitutions has a key responsibility to educate the next generation of indigenous dance teachers within their regions: Vou, in Nadi, Fiji the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies and University of Papua New Guinea, in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea The National Aboriginal and Islander Skills Development Association, or NAISDA, in Darkinjung land, Australia, and Waipapa Taumata Rei University of Auckland Ngā Akoranga Kanikani Dance Studies Programme, in Tāmakei Makarau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. Through a trans-indigenous, multi-modal polylogue across the Pacific, this film reflects on diverse educational histories and re-imagines complex educational futures. In doing so, it presents an opportunity to contribute meaningful and valuable knowledge on how dance education can support indigenous students and indigenous communities. This contributes to the critical review and development of educational outcomes, curriculum and pedagogies in ways that might respond to the needs of indigenous students and their future professional contributions to, in and with indigenous communities.

ABSTRACT. In the Applied Ethnomusicology project “Learning from Ethnomusicology and Our Neighbors: Musical Heritage, Creativity, and Intercultural Engagement” supported the Volkswagen Foundation, we aim to educate the dominant culture about diverse cultural expressions in small-town Germany, to counter stereotypes about post-migrant cultures, and to assist under-acknowledged artists in networking, transmitting their heritage, and sharing their stories and creativity. The resulting film The Music of Our Neighbors features six portraits of artists who make their lives in and around Würzburg, a conservative-leaning provincial city known for its wine festivals and local Franconian identity. Franconian accordionist Bernd uses folk music to connect with dancers, the elderly, and hospitalized youth. André teaches African drumming and gives benefit concerts for a school in his former hometown Kinshasa. German-born software engineer Elizabeth dances Kathak and Bollywood to de-stress and pass on her Indian heritage to children. The Bolivian-Ecuadorian-German family Rosenbaum build community with their Spanish-speaking and German neighbors through Andean folklore. Syrian-German rapper Niro integrates Arabic influences into his German-language rap and teaches hip-hop to German and migrant youth. Guitarist Rob journeyed from Metís community music in Canada to rock, EDM, and flamenco, collaborating with his Spanish-German wife Mercedes in teaching and organizing flamenco events. Their combined experiences provide insights into the intercultural struggles (racism, cultural policing) and joys (interpersonal connections) that characterize the increasing diversity of provincial Europe today. We aim to contribute to work on music and migration (Stokes 2021), cityscapes (Finnegan 2007), Applied Ethnomusicology (Pettan and Titon 2015), and Audiovisual Ethnomusicology (Norton 2021).

ABSTRACT. The ethnographic documentary 'Hopa lide' concerns Romani music making in Slovakia. Based on a decade of dedicated ethnographic research, the author intimately portrays the lives of Romani musicians, unveiling the complexities of their experience and presenting nuanced views to challenge prevailing stereotypes about Roma. 'Hopa lide' is a collaborative documentary committed to authentic representation, one in which Romani musicians become directors of the music videos they have longed for opportunity to make. This unique methodology empowers the musicians and leaves them in charge of their representation in the film.

The ever-roving (and ever-improvising) camera joins the musicians as they move from large venue spotlights to intimate backstages, capturing a mixture of wit, mundane struggle and unfulfilled dreams. Through the musicians’ stories, various anthropological questions emerge. How does Romani music making function as a way of making a living? What role does it play in an individual’s self-fulfillment? And in what way does Romani musicianship reflect the current situation of Roma – this underprivileged ethnic minority who are continually stereotyped as natural musicians? 'Hopa lide' inspires discussions about contemporary trends in filmmaking and the broader implications of visual-ethnographic practice – especially its participatory aspects and participants’ agency in representation. 'Hopa lide' also makes a significant scholarly contribution, capturing the vibrancy of contemporary Romani music-making.

ABSTRACT. Music and displacement are often discussed in terms of how musical traditions are kept alive and/or how they grow, change, and take on new meanings as their bearers carry them into new contexts. Yet what happens when the bearer’s relationship to the musical tradition becomes contested neither because of a new context nor because of a lack of access and community to perpetuate it, but because of the very circumstances under which they became displaced? What happens when the music they had considered theirs suddenly becomes inextricably linked with their oppressor? Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 and the ensuing and ongoing war has displaced thousands of people, among them many classical musicians whose musical identity was firmly rooted in the romantic period. This paper discusses the nuances of this musical relationship, based on conversations with young Ukrainian pianists who, after fleeing the war in Ukraine, have continued their studies at the conservatory in Lucerne Switzerland. From internal struggles with shame over musical decisions, to a reframing of the repertoire, to an outright rejection of works by Russian composers, their musical responses and choices are highly individual, but all deeply political in nature. I explore how their displacement and the ongoing war has impacted their personal and professional lives and consider what it means for a musical repertoire to suddenly and drastically take on new meaning that places musicians’ musical and social identities at odds with each other.

ABSTRACT. The object of this paper, "The Mighty Dnipro Roars and Bellows" (ukr. "Reve ta stohne Dnipr shyrokyy"), is one of the most famous compositions written ca. 1837 by Taras Shevchenko – the poet and the champion of Ukrainian nation and its independence, and led to music by composer Danylo Kryzhanivskyy in 1886. For a long time, and especially during the Soviet time, this song was considered to be an unofficial anthem for the patriotic circles of Ukrainians who were striving for the independence of Ukraine. This presentation, which came to fruition on the basis of my discovery of the song "The Mighty Dnipro Roars and Bellows" performed by a Ukrainian soldier from WWI POW German camp in the sound recordings collection of the Prussian Phonographic Commission during the summer of 2022 at the Berlin Phonogram Archive, as well as my analysis of the various interpretations of the song during 136 years of its existence (including its newest folk interpretation which brought the victory to the young vocalist and folklorist Maria Kvitka at the Ukrainian version of the program "The Voice" (ukr. "Holos Krayiny") at the time of the full-scale invasion in 2022), is aimed at discussing the meaning and role the song has played and continues to play throughout the different stages of Ukrainians’ struggle for their freedom and sovereignty. The paper also stresses the key function of the song "The Mighty Dnipro Roars and Bellows" that is its ability to embody the strength and unbreakable spirit of Ukrainians whether their displacement being in the tenets of prisoner-of war camp, living the Soviet realities or during the large-scale war, and to (re)connect the generations even more than a hundred years apart from each other in their ability to survive and continue to resist.

ABSTRACT. The ongoing Russia´s war on Ukraine has forced approximately 6 million Ukrainians to relocate to other European countries, with over half a million seeking refuge in countries outside of Europe. The fact of relocation led to profound disruptions in their lives and livelihoods. Amidst the turmoil, music has emerged as a vital source of solace, identity, and resilience for displaced individuals and those living in occupied territories. Around a million and 200 thousand Ukrainians remain on the territories temporarily occupied by Russia. Here, they often employ music as a means to demonstrate resistance, protest, and belief in homecoming and de-occupation. This study aims to investigate the significance of music in the lives of displaced Ukrainians, particularly focusing on their intense activities and involvement in Ukrainian music-making and listening as they navigate through displacement. It uses examples of different Ukrainian refugee communities in Europe and Canada and a case of a pro-Ukrainian women’s underground partisan movement that is active in Crimea and Donbas. Research Objectives: 1. To examine how displaced Ukrainians utilize music as a means of coping with the trauma of relocation 2. To explore the ways in which music and dance traditions serve as a form of cultural preservation and resistance, fostering a sense of continuity and belonging amidst displacement. 3. To investigate how displaced individuals and communities (re)connect with their cultural heritage and identity through music practices despite being physically displaced from their homeland. 4. To study how Ukrainians living in the territories occupied by Russia employ music to express protest, resistance, and trust in deoccupation and homecoming.

This research employs qualitative methods, including in-depth interviews and participant observation and analysis of media items. Understanding the role of music in the given contexts can provide valuable insights into the psychological, social, and cultural dimensions of displacement and occupation.

ABSTRACT. George Orwell astutely observed in 1940, "All art is propaganda, but not all propaganda is art." Our tumultuous era has witnessed the emergence of new musical genres: protest songs and songs of support. This presentation delves into how political conflicts influence the birth of these new music genres, where art and propaganda intersect. It aims to fill a scholarly gap by examining the potent role of music amidst contemporary conflicts in areas such as Ukraine, Palestine, and Afghanistan. In these regions, music serves as both a reflection of societal upheaval and a tool for shaping public opinion. By exploring the intersection of popular music and propaganda and the evolution of new songs and groups with distinctive repertoires, we can illustrate the dynamic relationship between music and power in today's world. From anthems of resistance to rallying cries for solidarity, music has become a powerful force in shaping narratives and mobilising populations. Through case studies and comparative analysis, this research elucidates how music both reflects and influences the socio-political landscape, providing insights into the complex interplay between culture, ideology, and power dynamics.

ABSTRACT. Although the organ frequently occupies a prominent place in an acoustic space, the player of the instrument is often barely visible. In this special concert and listening situation, questions are raised regarding certain (missed) expressive-visual opportunities. It is from this awareness that the idea of "Music-projected moving bodies" is created. Inspired by Embodied Music Cognition’s theoretical framework, the notion of the human body as a link between music and mind is expanded to the one of the dancer’s body as a mediator in the performer-audience communication as well as performer-performance awareness. In this case study, we explore the interdisciplinary process of creation of a multimodal performance. Through various steps of analysis and translation, the organist’s physical movements and performative experiences, as well as the more abstract gestures implied by the musical score, are “embodied” in a dance choreography. In return, the embodied knowledge of the dancer is discussed as a source of inspiration on top of the “historically informed musicking”, helping the organist access their embodied experience of the music as well as solving technical and expressive issues related to time (timing, articulation, touch) and space (projecting and reflecting sounds).

ABSTRACT. The intimate connection, interdependence and dialogue between sound and movement is ubiquitous in all African traditional performances that involve music and dance (Nannyonga-Tamusuza, 2015). “African performance is a highly wrapped bundle of arts that are sometimes difficult to separate, even for analysis. Singing, playing instruments, dancing, masquerading and dramatizing are part of a conceptual package that many Africans think of as one and the same” (Stone, 1998). Music and dance in imbalu circumcision rituals are so intertwined, each forming an integral part to the whole. The integrative nature of imbalu, music and dance, makes it impossible to distinguish between these components (Makwa, 2010). It is so intertwined that it's difficult to determine with any certainty which one is affecting the other (Kaemmer, 1993). The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how music and dance are closely intertwined within the performance contexts of imbalu circumcision rituals and how the duo are part and parcel of the imbalu circumcision rituals of the Bagisu of eastern Uganda. The paper presentation will demonstrate how the sonic elements of music and visual structures of the dance work together to create a composite rhythmically interdependent and dialogic performance. The drums and singers dictate what motifs dancers should dance, and sometimes the dancers may also suggest to musicians which kind of music they should play on drums or sing during the performance. In the presentation I will use both staff notation and labanotation, and also video to articulate the close connection between the two artforms.

ABSTRACT. Nangiarkoothu, a solo woman classical Sanskrit performance tradition in Kerala, South India, is widely considered as the only existent model of the earliest “classical” dance-drama tradition performed by women not just in India but elsewhere in the world. Historically, its performers were from the performer caste known as Nangiars and the audience mainly consisted of upper-caste Hindus and the performance was conducted inside the temple-centred koothambalam (temple-theatre) where non-caste Hindus or non-Hindus were denied entry. While faith-based segregations still exist, State support and UNESCO’s bequeathing of the ICH title has helped the art form to come out of the temple’s sacred architectural boundaries to the larger secular outside, and to travel and gain wide recognition both nationally and internationally. Yet, its practitioners and historians seem to maintain a ritualistic past, bestowed sacred status, and protocols of prohibitions as the status quo for the purpose of heritage market where interestingly, tourism is lampooned. Today, it is considered as if, while previously the worshipper had to go to the temple to watch the ritualistic performance, the ritual space now comes to him/her through the human body. This paper tries to map the political and historical alterations and ironies that went into the creation of a sacred body which is very different from the social and performance reality of the art form.

ABSTRACT. The Gjama – Men’s Lamentation- ritual, practiced by the Catholic Albanian Highlanders of eastern Montenegro and northern Albania, represents a potent cultural expression of male mourning during funeral ceremonies. Gjama, rich in tradition, encapsulates profound communal grief articulated through choreographed movements and vocal lamentations. It embodies the dual essence of catastrophic loss and the glorification of the deceased’s legacy, uniquely performed by men through a combination of vocal and physical expressions.

Gjama serves as a profound communal passage between the living and the deceased, integrating vocal and narrative storytelling with traditional eulogy, thereby enriching the communal mourning process. This ritual not only features gestural articulations and expressive body movements, such as chest pounding and facial scratching synchronized with collective sighs but also includes a poignant narrative element that celebrates the life and deeds of the deceased. The ritual begins and ends with the mournful exclamation, "i mjeri unë për ty," or "Woe unto me," encapsulating a deep emotional engagement with the audience and the spirit of the deceased.

The Gjama transcends mere lamentation; it is a choreographed performance that intertwines sound and movement in a rhythmic harmony, potentially categorizing it as a ritual dance. Therefore, this study aims to explore how these elements of sound and embodied performance articulate a narrative of grief and remembrance, positioning Gjama as a culturally significant dance and vocal form.

By analyzing both literature sources and field observations, including video recordings, this paper will investigate the multifaceted nature of Gjama—both as a narrative-driven rite of passage and as a symbolic dance form—to contribute to our understanding of embodied practices in cultural expressions of mourning.

ABSTRACT. In the art of Guqin performance, finger techniques constitute a vital element of tradition with a long history tracing back to the early Han Dynasty (around 202BC-220AD). This study takes the auditory perception as a starting point and presents the first analysis of over ten thousand samples of single-note finger techniques on the Guqin, each recorded at 192Hz/24Bit performed by myself and recorded by a Team of NExT Studios. Through systematic categorization, it is revealed that the finger gestures in the "sound" can be considered as pre-attack actions (subsequently named "Hidden Virtues"). These actions represent the sonic states between the body's exertion and the stimulation of the Guqin strings. The detailed acoustic characteristics of Hidden Virtues reflect the performer's habitual finger movements and their understanding and interpretation of the music. The samples of finger techniques can be categorized into four classes with eight different forms of Hidden Virtues. Due to variations in individual finger features, different performers exhibit corresponding variations in the type of Hidden Virtues. Therefore, summarizing the types of Hidden Virtues can serve as an essential dimension for understanding the performer's style and even the style of a particular school of Guqin music. As Hidden Virtues is based on auditory assessment for the integrity of the "sound"， it can be considered as a valuable complement to the acoustic technical definition of Guqin music. Additionally, this paper proposes a visualization analysis method of the body-sound relationship, which holds significance in understanding the generation process of Hidden Virtues and contributes a new perspective and dimension to the interpretation and performance practices of Guqin music. Through detailed observation and analysis of finger movements, this study offers a fresh perspective and dimension for the interpretation of traditional literature and practical performance in Guqin music.

ABSTRACT. Humans, through musical mimicry, have since expressed their deep relationship with the natural environment. Among the Panay Bukidnon, an indigenous cultural community in Central Panay Island in the Philippines, this relationship is evident in the performance of an extant instrument tradition called litgit. The litgit is a two-stringed bamboo fiddle that has a repertoire that ranges from the expression of human grief to the mimicry of the sound of swiftlets and cicadas – species deemed important in the community’s natural, social, and spiritual ecology. However, this instrument and the repertoire associated with it are endangered, if not moribund, as a product of human (in)activity in ecological spaces. For this presentation, I cull anthropological insights on the concept of “absence” and “presence” to situate the litgit music tradition in its current eco-musicological context. I particularly dwell on two themes – “temporal loss” and “derivative presence” – to understand the state of musical performance as well as the cultural waning and musical transcendence of available litgit musical repertoire. On the first theme, I explore the context of absence as a result of the decline in the vitality and viability of litgit music. Here, I discuss excesses of human activity, i.e. animal habitat destruction, and/or inactivity, i.e. loss of specialized experts, and music spaces, that contribute to the non-transmission of sound concepts and knowledge and, consequently, a decline in music practice. On the second theme, I look into the presence of forms, i.e. derivative, mediated, and print materials, from which the litgit tradition continues to manifest and exist. Here, I discuss how such derivatives become instrumental in the transcendental materializations of “loss,” perceived or otherwise. As such, the success of these materializations will outline how the litgit tradition is to be imagined, “heard,” and “unheard” today and in the future.

ABSTRACT. This article examines authenticity through the lens of replicating Stradivari’s 1716 Messiah violin. It demonstrates that not only can the violin itself change over time, but also the technological methods we use to describe it can influence its perceived authenticity. Additionally, it highlights the challenges faced by luthiers during the replicating process.

Although there is a branch dedicated to the study of musical instruments, such as organology, within the extensive field of musicology and ethnomusicology, reflexivity from the perspective of instrument makers is relatively rare. As a luthier, we know that violin replicating has its own knowledge and technique in the field of violin making, and it is also one of the important training processes that apprentices must go through. While everyone knows that the past is the key to the future, it seems that in this field, the past now serves as the ultimate goal to achieve. This situation poses a dilemma: which point in the past should we reference when attempting to determine the specific appearance of the object being replicated at a particular moment in its journey through time and space? Cesare Brandi's Restoration Theories help us describe objects within specific contexts, but they also hint at the complexity of authenticity, acknowledging that objects can evolve over time, revealing different facets of their authenticity.

ABSTRACT. On January 19, 1968, an article on Taiwan's UDN newspaper announced the introduction of new garbage trucks imported from Japan that came with music. Later sources have proven that this "music" was actually the sound of a music box. This early example highlights the unique ways in which music boxes have been integrated into Taiwanese life, setting the stage for their broader cultural impact. This study explores the cultural significance of music boxes in Taiwan by examining their historical introduction and integration into local traditions, particularly in the realm of gifting. It also assesses how their sound is perceived as both pleasant and therapeutic. The inception of Taiwan's first mechanical music box factory in 1979 marked a significant shift, introducing these items as symbols of Western sophistication and nobility. Throughout the 1990s, economic growth broadened access to music boxes, making them available to the burgeoning middle class and diversifying the selection with imports from Europe, the US, and Japan. This period also saw a strategic marketing of the music box's timbre as calming and pure, thereby enhancing its appeal as a status symbol. Drawing parallels to Stern's (1997) analysis of mall music's impact on consumer behaviour, this research argues that the presentation of music boxes—both in appearance and sound—similarly influences Taiwanese consumers. Since 2000, the proliferation of Taiwanese music box vendors has reinforced this cultural phenomenon. In Taiwanese culture, where gift-giving is integral to social ceremonies, music boxes have become a common choice, appreciated not only for their auditory qualities but also for their ability to evoke sentimental connections. With music boxes as a medium, through field surveys and interviews with music box companies, I investigate how multi-sensory listening evokes embodied memories for Taiwanese people, carries values, as well as fosters social and cultural connections.

ABSTRACT. The urge to create new musical sensibilities received yet another turn in Bengal with the rise and popularization of the sound recording technologies of mass communication, namely the gramophone industry, radio, and talkies/cinema. The major stir in the twentieth century (like many other parts of the world) was caused by the Industrial Revolution and capitalist interventions in the musical sphere. All the other characteristics concerning the innovations that were observed at this time followed from it - the division of labor to enable the professionalization of music, democratization of the musical sphere in terms of its circulation involving accessibility, practice, and consumption, and also, empowering varied new groups of singers and enthusiasts of music from non-hereditary backgrounds to actively participate in the process. This new technological intervention in the form of the new mass media of recording and sound innovation not only served as one-sided tools to transmit music to the public but also interfered with the very processes of making the music and congregating the publics. Adhunik Bangla Gaan or the Modern Bengali songs grew as a musical genre in the light of this larger phase of modernization. Its activities centered in and around the urban city spaces of Calcutta but eventually captured the wide attention of the rising middleclass, Bengali-speaking publics of the mofussil areas spread across the Eastern region of the country. Even in terms of the genre‘s participants, despite its central allegiance to the Bangla language, singers and musicians were always invited and welcomed from other, non-Bengali-speaking states. This gave birth to a cosmopolitan interactive space and the idea of a music market, viable for providing employment opportunities with an attached stardom. Thus, this article will enquire how music in Bengal began taking the shape of an industry, parallelly carving a space of the ‘popular’ within its understanding of the “modern”.

ABSTRACT. The encounter of the body with digital technologies has redefined the landscape of contemporary performance art, leading to innovative explorations in the realms of embodiment, representation, and audience engagement. This paper delves into the creative works of Maya Krishna Rao (an eminent Indian performer whose work exemplifies the fusion of corporeal expression with digital augmentation) and Deepan Sivaraman (another practitioner from India whose work has been on collaborative interfaces). Focusing on two seminal productions, "Loose Women" (2018) and "Heads Are Meant for Walking Into" (2005), the paper aims to analyse their distinctive approaches to the body in performance-making. Rao's methodology, as elucidated through her reflections on the creative process, underscores a profound engagement with the body as a site of inquiry and intervention. Embracing digital media not merely as a tool but as a collaborator, Rao imbues her performances with a dynamic interplay between live action and mediated representation. Through the incorporation of live cameras and projections, she extends the boundaries of the stage, amplifying the minutiae of gesture and expression that evade the naked eye. In "Heads Are Meant for Walking Into," Rao's utilization of multiple screens and live feeds transcends conventional notions of theatricality, transforming mundane objects into potent symbols of political resonance. By enlisting the audience as co-participants in her immersive mise-en-scène, Rao dismantles hierarchical distinctions between performer and spectator, foregrounding the agency of both in the act of meaning-making. While in “Loose Women," Rao's deft choreography of Kathakali-inspired movements, coupled with evocative soundscapes and video projections, engenders a polyphonic narrative that navigates the complexities of gender, violence, and resistance. Through a series of episodic vignettes, Rao invites the audience to inhabit liminal spaces of discomfort and introspection, foregrounding the embodied experiences of women traversing socio-political landscapes. Deepan Sivaraman’s productions "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" (2014) and "The Legend of Khasak" (2017) exemplify a symbiotic integration of digital media with scenographic innovation. Sivaraman's visionary approach expands the possibilities of theatrical expression, fostering immersive environments where narrative, technology, and embodied performance converge to redefine the boundaries of audience engagement. This paper seeks to elucidate the transformative potential of digital augmentation in contemporary performance, foregrounding the agency of the body as a locus of creative inquiry and political intervention. In an era marked by digital migration and virtual embodiment, the works of Rao and Sivaraman in my readings, show a burgeoning artistic praxis that transcends disciplinary boundaries and reimagines the contours of embodied expressions.

ABSTRACT. In the last few decades embodiment has been acknowledged as central to music cognition. The recent advances in embodied music theories have also prompted a significant shift in music pedagogy, particularly in formal Eurocentric music traditions, towards a multi-sensory, whole-body approach. However, traditional oral music education, relying predominantly on direct teacher–disciple transmission through live demonstration and imitation, is rapidly adapting to common teleconferencing platforms, not originally intended for music purposes. This paper explores challenges in embodied aspects of video-mediated synchronous distance Hindustani music pedagogy through an ethnomusicological lens, presenting a thematic analysis of interviews with Dhrupad music practitioners. The paper initially investigates the embodied aspects of conventional in-person Dhrupad music pedagogy and draws comparisons with the experiences reported by musicians when engaged in videoconferencing for singing instruction. The analysis is guided by the principles of the 4E cognition framework (standing for Embodied, Enacted, Extended, Embedded), which highlights the close interplay between body, mind, and surrounding environment. The findings underscore the crucial role of spatial perception and haptic sense, suggesting that Dhrupad vocal music essentially involves sculpting tangible spaces. Furthermore, the study posits that Dhrupad pedagogy effectively conveys these interactions of space sculpting through shared tactile experiences within a physical space, fostering active engagement between student and teacher. Additionally, they reveal that while adapting to technology aims to broaden music accessibility, it may limit opportunities for multi-modal engagement and interaction. The study identifies constraints in conveying non-verbal, embodied, multi-sensory cues, leading to disruptions in shared spatial and physical context. These limitations raise concerns about the effectiveness of conventional videoconferencing platforms and suggest insights for developing alternative technologies better suited for the embodied demands of music education, informed by previous use of motion and sound technologies in capturing pertinent features.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, I propose to study the newly emerged Hindutva pop (H-pop), a genre of songs that calls for the establishment of a Hindu ethno-theocratic state in India. The phenomenon of H-pop has caught public attention in the last decade, and it is part of the Hindutva cultural ecosystem that produces content related to history, politics, and religion that primarily circulates in digital space. Hindutva, i.e. Hindu cultural nationalism, has been built upon the demonization of Muslims as others, and enemies. It is no coincidence that the spread of Hindutva occurred simultaneously with the expansion of cassette culture in India. Technological advancement and the spread of mass media have immensely helped the Hindu right wing, initially tacitly, and then openly, once their electoral success was imminent. Erstwhile well-known, pluralistic, and devotional chants have been woven into H-pop songs with catchy beats and now form a new kind of pop-bhajan to be played in religious processions. This paper interrogates the songs of H-Pop that articulate, normalize, and indoctrinate people into Islamophobia and violence. The H-pop songs, which feature abundant threats to Muslims or Hindus who oppose Hindutva, work as a catalyst to convert Islamophobia into active violence. The paper will address the following questions: What spaces and occasions are H-pop singers performing in? Are they replacing or working with/as traditional singers? What is the caste and social background of the singers and how effectively does H-pop unify Hindus across caste divides? How is H-pop denting the image of music as a unifier in the cultural/religious sphere in Rajasthan? Is the explicit aggression and violence of H-pop causing more people to be critical of Hindutva? Are there musical or other forms of resistance against the onslaught of H-pop?

ABSTRACT. By examining the operation of the UK Chinese Opera Association based in London, this essay explores the subjective experience involved in the performers’ diasporic music life, and also the interplay of music, performers, and its audience. Speaking to previous research relevant to the topic of diaspora groups, identity, and music, the statement that music is related to cultural identity has been widely accepted in studies on diaspora groups. In the case of Chinese Opera, the close relationship between it and diasporic Chinese identity has been examined by many researchers (such as Riddle 1978; Zheng 1994; Lei 2006; Zheng 2010; Rao 2017), and displayed that the primary reason for practising opera is to maintain and strengthen their Chineseness.

However, the behaviours of UKCOA members have moved beyond the act of patriotism, but rather focus on their artistic ‘love’ of Beijing Opera. Interestingly, some of them even dislike the statement that the behaviour of practicing Beijing Opera is seen as the promotion of Chinese culture. Thus, I attempt to deconstruct Beijing Opera, and challenge it as a medium which maintains Chineseness in a diasporic environment. Afterwards, by interpreting the UKCOA activities and performers’ social behaviour in a diasporic place, I examine that Beijing Opera has constructed a spiritual community, which is a mental locale shaped by the subjective experience involved in music.

Informed by Butler’s theory of performativity (1988) and Gell’s (1998) study about agency, the effect of UKCOA’s performances will be shown via audience analyses. Beijing Opera is considered as an identity utterance, thus, its performence generate cultural meanings. During this process, audiences are the initiators of the agential action as they respond to the culture promotion. In consequence, regardless of the performers’ original intentions, the performance of Beijing Opera does achieve the representation and promotion of Chineseness and Chinese culture.

ABSTRACT. That is not how the Pacific Islanders do their dance. Something is lacking. They are usually more elegant and graceful. This was the view taken by my wife, who was not impressed with the Pacific Islander music videos we were watching on YouTube. She wanted to give me a preview of the kind of dances I should expect to see at the annual Mount Isa Multicultural Festival. She opined that the dances on YouTube were different from what she had observed at previous editions of the festival, as well as similar festivals in other Australian cities. Were the Pacific Island dances presented differently to different audiences, or were these simply different interpretive styles? Was my wife’s assessment merely an essentialist view towards Pacific Islander music, or had the performers simply influenced the audience’s (in this case my wife’s) impression of their performances? This paper investigates the nuances of impression management among Pacific Islander performers in Melbourne, Australia. It examines the hypothesis that Pacific Islander dances are presented differently to various audiences, potentially influencing the audience’s perception of their performances. The study is rooted in ethnographic fieldwork and a comprehensive review of the musical traditions of Pacific Islanders, with a focus on the role of music in their societies, the cultural and historical connections underlying their music, and the changes incorporated by performers in response to audience expectations. The research employs four theoretical frameworks: impression management, diasporic studies, performance studies, and performativity, to analyse the complexities of cultural expression and continuity. By exploring the interplay between performers and their audiences, this paper aims to deepen our understanding of diasporic musical traditions and the dynamic process of impression formation within multicultural settings.

ABSTRACT. Numerous authors have addressed the nuances of post-relocation dance praxes in the United Kingdom (David 2014), the United States (Shay 2006) and Canada (Wrazen 2005). Animated by their examples, this paper addresses the situation faced by culturally specific dance groups in Melbourne, Australia, through the recently completed “Teaching Dance in Diaspora” project. Ten dance groups representing disparate cultural backgrounds were visited, with 13 dance teachers being interviewed. All groups are amateur, and most teachers volunteer their services, but while some have their operational costs supported through fundraising efforts and/or corporate sponsorship within the diasporic community, others rely on tuition fees alone. Available choreographic and pedagogical support from the respective homelands also varies and, in turn, this often affects group structures and teaching praxes in Melbourne. Yet, every group maintains a remarkable program of performances at both intra-community celebrations and regionalised multicultural festivals. Another common but lamentable factor is the experiential marginalisation of the groups by government departments and arts bodies that privilege Western theatrical dance; while diversity is promoted, securing a place for amateur troupes in the national dance landscape is a troubled process. Principally, the project reveals the nuanced and multi-faceted nature of re-connecting with the former homeland and embodying cultural identity through the lens of dance, both within the relevant diasporic group and to the broader populace. It also highlights the solidities and precarities of operating a diasporic community dance group in Australia.

ABSTRACT. El Cóndor Pasa was originally an Andean music against the Spanish colonists composed by Daniel Alomia Robles in 1913. Paul Simon adapted it and included the song in his album in 1970, which won the Grammy Award and quickly became a worldwide hit.

Therefore, El Cóndor Pasa turns into a global phenomenon. Since 2016, it has come to Shanghai with the world tour concerts of a Polish-Indian musician Alexandro Querevalú (1975-). In the two different cultural spaces, he shows two versions of "condor", which are different from the "world music" version. It triggers the author's thinking: what touches him to show two versions? What do these two different styles of music indicate?

This paper argues that Alexandro's identity has the nature of "diaspora" (Robin Cohen, 1997; 2008; 2023) with the transnational concerts, which is a new type of diaspora. Within the constantly updated "diaspora" category by Robin Cohen, the case in this paper has its own particularity and echoes his global diaspora theory. As a matter of fact, El Cóndor Pasa represents Alexandro's dual diasporic identities according to different situations and "fields" (Pierre Bourdieu, 1980). In the "field" of public festival, he performs Paul Simon's version that represents the global music industry, showing one aspect of his global diasporic identity with the sense of world music; in the private "field" of gathering, he performs, triggers interactively by the author, a three-part version, showing the other aspect of his global diasporic identity with the sense of Inca appropriated from the history. In conclude, this paper echoes Stuart Hall's idea that "identity is not an essence, but a positioning"(Stuart Hall, 1990), Alexandro has dual diasporic identities, which are constructed in different fields.

ABSTRACT. Chile is one of seven countries with a territorial claim in the Antarctic, though most of the 56 parties to the Antarctic Treaty do not recognize its sovereignty. Nevertheless, Chile’s southernmost region, Magallanes y Antártica Chilena, administratively ties southern Chile with the Antarctic Peninsula. In this paper, I demonstrate how sonic properties of human and non-human actors complicate and inscribe Antarctic territory in Southern Chile. I examine the case of snow and ice sounding, demonstrating how their various forms of vibration and representation simultaneously reinforce and undermine geopolitical classifications of the Antarctic during accelerated climate change. Accordingly, I draw on multispecies ethnographic and archival research, focusing on field recordings, audiovisual soundscape projects, and a soundwalk experience based in Punta Arenas, Chile. By weaving these projects’ and their creators’ epistemologies with data from glacier and snow recordings, I demonstrate overlapping, disjunct processes at work in constructing Antarctica from and in the South American continent. Specifically, I show how these case studies highlight the fragmented colonialism of Punta Arenas’ identity as an Antarctic City. I argue for pluralistic, embodied definitions of Antarctic territory based in multispecies sonic assemblages (Ochoa 2014), pushing back against the colonial constructions of territory that define much of the discourse surrounding the continent. Accordingly, I propose a multisensory, process-based approach to the discussion of aural borders (Kun 2000), and I contribute to emerging posthuman music research methodologies (Mundy 2018, Graper 2023, Kohn 2013, Haraway 2016).

ABSTRACT. This article explores the transformative role of contemporary opera in articulating the complexities of modern society, with a focus on its capacity to reflect and critique humanistic values within a Chinese context. As a case study, the opera 'Mila'—a commissioned work by the Asia Society Hong Kong Center—serves as an illustrative example of how opera can engage with and represent localized social narratives on an international stage. The research examines 'Mila' not only for its artistic merit but also for its sociocultural significance, scrutinizing the libretto, the composition, and the dramatic elements to understand the nuanced portrayal of Hong Kong's societal challenges.

The critical analysis of 'Mila' reveals a rich tapestry of regional identity and universal themes, showcasing the interplay between artistic expression and social consciousness. The study highlights how 'Mila' embodies the distinctive qualities of Hong Kong's culture, while also addressing broader questions of identity, belonging, and community in a rapidly globalizing world. The opera's engagement with local issues serves as a microcosm for the wider potential of contemporary opera to act as a mirror to society, offering insights into the human condition and fostering cross-cultural empathy.

By placing 'Mila' within the larger framework of 21st-century operatic creations, this article amplifies the critical discourse surrounding the genre's evolution and its role as a commentator on the zeitgeist. The findings stress the imperative for operas to maintain relevance by resonating with current societal dynamics and by encouraging reflection on the diverse experiences that shape our world. The study concludes that contemporary opera, through works like 'Mila', holds a unique position in the cultural landscape, where it can challenge audiences, provoke dialogue, and contribute to a deeper understanding of the interconnectedness of global communities.

ABSTRACT. Since at least the first commercial extraction of Scottish shale oil in the 1850s, social and cultural interactions with energy have been articulated through music and sound in the country. Across nineteenth- and twentieth-century workers’ and folk songs, we hear reverberations of daily life in Scotland’s coal, oil, and gas industries. These are ‘petrocultures’, inextricable from the extraction and use of fossil fuels. Yet, they are also sonic testaments to the resilience and adaptability of those communities who have been failed by petro-capitalism during the rise and subsequent decline of these industries. In this paper, I adopt a historical ethnographic lens to trace the role of traditional and folk music in expressing lived experiences of Scotland’s petrocultures. By analysing song repertoires, oral histories, and radio broadcasts housed in archives across Scotland, I will demonstrate that music was a key factor in two domains of Scotland’s early extractive industries. Firstly, it demarcated and shaped the daily rhythms in the lives of miners and their families. Secondly, it expressed the precarity of this employment, from dangerous working conditions to mine closures. Moreover, these conditions of precarity are consistently critiqued and resisted in these traditional and place-specific musical cultures. I thus position such ‘petrocultures’ not merely as symptomatic of powerful fossil fuel industries, but as evidence that the conditions of petro-capitalism have never been accepted uncritically, even by those who worked within that same system. By attending closely to the music of the often-sidelined industrial working classes, this paper therefore offers an important bottom-up sonic history of Scotland’s energy systems.

ABSTRACT. For centuries, the double-reed instrument Piri has played a significant role in ensemble music performance on the Korean Peninsula, especially before the 20th century. Its capability to produce loud sounds without the need for amplification made it effective for outdoor events, reflecting its origins in the Silk Road region. Instruments similar to the Piri, such as the Guanzi in China and the Hichiriki in Japan, were primarily used for accompanying dances and processions due to their compact size, portability, and ability to produce loud sounds even while standing. This role of the Piri continued for about 1,300 years on the Korean Peninsula.

However, in the late Joseon Dynasty (after the 16th century), societal changes occurred due to the upheaval caused by the Imjin-owaran (Korea-Japan War), and Confucian scholars emerged in what was previously a Confucian society. Before this period, music and dance were difficult for individuals to enjoy freely, but the emergence of a wealthy class led to the formation of groups that could enjoy music privately in "Pungnyu-bang" (風流房), or leisure rooms. With the influence of Confucianism, the Geomungo, a string instrument, gained popularity as a tool for spiritual cultivation, leading to a reduction in the size of the Piri to ensure the clear audibility of the Geomungo's sound. The social changes transformed spaces for musical enjoyment, influencing the evolution of musical instruments.

In this paper, we aim to examine how the Korean traditional wind instrument, the Piri, has evolved in response to changes in society and space. Through this exploration, we seek to gain a deeper understanding of a facet of Korean culture.

ABSTRACT. The purpose of this study is to investigate and compare traditional cultural performance forms and practices within distinct Chinese communities, specifically in Deity Parade in Johor Bahru,Malaysia and the Teochew Qinglong Temple Fair,China. By conducting comparative analyses across these diverse cultural backgrounds,the research aims to uncover the nuances, similarities, and differences in the roles and contributions of musicians. Through this comparative lens, the study seeks to deepen our understanding of how musical traditions shape and reflect cultural identities within these communities, shedding light on the intricate connections between music, culture, and society.

Furthermore, this research endeavors to explore how traditional cultural practices evolve and are preserved over time, particularly focusing on the Chingay Parade in Johor Bahru and the Qinglong Temple in Teochew. By delving into the inheritance and contemporary development of these practices, the study aims to elucidate the mechanisms driving cultural continuity and change. By examining the dynamic interplay between tradition and innovation in these cultural performances, the research aims to contribute to a richer understanding of how cultural heritage is sustained, transformed, and transmitted across generations in the context of these vibrant cultural celebrations.

ABSTRACT. indigenous music is and has remained a prominent musical activity in Ogba community as well as other communities in Nigeria. Traditional music is one of the major art forms that has been prioritized over centuries by different tribes and communities in Nigeria to preserve culture, history, etc. Egwu otu (age grade) music festival is the indigenous music festival of Omoku community of the Ogba people in Rivers State of Nigeria. The musical activities of the aforementioned festival comprise traditional songs, dance and instrumentation of the community. It is the only musical culture that has stood the test of time in Omoku community. Egwu otu music creates a means of bonding, unification, rejuvenation, entertainment and socialization among members of Omoku community. Apparently, within 1940s to early 2000 the membership of Egwu otu music was limited to the men folk only. However, the married women and those who have attained marriageable age were the only ones qualified to accompany their spouses or fiancés to the music festival. It is pertinent to note that in recent times, there seems to be some form of evolvement in terms of membership qualification, manner of procession among others. The study is aimed at bringing to limelight the reasons for the evolvement, x-ray the impacts of new innovations on Egwu otu musical activities and the community in general. The study will suggests possible ways of strengthening the positive innovations for sustainability and relevance purposes. The study will also recommend ways of cushioning the effects of the negative impacts of the innovations on the community to enable the preservation of the musical culture from extinction. Tools for data collection will include personal observations, indept interviews and consultation of related literatures. The results from the findings will be used to draw the conclusion and recommendations for the study.

ABSTRACT. From 1949 to 1959, during the nation-building decade of the new People’s Republic of China, the Chinese government organized multiple musical festivals in Beijing and other major cities. These events were guided by the principle of “developing socialist culture and art activities to serve socialist construction” and proved to become a turning-point in China’s music history, music theory trajectories, and music education. National festivals included events like the First National Traditional Chinese Opera Festival in 1952, The First Art Festival of People’s Liberation Army in 1952, the First National Folk Music and Dance Festival in 1953, the First National Music Week Festival in 1956, and the First National Quyi Festival in 1958, whilst similar smaller events were held in regional centres across the country. These musical events involved participants ranging from national leaders, Chinese military personnel, professional musicians and music theorists, to folk artists and the general public. Through staged performances of Chinese traditional folk opera, Quyi, instrumental music, dance and folk songs, as well as some forms of Western music, as well as ancillary meetings and symposia, these festivals sought to cultural exchange between performers, music theorists and government officials at various levels, and using music to promote the social and cultural construction of China. However, these once important artistic activities have been forgotten and overlooked by modern scholars and the public. My dissertation integrates first-hand materials I have gathered over the past three years from major libraries, official archives, cultural research centers, and private collectors throughout China, as well as interviews with participants or people knowledgeable about the musical activities 60 years ago. Through examining some of the most significant features of these festivals – including their regional characteristics, performance forms, and cultural connotations of the programs performed – we gain a clearer understanding of how China’s massive musical developments during the twentieth century took shape, as well as the complex relationships between Chinese music, society and politics.

ABSTRACT. The Kenya Music Festival not only showcases musical talents but also includes choreographed performances, particularly in the ‘zinazovuma’ category, which features arrangements of contemporary music. While the festival significantly contributes to the cultural and educational landscape of Kenya, the participation of schools for the blind in this category is not well documented, particularly in how these students prepare for and choreograph dance performances. This study seeks to fill this gap by exploring the unique challenges and strategies employed by visually impaired students in their musical and dance preparations for the festival.

Employing a qualitative research approach, this investigation will involve participants from various high schools for the blind attending the 2024 music festival across Kenya. Interviews and observations will be used to gather data on how these schools adapt dance and music training for visually impaired students. The focus will be on the methods of teaching dance movements, the use of tactile and auditory cues in choreography, and the integration of these elements with musical performance.

The research aims to detail the preparation processes and the innovative techniques developed to enable visually impaired students to perform confidently in the 'zinazovuma' category. It will examine the interplay between musical cues and dance movements, highlighting how these students interpret and express contemporary music and dance. Insights from this study are expected to shed light on the pedagogical adaptations necessary for inclusive dance education and provide a deeper understanding of the artistic expression capabilities of visually impaired students.

By emphasizing the creative and adaptive strategies of these students and their trainers, the study will contribute to enhancing inclusive practices in arts education and underscore the importance of accessibility in cultural festivals.

ABSTRACT. Yūjo (lit. ‘women of play’) refers to females in Japan who from ancient times used their charms, physical attractions and entertainment talents to serve men. The term carries a negative connotation as it frequently referred to women involved in prostitution, but depending on the period and social context, it could also denote a class of highly talented professional courtesans whose refined artistic skills were popular in the licensed entertainment areas called yūkaku. The yūkaku constituted an integral part of Edo culture and was frequented by intellectuals, artists and writers of the day. Yūjomono refers to a subclass of songs from the jiuta sōkyoku genre of salon ensemble music that utilizes voice, shamisen, koto and shakuhachi; popular from the Edo period (1603-1868) to the present day. Yūjomono lyrics illustrate the yūkaku culture from multi-faceted viewpoints, ranging from songs about impoverished—and unregulated—women who plied Japan’s urban waterways on small punts to provide quick sexual services, to the grand oiran or tayū rank of geisha, who were superstars and rarely, if ever, slept with their clients. Other yūjomono songs were narrated from the male (client’s) point of view and extolled the skills and pleasures of the yūkaku women. In spite of the fame and glamour of the high-ranking courtesans, it must be kept in mind that these women were—along with their less fortunate colleagues—basically indentured workers. Because of the unsavory connotations of this system, some Japanese music scholars are reluctant to discuss this aspect of jiuta sōkyoku ensemble music. Nonetheless, the yūjo mono songs bequeathed to us today are some of the most popular and beautiful songs in the jiuta sōkyoku musical repertory. This presentation will discuss a sampling of song content, along with recordings, to illustrate the various voices of yūjo women and the yūkaku culture.

ABSTRACT. Diha Naam, a congregational prayer sung by women in Assam in reverence of the Assamese saint Sankardev, represents a deeply entrenched cultural tradition steeped in the region's religious ethos. Rooted in Vaishnava scriptures such as the Kirtan-ghosa, Diha Naam transcends its musical dimensions to serve as a spiritual practice fostering communal cohesion and devout expression. However, amidst the contemporary milieu, Diha Naam has undergone a transformation, assuming a dual role as both a spiritual endeavour and a source of livelihood for numerous women practitioners. This paper endeavours to explore the multifaceted concept of womanhood within this context, examining the urban-rural dichotomy in Diha Naam practice, the ritual's Bhakti performance attributes, its professionalisation, and the concomitant navigation of traditional and modern identities.

The methodology employed in this research comprises extensive fieldwork, interviews, and a meticulous review of pertinent literature, adhering rigorously to ethical standards to ensure fidelity to the cultural ethos and perspectives of the community under study.

Central to this investigation is the delineation of urban-rural dynamics delineating the landscape of Diha Naam. Differential performance styles, socio-economic determinants impacting participation, and the varying societal import accorded to Diha Naam across urban and rural settings underscore the diverse experiential realms traversed by women practitioners across Assam. Diha Naam, at its essence, emerges as a manifestation of Bhakti performance, encapsulating the fervent devotion and spiritual reverence of its participants. Facilitated by the call-and-response singing format and embellished by traditional instruments like the Negera, taal, khol, and hand-clapping, Diha Naam fosters a collective spiritual experience transcending individual boundaries, thereby providing a conduit for women to articulate their faith, reconnect with ancestral legacies, and forge communal bonds.

However, the burgeoning professionalisation of Diha Naam has engendered a paradigm shift, precipitating contemplation regarding the commodification of spirituality and the attendant tensions between tradition and modernity. While affording economic sustenance, this professionalisation potentially undermines the sanctity of the ritual and dilutes the authenticity of the devotional experience.

Moreover, Diha Naam serves as a locus for women to assert their identities and navigate societal roles. Within patriarchal frameworks, participation in Diha Naam assumes a transformative agency, empowering women to reclaim bodily autonomy, challenge entrenched gender norms, and engender a sense of empowerment. Additionally, this paper looks into the pedagogical frameworks and training methodologies underpinning Diha Naam, discerning variances from conventional training paradigms.

In summation, this study elucidates the intricate interplay between tradition, spirituality, and livelihood inherent in Diha Naam practice. By delineating urban-rural dynamics, explicating Bhakti performance attributes, and scrutinising professionalisation vis-a-vis identity negotiation, this research elucidates the evolving role of women as practitioners in contemporary Assamese society. Subsequent research endeavours stand to enrich our comprehension of gender dynamics, religiosity, and cultural paradigms within the Assamese milieu.

ABSTRACT. Winifred Atwell occupies a position in 1950s and 1960s British popular music that is difficult to categorize. Born in Trinidad and having studied classical piano in the United Kingdom and United States, Atwell become the first Black woman to top the British popular music charts. After attempts at a classical career, she found success as a jazz pianist playing ragtime and boogie piano in various venues, recordings, and on television in 1950s UK before later emigrating to Australia. As George McKay notes, though now forgotten, Atwell surmounted racial and gender barriers to become the United Kingdom’s most popular pianists. Her first recordings with Ted Heath “Dinah Boogie” and “Body and Soul” (both released January 1952) and her original “Black and White Rag” established Atwell as a jazz pianist. My paper reappraises Atwell’s music and cultural work in British jazz and popular music by taking an approach that examines the intersections of class, race, multiple migrations (from Trinidad versus Jamaica to the UK, the US, and finally Australia), and the emergence of Black British identity in a post-war UK. I critique taxonomies of “jazz” in the 1950s UK, arguing that this term as then understood was marked both by nostalgia first as the UK attempted to rebuild and second by revivals of earlier pre-WWII styles of Black American jazz. The latter resulted from critical and audience reaction to new musics as UK listeners confronted the post-WWII Black American musics of bebop, electric Chicago Blues, and early 1950s American rock’n’roll. I argue Atwell is truly transnational: she circum-navigated the Atlantic, absorbing and transmitting African American-Trinidadian infused jazz piano first to the United Kingdom and, later, trans-Pacific to Australia. Whether in the UK or Australia, Atwell was one vector through which African-diasporic music shaped white popular musical tastes.

ABSTRACT. In Igbo society, group activities are elevated over individual activities and individuals mostly socialize according to age and sex. This concept of grouping is also largely practised among the various Christian Churches in Igbo land. Since Christianity utilizes music to enhance worship, the groups are encouraged to make music based on what they stand for. The focus of this paper is on the songs composed and performed by the men of the Anglican Churches in Anambra State, Nigeria to commemorate father's Sunday, which is celebrated on the second Sunday of June, annually. However, these songs are transmitted orally and many of them are forgotten. This study, therefore, aims at providing the notational documents of some of these songs as well as examines their social and religious implication. The author also hopes to provide the textual interpretations. The instruments for data collection are to include field research, oral interview as well as textual and structural analyses of the songs.

ABSTRACT. This paper explores how Zambian indigenous music and dance therapy have evolved over the years to reach the levels that are evident in the performances experienced today among the different peoples of Zambia. Particularly for this paper, Vimbuza a healing dance popular among the Tumbuka people living in Eastern Zambia and Malawi will be explored in order to discuss how the role the arts play in the wellbeing of the people in the country. For the purposes of this presentation the focus will be on the Tumbuka people of eastern Zambia and those found across the border in Malawi. By way of ethnographic study, this paper delves into Vimbudza music and dance as therapeutic practice among the Tumbuka people. The name Vimbuza refers to spirit possession, but has developed into a healing ritual which dates back to the mid-nineteenth century, when it developed as a means of overcoming traumatic experiences of possession by evil spirits, and it further developed as a healing dance that has continued to serve a therapeutic purpose as well as for entertainment. Based on an analysis of twenty-five cultural performances by the Zambia National Dance Troupe and Kamanga Cultural Ensemble, the findings reveal that some elements of Vimbudza music and dance have continued to exist while others have changed to suit the current performance contexts.

ABSTRACT. Dance movement and gesture are integral part of African Musical arts and theatre. Most rhythmic expressions of African people are such that propels dance, gesture or bodily movement among participants and members of the audience or listener. In most cases, dance steps and gestures are culturally structured in a way that they not only entertain but, also communicate effectively the essence of the performance or cultural event they accompany. This study is therefore set to examine the Akalama traditional dance of UPU community in Idoma ethnic region of Benue State, Nigeria. Akalama traditional dance is known for its display of strength, bravery, fertility and courageous nature of the Idoma people. Dance patterns, styles and formations in Akalama characterize cultural norms, myths and philosophy of the people. While some dance steps express farming skill and richness of Idoma land, others showcase planting pattern which involves the use of the feet and right hand in the dance. Even though, external influences from colonization, globalization, socio-political dynamics, western religions and western education have constitutes some ongoing changes in the choreographic elements of the Akalama dance yet, it is still relevant in the socio-cultural construct of Idoma people in this twenty first century. The study investigates the creative syntheses that have emerged as a result of intersection of tradition and modernity. It raises questions on the degree of evolvement in Akalama traditional dance and if it reflects the contemporary cultural values of Upu community. What measures are on ground to ensure sustainability, relevance and projection of cultural identity of the Idoma people in the twenty first century Nigeria? Ethnographic research method will be employed in this study, using interview, participant observation, observation method and review of relevant literatures for data collection. Finding from the field will guide the conclusion and recommendation for the study

ABSTRACT. This paper is focused on reconceptualizing music therapy through the lens of Ghana by studying how traditional medical practices are employed at the Tomekpe shrine in Klikor Agbozume community (a notable shrine) in the Volta Region of Ghana. The concept of healing using music has gained notoriety in the Western world and this practice is gradually infiltrating into African societies. This includes using strict methods and patterns as curative and preventive measures in healing. As a professional with a Nursing and Psychology background, I came out of depression using music and arts. This paper is thus written to satisfy my inquisitiveness to know what components are in music that cures and why music is not used as a form of therapy as part of modern clinical practice. The paper delves into the utilization of music therapy by traditional priests within the Tomekpe shrine in the Klikor community to address particular medical conditions. It does not only draw the lines of these conditions but also probes the interaction between traditional medical approaches in Ghana and those of hospitals/clinical settings, alongside the absorption of music therapy. Furthermore, it examines the impact of modernity and globalization on the musical elements embedded within traditional healing practices in Ghana, offering insights into evolving therapeutic styles. Initial discoveries from this ongoing research endeavor involves clearing the myths around traditional shrines and the incorporation of music by employing the services of a spiritualist or Divine Priests (who uses music as the main conduit) in clinics and hospitals to provide a more holistic care.

ABSTRACT. This paper focuses on the role of Imam Yang Xingben in maintaining Hui community in multi-ethnic Hong Kong society. As the only Chinese ethnic Imam in major mosques in Hong Kong, Yang--a Chinese Muslim from Shandong province--holds a significant and meaningful position in the local Muslim community. Not only does he serve members of the Hui Muslims in Hong Kong, he also connects them with diverse Muslim groups such as those from Indonesia, Pakistan, and the SAR government. These roles grant him greater responsibilities and influence in the community compared to other religious leaders. What grants him these great social power lies in his recitation of the Qur’an. His recitation features a relatively standard Arabic pronunciation, in contrast to mainland Imams, and incorporates a mix of melodic styles. His recitation voice has become a symbol at the Wan Chai Islamic Centre. As a devout Muslim, Yang studied in Beijing and Pakistan, and he has been serving as an Imam in Hong Kong since 1993. He is fluent in Mandarin, Cantonese, Urdu, and English, which he uses for daily works and delivering the Friday Sermon. These diverse experiences are intricately woven into his recitation melodies, perhaps unconsciously. This paper explores Yang's recitation in building his community and placing them within the Muslim in Hong Kong. It helps us to understand how religious diversity and cultural adaptability are necessary and even valued in Hong Kong. Through ethnographic research and investigation with Yang, I suggest that his recitation melodies and language is based on his ability to adapt to the Hong Kong's fast-paced and culturally diverse environment. I argue that Yang’s flexible chanting style, rather than being seen as “inauthentic”, is the most important element that allows him to transcend cultural and ethnic boundaries and navigate in the different Muslim communities at ease.

ABSTRACT. Ohangla is a set of 6 traditional drums played by one person. The ensemble has 6 other instruments that are domiciled in the luo community of Kenya. Like in many other cases of African instrumental ensembles, the ensemble exhibits many aspects of composition and harmony. Nevertheless, it’s important to note harmony in African ensembles cannot be understood using Western music systems. This is because of the different focus on rhythm, timbre, melodic interdependence, and tuning systems. The selection, tuning, and playing techniques of the instruments in the ensemble vary across most communities in Africa. The rhythms played also vary making it difficult to analyze its compositional techniques using form and structure provided by the Western music system. The complexity in rhythm, principles of ambiguity, emphasis on participation, movement, and communal influence are common in atypical Kenyan instrumental ensembles. Using empirical data from selected master musicians and practitioners in the community, this paper seeks to discuss compositional and harmonic techniques and/or approaches in ohangla drum ensemble of the luo people of Kenya. This is even though typical ohangla drum practitioners rarely think of harmony and composition. This proposal discusses how atypical drum ensemble is composed, the compositional process, role of each instrument in the group, harmony in the ensemble, and factors that influence this process. Through this, the paper hopes to add voice to a continuing discussion of form and structure in African music ensembles.

ABSTRACT. Rabai, commonly known as Arabai are among the nine Mijikenda sub-communities that have practiced various rituals for centuries in their kaya (shrines). Special ngoma (song-dance) performances normally accompany these rituals. Intriguingly, the Arabai people are able to continue with these traditions to date despite an influx of foreigners in the name of tourists, and missionaries, among others to the coastal region of Kenya where the Arabai live. It is, therefore, possible that the Arabai traditional rituals have suffered an authenticity crisis emanating from internal and external cultural influences in the territory. This paper, therefore, examines ngoma performance as one of the few surviving musics for rituals in Coastal Kenya. In particular ngoto song-dance which is especially singled out to demonstrate the interaction between music and ritual among the Arabai people. Using diffusion and historical theories and approaches coupled with empirical sources, the paper traces the development of ngoto song-dance with the hope of explaining and evaluating its role and functions as regards Arabai rituals. This paper assumes that foreign influences of tourism, religion, and social-cultural changes have imparted the performances of traditional Rabai ritual music thus influencing its context and performance practice. The ethnographic nature of the study enabled primary data to be collected through informal interviews, participant and non-participant observations, literature reviews and live recordings. Data from these sources is corroborated with that from archival and historical orientation. From the findings of this paper various recommendations are made.

ABSTRACT. “Lost Kamuy” is an innovative dance theater created in Akan, and it features the culture of Ainu, indigenous people of Japan. In contrast to the Ainu dance practice in other regions, which focuses on the revival of tradition, the Ainu community in Akan has produced several innovative dance works, resulting in the transmission of “tradition” and the manifestation of the diverse ethnic identity of the modern Ainu. This presentation takes “Lost Kamuy” as a prominent example of such cases. We examine the narratives of creative directors and dancers and discuss what the Ainu people aim to achieve through this work and the kinds of conflicts and negotiations. The Ainu community in Akan comprises people who have migrated from various parts of Hokkaido. The community engages in tourism, and dance is an important tourism resource. In addition to “traditional” dances, many unique forms of cultural heritage, such as puppet shows based on oral literature (yukar), have been created and presented to tourists. “Lost Kamuy” (released in 2019), produced by various creators from within and outside Akan, is one such attempt. The performance, which fuses “traditional” dance with contemporary dance and makes full use of digital technology, pursues the aesthetic and entertainment value of dance, thus potentially challenging the existing image of the Ainu. However, lost traditions are reconstructed in this work. For example, women's sinuye (tattoos), which were prohibited and diminished because of assimilation policies, are included as face paintings. In creating and performing this work, the possibilities of Ainu dance are explored concerning tourists, artists with and without Ainu heritage, non-Ainu dancers who have migrated to the area, and the local community.

ABSTRACT. Loss and grief experiences, are a significant risk factor for mental health. Considering the prevalence of loss, the effectiveness of coping strategies used by individuals experiencing bereavement is of interest to researchers. This study examines the role of indigenous music in coping with loss and grief. Music has continued to be an effective, expressive human activity in cultures around the world. One advantage of music is that it expresses and enhances human moods, emotions and physical activities. This paper explores the role of Ramogi –an indigenous Luo burial rites dance, performed in funerals by members of the community. It is claimed that this dance is performed to address the mental, physical, emotional, social, aesthetic and spiritual health of the bereaved. Luo traditional song and dance have always had a utilitarian role in the community. Other than the entertainment role, indigenous songs and dances were used in healing ceremonies, deep spiritual rituals in the community and for cultural preservation. The mourning processes involved music; and it is believed it helped alleviate stress and trauma accompanying the loss. The Luo people believed that emotional or spiritual trauma caused by an event such as a death of a loved one needed external intervention for resolution. An individual was considered to be fine if he exhibited physical, spiritual and emotional soundness. Incidentally, these are the aspects the community believed that Ramogi dance enhanced and hence incorporated it in the mourning healing process. Although the efficacy of Ramogi dance practice in grieving has not been scientifically proven, its prevalence and the rate of participation by community members point to benefits that can only be associated with gains during process of addressing loss and grief.

ABSTRACT. Each year, approximately 200,000 United States servicemembers leave the military (U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2019). Although most veterans transition successfully (Igielnik, 2019; Vogt et al., 2020), some report continued challenges fitting into civilian communities after the transition period, especially veterans who served post-9/11 (Igielnik, 2019). In a survey of recently separated veterans, almost 70% reported missing the camaraderie that was part of serving in the military and the feeling persisted even after three years (U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Office of Transition and Economic Development, 2020). Periodically, military veterans re-experience transition stress as they adjust to significant life changes. A growing body of evidence demonstrates the importance of social connections as a determinant of health and a protective factor in the face of major life changes (C. Haslam et al., 2021; C. Haslam, et al., 2018; Holt-Lunstad et al., 2010; Steffens, LaRue, et al., 2021). Intentional serious leisure activities, such as group music-making, can lead to personal growth and strong personal identities. However, motivational factors for military veterans to participate in leisure activities are largely unstudied. We investigated motivational factors among 150 veterans and their families who attended music workshops through pre-and post-workshop surveys. We found more experienced participants were motivated by factors such as personal enrichment, self-gratification, and self-actualisation, while beginners were motivated by the pursuit of novelty and pleasure. Exit survey responses indicated the instructor’s effectiveness, feelings of personal accomplishment, and positive social interactions were valued highly by participants and may motivate sustained interest in playing the guitar or ukulele. For example, the social dynamic between the instructor and group members played a significant role in motivating participants to continue their engagement. Music workshops can attract beginners and cultivate serious leisure participants through flexible pedagogy that is adaptable and responsive to the needs and interests of group members.

ABSTRACT. In the last two decades or so, the discourse of community-centered scholarship has gained a significant proliferation in the ethnomusicology discipline. Chiefly driven by the applied aspect––social responsibility and the use of academic knowledge for societal benefit (ICTMD 2024)––ethnomusicologists have initiated a range of ethnomusicological works involving communities in capacity building, cultural empowerment, cultural dialogue, through a skill development project (Impey 2002); a conflict and violence solution project (Araújo 2006); an HIV and AIDS related health awareness project (Buren 2010); a refugee community empowerment project (Pettan 2010); a cultural revitalization through internet-based digital multimedia project (Ostashewski 2015); an audio production, documentary display, and festival showcase project (Sweers 2015); a public recognition of minority groups project (Hemetek 2015); and a public health promotion and global awareness in sanitation project (Frishkopf 2018). Certainly, such research initiatives have demonstrated efficacies and significantly contributed to the context of the ongoing inquiry into a new egalitarian knowledge-production praxis (Araújo 2008) and the reconsideration of the theory and method in ethnomusicology (e.g., Barz and Cooley 2008; Dirksen 2012). Nevertheless, there are also scholars who are suspect of having asymmetrical relationships (Fals-Borda 1991), power hierarchies (Hofman 2010), and a lack of democratization (Tan 2015) in community collaborative research where the top-down approach is taken. Situating my own community collaborative participatory research project conducted with the minority Nepalese diaspora community in Canada, this paper discusses the challenges, benefits, and future possibilities of community collaborative research in ethnomusicology.

ABSTRACT. I am writing the study that will contribute to the scholarly understanding of awareness of both, communities and the music artists in acknowledgement and understanding of music diplomacy in their states. This study will also increase scholarly understanding of how musicians across nations value music activities that enhance diplomacy, especially between Tanzania and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) as well as how respective governments use of music to enhance diplomacy between Tanzania and DRC.

The study mentions diplomacy because, music is a major tool in culture and community’s daily life. And as a result, relation between one society and another is fostered.

Music diplomacy by its genuineness, provides melodies, rhythms and messages that makes people of different origins begin to associate politically, socially and culturally. The harmony of diplomatic music simplifies ways of oneness and unity among people of different nationalities and beliefs.

As far as music is concerned to unite people of different culture, ethnicity and nationality, diplomacy is rising in between and highly facilitated by the music activities within communities, because music itself has got the sound of diplomacy. The artistic exchange with other countries and understanding of music diplomacy would enhance the awareness of musicians (artists) and the community to the diplomatic essence of relations.

One of musicians’ sources of reputation and self-esteem is to move from one’s country to other countries worldwide. Many musicians are looking for marketing managers that will connect the artists with international platforms. It sounds so satisfactorily when music artists move from one country to another. This act causes adoption of culture, economic and politic among the given societies.

In my study, i am considering and focus on the fact that cultural exchange between Congo and Tanzania is an avoidable. The Congolese and the Tanzanians will be portrayed as key members to expose the state's relations through their intercultural music.

ABSTRACT. In early modern Europe, the plucked and bowed string instrument was a metaphor for the human body. The harmonic series of normative tunings was associated with good health – physical and spiritual – and resonated as part of a larger cosmic order. Scordatura, as the purposeful de-tuning of a musical instrument, was antagonistic to this harmony.

This paper explores the embodiment of scordatura in Heinrich Biber’s so-called Mystery Sonatas. It moves beyond an understanding of scordatura as a device for representing the different stages of Christ’s life, such as the crucifixion and resurrection. Rather, by drawing on the concepts of "crip virtuosity" (Jones 2019) and temporalities of “dis-ease” (Boddice and Hitzer 2022), this paper reconfigures scordatura as an embodied dynamic of bentness between the bodies of an instrumentalist and their instrument. When set against the Sonatas’s dance structures, which in their prioritisation of agility and lightness thus function within a framework of normative bodies, such embodied distortions are further problematised.

By re-evaluating scordatura not only as a de-tuning of instrument, but also as an embodied dynamic of bentness, this paper seeks to further the “carnal” call in musicology (Le Guin 2006) through conceptualisations of musical performance as physical and psychological “dis-ease”.

ABSTRACT. Presentation explores the ways in which sound and movement intertwine in Polish traditional dances. Author describes the embodied experience of dance parties with traditional music. The questions addressed in this speech are: what are the sounds of a dance party? How dancers use the sound? What implications has the sound of the dance party to the constitution of meanings of Polish traditional dances? The differences between the sound representation of traditional dance and the experienced reality of it constitute a telling case of power relations. The way dancers interact with the music is not necessarily connected to the way it is presented on stages or in the music studios. The movement response to a dance can serve as an indicator of the choice of values that the participants wish to attribute to traditional dance, allowing the researcher to explore the bottom-up understandings of the dance heritage. Author follows an ethnographic research, based in participant observation, where she attends the dance parties as a dancer. The observations are ongoing since March 2023, in Poland, employing a multi-sited ethnography where author follows the dance floors of traditional dances. The methodology is grounded in author’s autoethnographic experience to access the embodied knowledge of a dancer. The theoretical framework for this piece of research combines the new materiality and sensory anthropology. Author perceives sound as a vibration constituting a part of embodied experience of dance. This vibration serves as a means of connection between the dancers, the dance and the music. The touch mediated reception of vibration should take into account the matter in which sound waves permeate. Sound in the dance party can serve as a key issue exposing the intertwined qualities of the embodied experience of dance and the uses of dance heritage.

ABSTRACT. Xigubo is a war dance practised in the south of Mozambique, in the provinces of Maputo, Gaza and Inhambane, as well as in neighbouring countries, with some of its own names and variations. According to oral tradition, the dance was formerly practised as a form of military exercise, to prepare the men for war and to celebrate victories on the battlefield. These battles refer to the various military conflicts that took place throughout the 19th century in this region of the African continent, especially since the Mfekani, the military expansion movement of the Nguni peoples, who came from South Africa and reached the vast area that corresponds to the current territory of Mozambique and other neighbouring countries. In the Mozambican context, it is a cultural expression associated with the ethnic identity of the Rhonga and Changana ethno linguistic groups, above all. However, since the country's independence in 1975, it has had a prominent place in Mozambican cultural heritage, as part of the project to build a national unity. As part of this process of symbolic construction of a national identity, the National Company of Chant and Dance, (1979) introduced a series of choreographic and aesthetic elements into xigubo, as well as into other dances and cultural expressions, with the aim of adapting them to the concept of stage shows in the form of ballets. As a result, the practice of xigubo has expanded beyond its original ethnic and regional boundaries, becoming taught and practised in dance schools all over the country, obeying pedagogical processes and social codes that go beyond its traditional conception, advocated by oral tradition. It is precisely this set of transformations in the corporeality associated with xigubo that will be explored in this presentation.

ABSTRACT. Throughout urban South Korea, the popularity of social dance as a hobby among older women and men indicates a cultural transformation around the wellness and identity of aging subjects. The dancers, typically aged sixty and older, gather at dance halls (k’ollat’ek) and dance to live electronic music which encapsulates the musical tastes of the older generation imbued with layers of affective cultural meanings that complements the heterosexual activity. This research project interrogates the ways older people destabilize culturally normative performances associated with age through playful dances and performances amidst conditions of socioeconomic precarity, such as financial insecurity and social isolation. Music and dance for aging subjects are empowering tools that help assert their rights to physically and socially healthy lives despite the frequent neglect and denial of such rights within the frameworks of the twenty-first-century neoliberal welfare state. Through ethnographic fieldwork involving in-depth interviews and participant observations, I examine how older adults in South Korea embody affective social realities through music and dance. I argue that the meaningful formation of the k’ollat’ek dance culture for older Korean adults constitutes a musical embodiment of the politics of aging.

ABSTRACT. With applied ethnomusicology on the rise over the past three decades or so, there are skill sets that are becoming increasingly important for those who choose to pursue work with impact beyond academia. These include developing ideas while taking into account highly complex environments; designing and executing projects on the terms of diverse communities; negotiating and gaining financial and organisational support; leading teams and engaging other stakeholders; developing realistic budgets; and managing complex projects. In short, the range of skills stretches from business-like project management to increased attention to ethics, as the effects of this type of research may be of lasting consequence to the people we work with.

In this presentation/workshop, based on ethnomusicological literature, hands-on experience and courses developed for students on five continents, I will elaborate on a new, 40-hour course highlighting core skills that are usually not taught at university, including: developing your idea; building your project; writing a successful proposal; negotiating support; and running a targeted project with integrity and results. Throughout the presentation, there will be extensive reference to known and lesser-known projects in this field and the things we can learn from them, enabling applied ethnomusicologists to enter the field better equipped to develop and conduct projects which truly benefit communities.

NB This proposal will work best as a 1-hour practical workshop where participants leave with concrete new skills, but it could also be squeezed in a 20 min paper.

ABSTRACT. This roundtable focuses on pedagogical approaches that incorporate student researchers into research and community advocacy initiatives. The Centre for Sound Communities (CSC) is an arts-based innovation lab that serves as a hub of international ethnomusicology, ethnography, and critical-cultural research and outreach. The CSC engages in many community-centred research-creation activities, including festival performances, workshops, and the production of multimedia outputs highlighting local music and dance traditions and narratives. Inclusion, collaboration, and creativity are central to every CSC project, from research-creation to knowledge dissemination. Student researchers are pivotal in developing and implementing these activities, and they receive training through the CSC to support these projects. This 60-minute session will reflect on newly developed training workshops and the experiences of diverse student researchers. We aim to analyze students' multi-faceted roles in our initiatives, supporting them in research, film (and multi-media) making, and active community involvement. This discussion will underscore the development of student capacities in film/media production, social media management, creative storytelling, and strategic community engagement. We will also evaluate the outcomes of recent collaborative projects and their impact on student researchers and community engagement, illustrating how student participation in research contributes to vibrant community development and academic enrichment.

Key themes:

• Understand the frameworks and strategies for integrating students into community-based research projects, especially in a cultural research context. • Gain insights into the process of audio recording, filmmaking, and social media within community projects, including technical and creative aspects. • Explore developing and implementing strategic plans that support community engagement and sustainability. • Discuss the challenges and successes of bridging student researchers with community needs to foster cultural exchanges. • Explore the possibilities of bringing student-researchers together with knowledge-holders and alternative ways of knowing.

ABSTRACT. Persian classical music has substantially flourished and evolved in the past hundred years. Unique and endemic to Iran, it is a high art form that has become a central aspect of Iranian national identity. In the Pahlavi era (1925-1979), it was extensively promoted through multiple governmental institutions, including radio and television broadcasting, as an important cultural element in nation building. Initially banned after the 1979 Revolution, it is now widely practiced and enjoyed throughout the country. The art music of Iran is mainly cultivated in urban centres, though Iran’s various regions have contributed to its development. While deeply rooted in tradition, Persian classical music is also dynamic and reflects the innovative contributions of different schools of thought. Rarely has the development of art music been investigated as a continuation and expansion of musical ideas. Rather, the binary perspective (traditional/modern, urban/folk, artistic/popular, male/female, elite/ordinary) has dominated the scholarship of art music, especially during the hyperpoliticized period of the post-1979 Revolution. This article explores various developments and dialogues of musical thoughts from composition, practice, pedagogy, education, and publication and scholarship based on Nietzsche's monumental approach to history and the concomitant non-binary perspective of recent Iranian studies (e.g., Jahanbegloo 2004, Dabashi 2015). This chronological investigation divides the Persian classical music of the past century into three periods: early Pahlavi, late Pahlavi, and the post-1979 Revolution era. This article has benefited from conducting fieldwork and many interviews in the past decade.

ABSTRACT. This paper is based on a recent, year-long fieldwork in Indonesia that is concerned with the impact of international and national Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) policies on local communities and performing arts. I investigate selected music communities and genres in three major cultural areas of Indonesia: Sumatra, Java, and Kalimantan. Indonesia is one of the leading countries in Southeast Asia regarding intangible cultural heritage designation. In the span of fifteen years, thirteen Indonesian cultural elements have been inscribed onto the international Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity that is maintained by the UNESCO. Out of thirteen elements, seven belong to the performing arts category: gamelan, shadow theatre (wayang kulit), three genres of traditional Balinese dance, angklung, saman dance, pantun, and pencak silat. Indonesian regional and national lists contain hundreds of cultural elements, which are considered representative of particular cultural regions. On the basis of the safeguarding ideas of the UNESCO Convention from 2003 (Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage), a deepened understanding of the ties between culture and social and natural environment, as well as desires for economic advancement, the Indonesian government implements the concept of balanced ecosystem as the ultimate solution to the social wellbeing and preservation of cultural forms. Based on my fieldwork (observation of local events, conversations with cultural administration officials, local artists, cultural activists, and scholars) and the analysis of extensive data, I examine several case studies, while seeking answers to the following questions: In what ways the recognition of ICH helps (or hinders) sustaining of local music practices? What are the power dynamics and what actors hold power over cultural heritage? What kind of specific methods and activities (“best practices”) can assure the continuity of local practices? What is the role of ICH in boosting local economies?

ABSTRACT. First-hand ethnographic evidence suggests that interest in folk music within the contemporary scene in Spain has experienced a considerable growth in the last few years, to the extent that it could be described as a revivalist movement. This phenomenon comprises not only young generations that enjoy this music, finding in it a way to (re)connect with their “roots”, but also institutions that back this movement, such as archives, music schools, or governmental agencies. Through heritage-based discourses, diverse agents are able to translate folk musical practices from an alleged “original” context to urban settings, a process in which global agencies like UNESCO are involved, as well as local musicians, artists, curators, audiences, media, and scholars, among others. This dual process of revivalism and heritagisation is usually interwoven with a serious concern about the “authenticity” or “falseness” of a particular tradition, something that is at the heart of this kind of legitimising praxis (cf. Bendix, 1997).

In this paper we will present some results of an ongoing ethnographic research about folk-music revivalism movements in Spain, with a special emphasis in metadiscursive practices and rhetorics of authenticity (cf. Briggs, 1993). In particular, we pay attention to artists and audiences based on Castile, not only understood as a territorial unit but also as a symbol often mobilised to produce regional and/or (ethno)national identifications. One central aspect of this research is questioning how these rhetorics and related practices define what is excluded/included under the notion of “tradition”, a process in which the capitalisation of this notion as “heritage” is expressed through categories similar to those in the religious field. Additionally, we focus on what kind of threatens are these folk music practices responding to, analysing the interrelation between the “traditional”, the “popular”, and the “mainstream”.

ABSTRACT. This presentation explores the multifaceted approach of Les Brasileirinhos, a music program designed to transmit and preserve cultural heritage among Brazilian expatriate children and families residing in Canada. The primary goal of Les Brasileirinhos is to develop the heritage culture of its participants and provide a space for building community through high-quality music classes. Led by proficient instructors with comprehensive knowledge of Brazilian musical traditions, the program offers classes for infants, children, and adolescents, all taught in Portuguese and exclusively utilizing Brazilian traditional music to recreate the original musical context as closely as possible. The program emphasizes active engagement and experiential learning through regular music classes and workshops. In addition to its pedagogical activities, Les Brasileirinhos extends its reach through community events, concerts, and collaborations with Brazilian artists and institutions, enriching both the cultural landscape of the Brazilian diaspora in Canada and promoting intercultural dialogue with Canadian society. Additionally, Les Brasileirinhos serves as a cultural bearer, promoting Brazilian traditional music in Canadian schools through workshops and interactive performances. Les Brasileirinhos exemplifies the transformative potential of music in fostering a sense of belonging, cultural pride, and intergenerational continuity within Brazilian communities in Canada. By assisting expatriate families in transmitting their heritage culture to their children, the program ensures a more lasting legacy of Brazilian cultural heritage for future generations of Brazilian diaspora families in Canada.

ABSTRACT. The Gbagyi (also known as Gbari) people are indigenous to the North-Central region of Nigeria and they are found mainly in Abuja area, the capital city of Nigeria. Although they are the largest ethnic group in Abuja region, the Gbagyi people are the minority ethnic group in Nigeria. The Gbagyi have a rich cultural heritage including music and dance. However, the existence of these cultural practices are being threatened, particularly by the influx of diverse populations and cultures into the area since its establishment as the Federal Capital Territory in 1991. This study explores the cultural significance of music and dance among the Gbagyi people as a means of communal cohesion, social order, community collaborations, social harmony and co-responsibility. Hence, Gbagyi-knunu dance is deeply embedded with meanings, encoding historical narratives, moral teachings and social expectations that guide community membership. Data for this work was gathered through the use of ethnographic methods which include participant-observation and interviews with knowledgeable cultural elders and practitioners. The work will add to the existing body of literature in ethnomusicology and will be valuable for future academic research in related fields including musicology, dance study and music therapy.

ABSTRACT. The efficacy of traditional dance costumes in performances is often ignored as the focus is placed on perfecting music and choreography and less on the visual image of a performance. This is to say costumes are seen as a secondary component of a performance. As such they are ignored yet music or dance performances cannot go on without them. This paper will underscore the significance of costumes in music and dance performances from the Ndebele perspective. The data to be presented in this paper was collected through a qualitative ethnographic method in which the researcher solicited data from Culture bearers and Isitshikitsha traditional dancers in the Ndebele society. The findings were that traditional costumes are responsible for the representation and preservation of a people’s culture, for defining the spiritual significance of a performance, setting the mood of a performance, as well as for enhancing identity and pride of the Ndebele. With the aid of photos, videos and physical costumes, the presenter who is a researcher, costume designer and a costume archivist will unveil to the audience the strengths of costumes in music and dance performances of the Ndebele people of Zimbabwe.

ABSTRACT. Abstract One of the key mandates of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is the establishment of the policy for freedom of expression as obligatory for democracy and development, promoting international cooperation, collaboration and sharing of cultural ideals through socialization. Researches under cultural expressions through music and dance have been considered largely under major ethnic blocks and traditions, thereby concealing some of the unique and salient elements that characterize the minority ethnic areas. Umuagbai Ndoki is one of the communities in the minority areas in Nigeria. What are these spectacular elements and characteristics of music and dance? How are they expressed and how can they contribute to sustainable development of the community? Therefore, unveiling minority idioms and dance characteristics draped in major Nigerian musical traditions, with particular reference to Umuagbai Ndoki Ikoro dance, provides the opportunity to promote these musical idioms and dance characteristics hitherto unknown to the wider society streaming. Collection of data was conducted through primary and secondary sources, and through empirical and participatory observation research methodology. Assessing the contributions of music and dance towards sustainable development, findings reveal creative and cultural expressions, unveiling of societal norms and values, socialization and economic empowerment with economic and behavioural indicators towards peace and sustainable development.

ABSTRACT. This paper explores possible cultural links between Taiwan and other Austronesian regions spanning from Southeast Asia to Oceania through examining two chants (with an associated dance) of the Pinuyumayan people, one of Taiwan’s sixteen Austronesian-speaking ethnic groups. The two chants, the irairaw and tremilatilraw, feature couplet formats in their texts, often marked by alliteration and synonymous phrasing, despite their difference in call and response forms. The Pinuyumayan chants’ versification and antiphonal singing embody principles of parallelism, also evident in the socio-cultural facets of this Indigenous group. James J. Fox uses the term “speaking in pairs” in his edited volume (1988) to refer to the parallelism in eastern Indonesia’s ritual languages. Within chapters of Fox’s volume, examples of couplets mirror the structural features found in Pinuyumayan chants, such as those used in the ritual speech of the Wewewa in West Sumba (Brigitte Renard-Clamagirand 1988). Similarly structured couplets are also present in Hawai’ian hula songs (Amy Ku’uleialoha Stillman 1995). In this paper, I first examine the versification and antiphonal forms, including call and response between voice and body, employed in the singing of the irairaw and the tremilatilraw chants. I then explore their social and ritual roles in the contemporary Pinuyumayan mangayaw, an adaptation of a headhunting ritual. This ritual, which continues to alleviate bereavement grief and affirm the maturation of the interns of the men’s house, echoes the mappurondo community’s headhunting ritual in upland Sulawesi, Indonesia (Kenneth M. George 1990). By discussing possible interconnections between musics and rituals in the Austronesian world, I hope to stimulate scholarly dialogue on the significance of Indigenous musicking and dancing, both historically and presently, across Austronesian regions and beyond.

ABSTRACT. Errentai (two-person opera) is a Chinese folk operatic genre popular in the Jin dialect zone (including northern Shanxi, western Inner Mongolia and northwestern Hebei). It largely preserves the entering tone character (rushengzi) in traditional repertoire. The entering tone character is based on the entering tone, which is one of the four linguistic tone types in ancient Chinese. The pronunciation of the entering tone character is short and breaks when spoken, therefore having an impact on melodic lines and music styles in various ways (Yu, 2008). From a linguistic point of view, in north China, the entering tone character exists only in the Jin dialect, making the Jin dialect more rhythmic. To a great extent, it also helps differentiate the Jin dialect from other northern dialects (Language Atlas of China·Chinese Dialect Volume, 2012). While previous research on Errentai has mostly focused on its history (Wei, 2004), the characteristics of the singing (Xing, 2013), and the repertoire (Ye, 2013), less attention has been paid to the interactive relationship between its music and local dialect speech. There are even fewer studies centering on the relationship between entering tone characters and singing. Combining music and linguistic analysis, this paper attempts to discern several regular patterns within Errentai’s representative music and examines the influence of the entering tone character on the pitch, rhythm, embellishment of its melody and music style. This paper contributes to scholarly discourse on linguistic approaches in music analysis, especially the dynamic interrelationship between dialects and local musical genres, styles, and music making. Musical practices both constitute and are constituted through language (Jayson Beaster-Jones, 2019), thus exploring musical issues also requires a linguistic perspective.

ABSTRACT. Antiphonal singing is a very common activity for ethnic minority groups in Southwest China. As a means of entertainment, it can be observed at various festivals, temple fairs, and in people’s daily lives. Among the Bai people in Dali, Yunnan, antiphonal singing involves two singers, usually one male and one female, who sing together in a question-and-answer format using Bai folk tunes and improvised lyrics in either the Bai language or a local variation of Southwestern Mandarin. While the lyrical themes vary, they frequently include flirtatious elements. In the past, antiphonal singing served as a crucial way for two persons to engender, exchange, and sustain intimacy and romantic feelings in a private setting. Since the 1990s, as minority music began to be recognized as a cultural resource for the construction of ethnic identity and tourism development, while the sense of private intimacy remains, this practice has gradually turned into a form of semi-performative display, organized or spontaneous. It now generates and depends on intimate interactions and communications not just between singers but also between singers and the audience and among the audience. In this presentation, I examine the transformation of the sense of intimacy within antiphonal singing, the coexistence of multiple forms of “public intimacy” (Guilbault 2010) in its current practices, and the politics of pleasure in the Bai people’s social life. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Dali from 2021 to 2022, I explore how collective and community-based music activities like antiphonal singing enact a performative time and space across the boundaries of domestic and public and foster a web of delicate and intersubjective social relations that create community belonging and experiences of pleasure, but at the same time raise conflicts between participants’ varying understandings of morality.

ABSTRACT. From the rough and gravelly sound of Mongolian throat-singing to the deep sound and open-legged sitting position of the Mongolian horsehead fiddle; from the images of strong, masculine Mongol steppe warriors to the viral popularity of the four-member, ethno-metal band The HU; musical sounds and historical images of the Mongol people have been overwhelmingly masculine. This paper investigates the ways that female singers and fiddlers in Inner Mongolia, China struggle against a male-dominated and masculinity-centric performance field. I show how women musicians offer unique and creative “re-sounding” challenges to conventional ways of listening to gender in the region. Drawing on Gaby Bamana’s work on gender divisions in Mongolia (2009, 2015, 2016) and Alexandra Lippman’s investigation of listening practices and modes of “listening across borders” (2018), I argue that female Mongol singers and fiddlers use close listening to overcome and to eventually “re-sound” rigid notions of femininity and masculinity through their musical performances. I show that they accomplish this work through multiple marginalized, intersectional identities, including positionalities not only as women, but also as a minority group in China and a position outside an authorized center of culture located in the nation of Mongolia. My work focuses on four pioneering women musicians in Inner Monglia, each of whom have become close friends and mentors of mine since I began work in this region in 2009: Anda Union member and fiddler Saikhanaa, the throat-singing performer and teacher Tunala, prominent fiddle performer Sorgog, and the fiddle scholar-performer Boindelger.

ABSTRACT. Slainte!: Early Gaelic Song Collecting in Eriskay

In the Highland ‘Mòd’ (festival) of 1902, held in Dundee, Scotland, the winner of the prize for ‘the best rendering of a Gaelic song with clarsach accompaniment’ was – extraordinarly – an American, Amy Murray. Hailing from New York and the only American in a competition featuring local highlanders with Gaelic as their first language, Murray stood out both as a singer and clarsach (harp) player.

Three years later, Murray went to the Hebridean island of Eriskay, where she began to collect songs, befriending the local priest, Allan MacDonald, a Gaelic speaker and expert in local folklore. Writing about her experiences in The Celtic Review and much later in her book, Father Allan’s Island (1920), Murray revealed herself to be a meticulous collector, with a strong musical sense and rapport with her informants. Her observations and transcriptions also question the conventions set by the Comunn Gàidhealach, established in 1891 to further awareness of Gaelic traditions, in relation to the Mòd, criticizing their effect on local performance practices.

This paper will examine Murray’s contribution not just in musical terms but also in her collaboration with MacDonald in gaining insight into Gaelic folklore and language generally, as well as in the context of a nascent appreciation of a previously denigrated and ignored culture. Primary sources include MacDonald’s papers at the University of Glasgow and Murray’s meticulous transcriptions and commentaries in her notebooks, now part of the Matheson papers at the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh. The paper will compare Murray’s methodology and approach to those of her contemporaries such as Grainger, Tolmie, Broadwood and Kennedy-Fraser. The presentation will also include newly recorded renditions of the songs. Far from appropriating a culture not her own, Murray enhanced and enriched it through her diligence and humanity.

ABSTRACT. In October 1960, a Senior Ethnologist at the National Museum of Canada wrote a memo to the director of the Natural History Branch of the National Museum regarding contracts between the Museum and Richard Johnston, a University of Toronto music professor who had travelled to Saskatchewan (in the Canadian Prairies) to collect folk musics. In it, he described Johnston’s collecting outcomes as “worthless” and potentially embarrassing to the Museum. While Johnston acknowledged the minimal value of the materials he collected among “the white man,” he was laudatory about the belongings he collected among Indigenous (Cree and Métis) peoples, noting that he recorded “minor masterpieces” played by an “absolutely fabulous Métis” fiddler. While in Saskatchewan, he also organized the first annual conference of the Canadian Folk Music Society (founded as the Canadian branch of ICTMD and now known as the Canadian Society for Traditional Music). Emerging from an interest in better understanding the history of the Canadian Folk Music Society and Canadian ethnomusicology, this paper asks: What does Johnston’s work reveal about the relationships among music researchers, the National Museum, and Indigenous peoples in late 1950s Canada? I argue that Johnston’s collecting demonstrates the deeply engrained colonial attitudes that underpinned collecting practices; shows evidence of the complicated and even conflicting ideas held by Johnston; and, importantly, reveals the agency of Indigenous peoples who—even under duress—did place limits on collectors. Though these statements are perhaps unsurprising to anyone working with archived Indigenous belongings, this paper offers an opportunity to better understand the microhistory of music collecting in Canada, its entanglement with the formation of Canadian ethnomusicology, and the founding of the Canadian Folk Music Society.

ABSTRACT. When listening to Irish traditional music it is sometimes difficult to separate the sonic experience with the images which it inspires: rugged rural landscapes, intimate firesides, mystical folklore and wild abandoned dance. All of these images, whether they be a cliché or an experiential truth, are part of the cultural frames which music constructs or vice versa constructs our music. Through the organisation of sound and silence we make subtle, complex calibrations of what it means to be human within a particular social, cultural, national and even spiritual context. Traditional music in Ireland is no exception to this concept as it carries ‘inordinate burdens around ideas of identity’. Within the traditional repertoire, arguably no other form of music embodies indigenous Irish mythic identity more than sean-nos singing. This paper explores the mythical subtext of sean-nos as a marker of Irish-ness through its traditional and post-modern interpretations. In particular, this paper will outline the author's own arts practice research exploring the concept of 'Irish Music Orientalism'. A 2018 performance based case study in collaboration with renowned sean-nos singer and scholar Lillis O Laoire will be examined as a backdrop to wider discourse on Irish identity, indigeneity and post-colonialism.

ABSTRACT. The purpose of this study is to explore the transformation of Indigenous people’s traditional songs into hymns. Let the Hills Sing: Hymns of the tribal Christians in Taiwan is a music score published jointly in 1986 by the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan and the Asian Institute for Liturgy and Music in the Philippines. It includes 25 hymns adapted from indigenous songs of six ethnic groups. The accompanying cassette tape allows us to understand how Indigenous churches performed these localized hymns at that time, making it valuable material for studying the localization of Christian music. ‘ISATSEQALAN’ and ‘ALAIYOAI’ are well-known traditional songs among the Paiwan society. However, the method of adaptation into hymns were different. Apart from the difference in languages used for adaptation, the variations in singing styles across different villages result in diverse dissemination of these songs among various churches and villages. This study adopts Nina Sun Eidsheim's perspective from 2019, which views sound as cultural and collective. Therefore, it attempts to understand the cultural background of the hymnal and the traditional characteristics of the Indigenous songs through interviews, historical documents, music scores, and field recordings. This study combines historical recordings and videos from different eras as comparisons to witness the localization of hymns, aiming to contribute to an understanding of the evolution in indigenous music within churches over time.

ABSTRACT. The report is devoted to the problems of the musical and dance culture of the Kalmyks, who have lived in the steppes of the Volga region for more than 400 years. Modern scientists of Kalmykia are successfully engaged in field expeditions, descriptions and reconstructions of Kalmyk music and dances (Badmaeva 1992, Khabunova 1998, Dordzhieva 2000, Basangova 2009, Sharaeva 2010, Borlykova 2012, Bakaeva 2014, Namrueva 2022), but all their works are based on the study of Kalmyk settlements only on territory of Kalmykia itself. The author in his report relies both on their materials and on the materials of his own field expeditions to the “Astrakhan Kalmyks”, who remain outside the field of study. The importance of their examination is in varying degrees of the modern revival of their national culture. Europe, a Mongol-speaking people professing Buddhism, which by the mid-20th century had retained a semi-nomadic way of life. The forced displacement (deportation) of Kalmyks in 1943 from their native land and deprived of compact living for 13 years resulted in the death of a significant number of people, the loss of many elements and material features. and spiritual culture. Moving to Siberia from their places of residence imposed a ban on the use of the national language and religion. The report analyzes the problems of the mentality of Russian Kalmyks, the self-awareness of Kalmyks as people of the steppe. The Kalmyk dance culture is revealed as a marker of ethnic identity today, thanks to the preservation of ritual dances with elements of imitation of the habits of animals and birds. The presented materials and the author’s conclusions on the report are significant for the modern revival of Kalmyk musical and dance culture in schools, societies, and artistic groups. The author's theoretical conclusions about the rapid and slow reduction of culture among different subethnic groups of Kalmyks advance the understanding of the problems of the culture of displaced peoples in ethnomusicology. The report presents the author's field photo and video materials of the musical and dance culture of the Kalmyks.

ABSTRACT. Bon Odori is a type of dance held in many places in Japan during summer. My paper will deal with the repertoire and stylistic differences of Bon Odori dance from Oku-Mino and Tono part of Gifu prefecture in Japan. Though these areas are located in the relative proximity, their Bon dance events exhibit dissimilar features. The Bon Dance events practiced in Oku-Mino area keep more traditional style whereas those in Tono area are open to changes. For example, Gujo-Odori Bon dances in Oku-Mino area depend on the same song repertoire and dance movements formed around the beginning of the 20th century. In contrast, Bon dances of Tono areas use much newer musical materials in their repertoire, including J-Pop and Anime songs from the late 20th century. In this paper I will argue that (1) the existence of Hozon-kai conservation society, and (2) differences in the type of participants contribute to the stylistic differences in the music and dance of Bon events in these areas. Hozon-kai or conservation society has a role to set the standards according to the tradition, and Oku-Mino Bon events are overseen by the local Hozon-kai conservation society. However, no Hozon-kai officiates the Bon events in Tono area, thus, without the gate keeper, the event organizer may have more freedom. Oku-Mino and Tono attract different kinds of participants to the Bon event. The Gujo-Odori Bon dance in Oku-Mino area attract many visitors from the outside of the area, and the Gujo Bon events may be understood as a festival for tourists, who visit there in hope of experiencing and participating in the traditional Japanese Bon Odori festival. On the other hand, few tourists visit the Bon Odori in Tono, where the Bon events function as a festival primarily for its residents.

ABSTRACT. This research project explores the development of creative approaches to public Music and Dance. It achieves this by fostering the preservation and conservation of existing community music and dance traditions while simultaneously encouraging the creation of new cultural spaces within the community. The project utilizes a research and development approach to "creative conservation." This involves collaborative work with the community to integrate the concepts of public art, aesthetic ecology, relational aesthetics, and collaborative creativity. Particular emphasis is placed on the interrelationships between people and place.The project employs a working framework titled "Conserving, Deconstructing, and Creating" for festival development. Conserving: This entails retaining traditional aspects of performances. Examples include the "Phleng Lae Chom Khlong Mahasawat" Thep Prathan Phon Lakhon Chatri performance group and the Suwannasin traditional brass band and etc. Deconstructing: This refers to the collaborative design of performances between artists, scholars, and traditional artists. Examples include the "Yu Yen Pen Suk Na Salaya" "Luk Thung", "Phleng Ruea" and others.Creating: This encompasses the artistic products developed with project support. This process integrates visual arts, music, and dance into a dedicated performance element called "Kanlapaphruek."The research suggests several key areas for development: (1)Enhancing local fine arts across epistemological, methodological, and creative dimensions to address social issues. (2) Applying festival development experience to broader area improvement using arts as the primary toolset. (3) Implementing cross-platform collaboration among cultural and creative organizations for the benefit of cultural workers. (4) Facilitating cultural well-being through an integrated economic approach and a dedicated Art for Public policy aligned with SDG 11.4. and (5) Establishing cultural well-being as an alternative development gauge alongside GDP to highlight the arts' role in fostering healthy communities

ABSTRACT. When Tomé Pires wrote in 1512 “Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice,” he was referring to an already vibrant entrepôt located halfway between India and China at a narrow point in the Straits of Malacca. It was a natural rendezvous for traders dependent on seasonal monsoon winds. Control of the city meant effective control of the entire South China Sea spice trade. Over the centuries the Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch, and British all realized the strategic importance of Melaka; their sojourns resulted in the growth of new transnational communities.

Today, the descendants of one of these communities reside in a small fishing village called the Portuguese Settlement. Having navigated life in post-independence Malaysia by positioning themselves as a distinct cultural minority, this community is now challenged by a new threat: a Chinese-funded development project to build a chain of islands and a new city on reclaimed land in their seafront.

“Melaka Gateway” (now “M-WEZ”) is a deeply flawed project that ignores social and environmental impact studies in favor of quick profit and incentives to local and national politicians. Reclamation affects fishing communities all over Malaysia, but it affects the Portuguese Settlement more than most, for it is not only their livelihood that is threatened, but also their culture. Seduced by the developer’s promises of lump sums as “compensation,” families are pitted against each other, threating the stability of the community.

As the Portuguese Settlement becomes a muddy lagoon, residents will inevitably be forced from their land. Once their land is gone, they will have nowhere to call home. In this paper, I will discuss music- and dance- related projects that attempt to shore up human connections within a community severely endangered by the double threat of climate-related and man-made environmental destruction.

ABSTRACT. This research explores the evolution of "Noise Music," an emerging experimental genre, within the contemporary music scene of Southeast Asia (S.E.A.), with a primary focus on Noise artists from Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. The study investigates its emergence, development, and current trends, shedding light on how it evolves through the fusion of traditional influences and avant-garde experimentation in the region. Previous research has largely concentrated on Noise Music within a specific country and overlooked the correlation, comparison, and contrast among artists from different S.E.A. countries. Therefore, this study will compare practices of making noise music in these 3 localities through the examination of the techniques used by artists such as rEmPiT g0dDe$$, Senyawa and Cheryl Ong. It seeks to identify differences in aesthetic perspectives and how these might differ from the canon of Western precedents. Through a comparative analysis of three Noise artists, each representing Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia respectively, it seeks to understand the changes in perception and aesthetics regarding their works and to examine the factors influencing the trajectory of Noise Music evolution in S.E.A. This research expands our understanding of Noise Music within the contemporary music scene of Southeast Asia by examining its intersection with diverse cultures and traditions.

ABSTRACT. Sound recordings exhibit a peculiar paradox: they are historical records of collective cultural practice but are treated as isolatable commodities whose use are controlled by issues such as copyright and access to specific technologies. How does commodification effect the historical representation of musical cultures on sound recordings? How do these representation influence the ensuing cultural practices that orbit such recordings? This research examines these issues through the case study of Ansonia Records, its sale, and relaunch. Ansonia Records was founded in Manhattan in 1949 and released a large catalog of Latin American music over the subsequent decades, including releases from renowned artists like Arsenio Rodriguez and Trio Matamoros. The label ceased production in the 1980s and as the majority of the catalog was never digitized, thousands of recordings from the label’s vast catalog remained obscure in popular culture. In 2019, the label was sold to a California-based music supervisor/DJ and the entire catalog of analog master tapes was transported from a warehouse in New Jersey to the new headquarters of the label in California. The newly-helmed Ansonia began the process of introducing its catalog to a new generation of media consumers, digitizing its back catalog, making the newly-digitized albums available online, and licensing the recordings for use in other media (such as film). Through ethnographic investigation and archival research, this paper explores the negotiations that occur when sound recordings are treated as both speculative assets for the culture industry and as sites of collective memory that preserve cultural practices.

ABSTRACT. Rapper Alim Braxton had dreamed of recording an album for years, but he faced a technological problem. The problem was a lack of technology: he had no microphone, no music production software, no computer, no studio. He is unlikely ever to get direct access to such technology given that he lives on North Carolina’s Death Row. Moreover, he has had virtually no contact with modern music technology, having been been incarcerated since 1993. He has never used a computer, accessed the internet, or even owned a CD. Nevertheless, he has recorded a full-length album, Mercy on My Soul, which will be released in May 2024.

This paper explores the understudied consequences of technological inaccessibility for the work of incarcerated musicians, with Alim Braxton and his 2024 album as a case study. We begin with an overview of the “technology gap” (a concept borrowed from economic theory) between incarcerated and free musicians, as well as other relevant theoretical concepts (e.g., Rice’s “acoustical agency” and Fouché’s “Black vernacular technological creativity”). We then chronicle the long, fraught, and complex process of creating Mercy on My Soul, which Braxton recorded over the prison phone and which was engineered and produced by artists on the outside. Although Braxton’s story is distinctive in many ways, it reveals widespread obstacles faced by incarcerated and other marginalized musicians. More broadly, it illuminates some of the challenges and rewards of artistic collaborations between scholars and incarcerated musicians.

This is a co-authored paper that draws on nearly five years of correspondence, conversation, and collaboration between Alim Braxton and Mark Katz. If accepted, the paper will be presented by Katz but will substantially include Braxton’s voice through his written, spoken, and rapped words.

ABSTRACT. The emergence of camera performance in dance, influenced by platforms like social media and digital content creation, has transformed the landscape of dance practice and performance. Traditionally experienced live, dance now finds a significant presence in the digital realm, with choreographers and performers embracing the unique opportunities offered by the camera lens. This shift has blurred the boundaries between physical and virtual stages, prompting dancers to adapt their technique and expression to suit the demands of digital audiences. This paper seeks to investigate the multifaceted impact of camera performance on dance practice, choreography, spatial awareness and audience engagement in the digital age. It seeks to examine how the adoption of camera performance shapes the dynamics of dance creation and presentation, addressing the following key questions: How does dancing for the camera influence the form and aesthetics of dance? What are the implications for the relationship between choreographers and performers in the context of camera-based works? How do dancers navigate the challenges and opportunities presented by camera performance in terms of practice, rehearsal processes, and spatial awareness? How would the same choreographies, created for camera, fare in the non-virtual performance spaces? To address these questions, this research employs a mixed-methods approach, incorporating qualitative interviews with dancers and choreographers alongside quantitative analysis of dance videos and choreographic documentation. Through thematic analysis and pattern recognition, this study aims to identify the changes in movement dynamics, choreographic choices, and spatial awareness that occur when dance is crafted specifically for the camera. The study aims to illuminate camera performance's complexities and implications for artistic expression, audience engagement, and pedagogical practice, contributing to discourse in dance studies.

ABSTRACT. The present documentary film is the result of four participant action research trips to Mozambique between the years of 2019 and 2024, with the intent of developing the MidiMbira - a digital-acoustic hyperinstrument -, together with local collaborator May Mbira.. As a master mbira maker and solo live loop artist with a 15-year performance career in Maputo, May Mbira records traditional Mozambican instruments alongside his own voice into the Boss RC-505 mkii loopstation and remixes them in loco into a live tradern musical performance, navigating in improvisation between traditional soundings and electronic beats and effects provided by the hardware. The recently concluded Midi-Mbira - made in collaboration with Guillermo de Llera Blanes - has allowed May Mbira to increase his sonic gamut, potentiating his creative output as sonic pallet from a self-proclaimed african-futuristic ethos. In contemporary Mozambican mbira expression, no other artist equals May Mbira's as his 'creative space' is well respected and avidly observed by the artistic community. During those four years, a 'happy accident' occurred and Guillermo met Maneto; a master builder, instrumentalist and researcher of traditional instruments. As one of the few people left making and playing the Kankubué, Maneto has innovated the instrument, making it tunable, which makes it unique. Seeing that there is no recorded audio or visual records of the instrument in its contemporary form - despite Maneto's long record of collaborations with Maputo's artistic community. Guillermo volunteered to record Maneto's songs and release them in his own independent label.

As he records the tracks for his album Maneto's mastery of the Kankubué and percussion are evident, as is shown on the film. Also notable are his innovations with an electro-acoustic percussion. The film details Guillermo de Llera Blanes' research journey from an autobiographic journaling perspective - taken from his field diaries. By using storytelling as a medium through which to perform production of knowledge as an alternative form of academic output, Guillermo takes a decolonialist approach. He avoids extractive strategies through creative participation, prioritizes the production of value to partners and collaborators and focuses in on the human(e) aspect of fieldwork by embracing the researcher's personal experience as part of a shared scientific production.

ABSTRACT. The Cimarrona Pableña is a cultural manifestation that echoes all the components included in the definition of Intangible Cultural Heritage proposed by UNESCO in 2003. It is a local practice in the district of San Pablo that has been transmitted from generation to generation through and on the occasion of cantonal festivities. Among these is the renowned Diana Pableña festival, which consists of a parade that runs through the central streets of the district in the early hours of the morning, mainly during the patron saint festivities, but also on other occasions. This local practice that combines a musical component and a dance component through the masquerade, provides a sense of identity and belonging to the residents of the area. As the bearers of the tradition included in this proposal say, “there is no Pableña festivity without Cimarrona”, that is, the residents of San Pablo link all social ties to the presence of the musical band plus the masquerade called Cimarrona Pableña. This has been happening for many years, and it should be noted that there are two or three generations of musicians: one called Cimarrona Vieja among the bearers and another currently active one called “La Columbia”. The bearers of this tradition also indicate that girls, boys and young people from the community have expressed their desire to be musicians specifically to be part of the Cimarrona. This demonstrates the strong relationship of Pableña identity with the local practice of Cimarrona. At the national level, the Costa Rican Cimarrona was declared Intangible Cultural Heritage by executive decree No. 43302-C published in La Gaceta on January 19, 2022. As part of this cultural practice, the technical, aesthetic and cultural specificities of the San Pablo area show differentiating characteristics from the other cimarronas in the country.

ABSTRACT. The documentary “Devagan" (2024) explores the ritual performance of Nava Durgā, a Hindu tradition practiced by the Newar indigenous people of Bhaktapur, Nepal. The term "devagan" in Sanskrit refers to a group of deities. Since 1512, male members of the lower-caste Banmālā have been embodying the nine (nava) female manifestations of the goddess Durgā, performing the ritual dances over a nine-month period annually. This prolonged performance season symbolizes the perpetual cycle of death and rebirth in Hindu belief, with the Nava Durgā deities being (re)born during the Dasain festival in October and passing away on the day of Bhagasti in June of the following year. The film is structured around the narratives of three devagans from different generations within the same family. Indra Bahadur Banmālā, the grandfather, assumes the role of community leader overseeing the rituals. He narrates the myth of Nava Durgā, which is then brought to life through the performances of his son-in-law, Narayan Prasad Banmālā, and grandson, Laxmi Prasad Banmālā, both actively engaged devagans. "Devagan" represents the culmination of six years of collaborative fieldwork between the researcher and her Newar interlocutors. The film serves as a contribution to the Newar community by preserving and disseminating this tradition amidst challenges posed by rapid modernization and the marginalization of indigenous culture in Nepal. Its multi-layered structure delves into various ethnomusicological and anthropological themes, including the current status of Nava Durgā performance, tradition transmission, and the challenges faced by young devagans. Furthermore, the participatory approach and the researcher's identity as a female foreigner emerge as integral components of the observed reality.

ABSTRACT. (a)shore is a dance film that explores environmental awareness as an element of survival, a theme which connects urban and coastal communities. This film brings empathic awareness to the effects of human activities including urban encroachment, climate change, pollution and habitat destruction that have put coastal communities at risk. Through the synergy of dance, film and original music composition, audiences will be invited to consider their own personal connections between their immediate environment and with nature. Preliminary research includes interviews conducted with the director of the University of Georgia’s Marine Extension and with a UGA Marine Extension storm water specialist; and on-site visits to ecological preservation sites along the Georgia Sea Coast. Previous and relative projects include a concert dance work concerning glacial deterioration accompanied collaboratively by a harpist and multi-media artist; and a multimedia performance focused on cognitive dissonance within abusive relationships. To express the psychological experience of cognitive dissonance, its scenes were filmed in vast desert of White Sands National Park, New Mexico. The theme of (a)shore align with the focal points of the ICTMD Conference in the categories of Movement, Gesture, Embodiment; and Environment, Place, Displacement, and Relocation. At the heart of film lies the landscape itself. Filmed along the Georgia Sea Coast in Jekyll Island, Georgia (USA), the shore serves as an inspiration and muse. Through choreographed dance created in conjunction with an original music score, an interaction unfolds with the shoreline, symbolizing an interconnectedness between humanity and nature. The seashore becomes an interactive canvas, inviting the audience into this environment in a meaningful and sensory manner.The film aims to generate a deep relationship between humans and nature in consideration of the immediate and long-term challenges in balancing economic vitality, ecological integrity and social responsibility while upholding the core values of collaboration, innovation, sustainability and accountability.

ABSTRACT. Using Cantonese narrative singing in English as a case study, the objective of this workshop is to examine the feasibility and limitations of cultural translation. Cantonese naamyam is a narrative singing form that uses Cantonese dialect as its medium, employing a specific literature structure and a set form of musical accompaniment. The workshop draws inspiration from previous efforts to create Chinese opera in English, which involved writing new scripts and translating old stories with the goal of promoting it to non-Chinese speaking audiences. There are pros and cons, and idiomatic areas for improvement in producing Chinese opera in English that will serve as a reference to this workshop of singing and writing an English naamyam.

The workshop will commence with an introduction to naamyam and a demonstration of a selected piece called “客途秋恨” (Autumn Sorrows on a Journey of Exile). Following that, participants will be guided in singing an excerpt of the English version of the piece, which has been written by my team. Through the example of the English adaptation, I will explain how Cantonese tones and varying pitch levels are incorporated into naamyam composition, applying this understanding to the English language, and supporting it with musical knowledge. Finally, participants will have the opportunity to collectively create an English naamyam piece and participate in a group singing session.

This workshop is intended to assess the feasibility and limitations of cultural translation by transmitting Cantonese naamyam in English. It also aims to act as a bridge between Cantonese culture and various cultures worldwide, while exploring the potential and constraints of translating traditional literature-related music into English.

ABSTRACT. Soviet hydroelectric projects of the 1930s and 50s turned most of the Dnipro River into stagnant “seas.” These projects flooded rapids (that had obstructed shipping), some of the richest land on Earth, as well as archeological evidence of prehistoric settlements and numerous peoples and cultures who passed through the Pontic Steppe. They also flooded key Ukrainian historical sites. In 1956, the Kakhovka Dam flooded the lower Dnipro – the Velykyj Luh, or Great Meadow. It had been a huge wetland, offering sustenance to people who lived there, and concealment for those who learned the maze of waterways. The Luh’s natural wealth attracted adventurers, agriculturalists, and people escaping serfdom to “The Land Beyond the Rapids” – Zaporizhia. They eventually coalesced to defend the area and became the basis of the early modern Ukrainian nation.

On June 6th, 2023, retreating Russian forces exploded the Kakhovka Dam to block advancing Ukrainian troops – exposing what had been the Luh, and drawing the contemporary world’s attention to this site of two human-made ecological disasters. Echoes of the Luh, as it had been prior to the dams, and voices of people who had lived there, can be heard today in songs and stories. This workshop showcases the bandura, Ukraine’s national instrument, which emerged in the same area. Ballads and epic songs that were still sung circa 1900 by the kobzari – blind bards who played the bandura – were often set in the Great Meadow and its environs. The songs and stories shared in this workshop – delivered by one of the world’s foremost researchers and performers, a renowned musician and culture bearer of the tradition – speak to issues of cultural transmission, ecological preservation and destruction, colonialism and empire, and of personal trials of people caught in the middle of these conflicts and calamities – from late medieval times to present day.

ABSTRACT. Tap dancing, from the perspective of gestures, is an expression present in several cultures around the world, having different performance configurations. To understand each tap dance reality, it is necessary to take a generous look at the body and its ways of being in the world. To date, there has been an effervescence of tap dancing across the five continents; some quite well known, others not so much. There are still those that are yet to be discovered. What we propose is to identify possible founding elements of this dance expression and how they are articulated in the singularities of each culture. When observing tap dancing from different cultures, the multiplicity of postures, movements, sounds and shoes stands out; Given this, we cannot consider a specific culture, but a plurality of cultures, consequently, of tap dancing, that is, of tap dancing gestures. When approaching the cultural aspects of this art, it is inevitable to think about the ground, the earth, the feet and the action of hitting them on the ground. Thus, each people will bring different meanings to stomping, as they articulate these particular meanings and connect emotionally with the land, whether barefoot or not. The understanding that the diversity of tap dances lies in the uniqueness of each tap dancing body, is the impetus to search for the elementary principles that function as a link to this practice, made up of the triad: music, dance and shoes. By proposing tap dancing as a gesture, subdividing it into two categories: cultural gesture and artistic gesture, the aim is to expand the theme of the different cultural configurations of tap dancing using authors such as Hubert Godard (2002, 2004, 2006, 2010), the concept of “cantar-dançar-batucar” de Fu-Kiau in Zeca Ligiéro (2011a, 2011b), the book Arquivo e Repertório and DianaTaylor (2013), as well as iconographic and videographic references.

ABSTRACT. Ketuk tilu is a popular dance from Sunda (West Java) that, born as a ritual of fertility, acquired a ludic and social dimension in the 19th century. At that time, it involved a few musicians and a female singer-dancer—called ronggeng—who often ended up being prostituted after dancing with the various men present at the celebration. Nowadays the connection to prostitution is tenuous, the dance having been technically developed—even academized—and the flirting among man and woman becoming just symbolic. However, the interactions between the dancers, as well as the interplay between moves and music, are still structured by mincid and mencug, two types of dialogue that give shape to the choreographies. Scarcity of primary sources does not allow us to trace the changes ketuk tilu underwent from ritual to spectacularized form, but the highly documented presence of this genre during the 1889 Paris’ Exposition Universelle permits us to reconstruct some of its performing conventions at the time. For that occasion, logistic conditions imposed by the organizers gave rise to an uncommon staging in which the female dancer had to interact with the same male every evening during the six months of the exhibition, in a pantomime of a love scene that didn’t presuppose any sexual intercourse at the end of the show. Drawing on historical research and the embodiment of current ketuk tilu practices, this paper—part of my doctoral thesis in progress—focuses on the way seduction was incarnated through Sundanese dance conventions, highlighting the performative implications of decontextualizing and spectacularizing social dances. It also aims to reflect on how Western audiences, based on 19th century codes of physical behaviour, generated their own narratives about eroticism and immorality, bringing to the surface the dynamics of objectification and the way in which colonized bodies were rendered for consumption.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines solo Indian male dancing of the early twentieth century to explore new templates of masculinity. Through analysis of archival print media reviews and film records, I explore how prominent Indian male dancers such as Uday Shankar (b. Uday Shankar Chowdhury, 1900–1977), Ram Gopal (b. Bissano Ram Gopal, 1912–2003) and U.S Krishna Rao (b. Ubhayakar Shivaram Krishna Rao 1912–2005) embodied a distinctly Indian postcolonial masculinity through their dance technique. However, Western critical narratives exoticized and feminized the subaltern male body in concert with popular stagings of race and ethnicity in ways that placed the dancers outside normative and hegemonic masculinities. In contrast, in India, the anti-Oriental nationalist discourse of the 1930s offered scope for performative reflection of indigenous gendered identities. My work will thus explore how Indian male dancing of the early twentieth century generated an aesthetic for non-hegemonic gender embodiment. In India, the male dance form has always occupied an ambiguous space. Textual historical narratives invoke male deity Siva as the divine legacy for male dancing and eighth-century temple sculptures substantiated the eminence and popularity of male dancers. However, the dance revival movement of the 1930s–50s which saw the displacement of hereditary dance and the development of a canonical nationalist representation led to the fall of male dancing. The female dancer monopolized the solo dance stage as an embodiment of new nationalist respectability and the men supported as conductors (nattuvanars). On the other hand, the ensemble dance-drama practices of South India such as Kathakali, Kuchipudi, Yakshagana, and Bhagavata Mela, were hegemonic all-male forms where male dancers played mythic and non-mythic characters and performed female impersonation. My paper will thus propose to reclaim these historic indigenous gendered male enactments in solo dance in ways that empower the current transnational male dance scene.

ABSTRACT. Anthropologist of dance, Joann Kealiinohomoku presented her theory of dance culture at the 1972 Committee on Research in Dance conference entitled, “New Dimensions in Dance Research: Anthropology and Dance—The American Indian.” That ground-breaking event, which laid the foundation upon which the discipline of dance anthropology emerged in the United States, continues to provide the clearest roadmap to understanding how dance serves as a human universal and functions in society. My two-part paper further explores why such ideas, shaped by the context in which the CORD conference occurred, provide a model for applied dance anthropology.

Part one interrogates historical factors informing Kealiinohomoku’s vision for a theory of dance culture, which includes contributions by early 20th century scholars, Ella Cara Deloria and Zora Neale Hurston. These Boasian protégés ignited interest in studying cultural practices from an emic perspective, recognizing situated knowledge as an adaptation and survival strategy. This discussion leads to a brief review of ethnochoreologist, Gertrude Kurath’s 1960 article, “A Panorama of Dance Ethnology,” which impacted comparative studies designed to examine human development concerns—a core value of applied anthropology. Kurath offers an etic framework to examine the dynamic processes by which people construct, store, and transmit meaning, setting the stage for Kealiinohomoku’s concept of dance culture to unfold.

The second part explicates dance culture as a microcosm of the total culture and cornerstone of applied dance anthropology. By expanding Kealiinohomoku’s ideas, my model proposes that dance culture epitomizes culture through purposeful, relational movement. This suggestion draws heavily from decolonial methods to fuel a transformative paradigm, driven by the possibilities of a better, more sustainable future. Its inclusive, reflexive, praxis-based approach addresses problems affecting quality of life—putting ‘anthropology’ to use. Numerous examples illustrate the study of dance culture to identify, analyze, and solve practical issues as applied dance anthropology.

ABSTRACT. Abstract

Of all the Micronesian islands, and before being colonized by Spain in 1668, the upper class Matua of the Mariana Island Chamorros had a rice culture. It was heavily influenced by Hindu belief and practice. Although mention of a rice pounding dance has survived in oral history, other than the linguistic significance of its name and the description that the fayao was slow and undulating, the specifics of the dance, have remained unknown. Archeologists have identified rice mortars, pounders and the type of rice used by the Matua as being Indonesian. In the absence of a continuing live rice pounding tradition, indications of its existence must be found in disciplines other than music. DNA was revealed in 2013, that links Matua DNA, to a migration from Sulawesi to the Marianas that culminated 1000 years ago, at the time when Hindu influence was at its height in Indonesia. Females were linked to Central Sulawesi and males to northeastern Indonesia within the Sulawesi diaspora. These ‘pre-Chamorros’ brought the rice tradition to the Marianas along with the ancestral beliefs that attended its cultivation. This revelation has brought together many seemingly disjointed cultural facts into a more unified perspective. The fayao exemplifies indigenous Matua dance with roots in Sulawesi. If there is a model for indigenous Matua dance, this research suggests that it is to be found in the rituals of Toraja and Bugis royalty in Central Sulawesi.

ABSTRACT. According to the Register of Indigenous Small-Numbered Peoples of the Russian Federation, 46 groups are recognized as such. The relations between ‘metropole’ and these groups are ever-changing, and one of the ways of looking at them is through the dance lens. In this research I would like to examine the changes of these relations in the USSR though dance politics, and to analyze how this ancestry is shaping (and potentially mirroring) the modern relations.

The overall trend in the Soviet politics can be illustrated by the Resolution of the communist party (1919): “There is no type of science or art that is not connected to the great ideas of communism”. Different strategies of the nation building and work with local identities were implemented. Art (and dance in particular) became a useful communicative tool, which aimed to replace the national identity with the Soviet one. The process was also characterized by the colonial attitude towards the seemingly equal republics of the fraternal family of Soviet peoples.

Although the various ensembles of music and dance were a well designed state project, they should not be seen merely as “fakelore” (Dorson 1969). The practitioners were actors in the process of heritage creation (Peleikis 2010), who made the state project private through “samodeyatelnost” (amateur performance).

After the collapse of the Soviet Union it is necessary to examine how these relations with the indigenous peoples have changed, and what is remained of the Soviet ancestry in the XXI century. The paper involves the modern day data from Archangelsk ensemble “Siverko”, Komi philharmonic ensemble “Asya Kya”, Chukotka ensemble “Kochevnik”, Buryatia etho-studio “Buin Khan”, and the Dagestan ensemble “Vishe Gor”. This geographical scope, as well as a different levels of proficiency of these ensembles gives a rough understanding of the situation in the modern context.

ABSTRACT. In the Spanish-speaking southwestern part of Nicaragua a music-dance complex that originated in the more indigenous heritage populations has expanded in practice over the last one-hundred years and become a signifier of regional and even national identity. Its original appearance remains unknown, lost in oral tradition and undocumented in written sources until the late 1800s. It centers around the Masaya region, both in the indigenous populated countryside and most famously in the Indian community of Monimbó that borders the large city of Masaya. Indigenous continuity of the Chorotega-Mangue peoples in this zone was once recognized by the more clearcut signs of dress and language that differs from the majority mestizo, mixed-race population. Both of these social markers gradually disappeared by the beginnings of the 1900s, leaving a complex of cultural practices centered around music and dance as the principal signs of "Indianess." The most prominent is a couple dance, accompanied by the unique diatonic marimba de arco with guitar and smaller guitarilla. Beginning in the 1920s the more European and economically empowered mestizo Masayans significantly appropriated reproduction of the dance, though all groups remain dependent upon more indigenous musicians. In the 1980s the Sandinista Revolution promoted cultural forms considered more indigenous as markers of local sovereignty. This new appreciation of the indigenous component of the national makeup led to national semi-professional dance troupes that reproduced versions of the marimba dance. Locally, in recent decades this appropriation expanded into a proliferation of groups in Masaya. Though the music remains very codified, this continual expansion has mutated the dance style and attire within Masaya, as well as the ambiance and interaction of the attending audience. Drawing upon forty years of fieldwork, I examine the historical and contemporary positioning of this music and dance practice as a marker of indigeniety within constantly changing contexts.

ABSTRACT. The Men’s Fancy Dance is one of the most popular styles of contemporary Native American powwow music and dance. Powwow, originating from Tribal Nations of the Great Plains, serves as both a social gathering and an intertribal repertoire of music and dance. By the mid-20th century, many Tribal Nations/First Nations throughout the U.S. and Canada embraced powwow as a political and collective expression of intertribal identity (Ellis 2003). The Drum, encompassing both the instrument and the singers, is the heartbeat of powwow and has an inseparable connection with dancers. Fancy Dance, in particular, has predominantly revolved around contests, where dancers compete with each other for prize money and social prestige, accompanied by an implicit competition between the Drum and Fancy Dancers. This paper explores the dynamic contest-based relationship between Drum groups and Fancy Dancers. I argue that the intertwined nature of contest between Drum and Fancy Dancers leads to the constant creation of innovative songs and dance moves. Drawing on over 12 years of autoethnographic experience as both a Southern style powwow singer and as a Men’s Fancy Dancer, alongside interviews with fellow Fancy Dancers and powwow singers, this paper offers a unique dual perspective on the interplay between powwow singers and dancers. By focusing on this relationship, this paper reveals the ways in which powwow singers and Fancy Dancers creatively (re)produce new musical and dance expressions, while also highlighting how powwow spectators popularize Fancy songs and dances on social media platforms. Given the scarcity of ethnomusicological literature on the Men’s Fancy Dance, this paper contributes to discussions about contemporary forms of Indigeneity and their performance practices in the U.S., as well as embodied relationalities that underpin Indigenous music making and dancing.

ABSTRACT. Despite their indigenous status being protected in the Singapore constitution, the indigeneity of Singapore’s Malay-Muslim minority is rarely acknowledged or discussed in public discourse. Nevertheless, the activities of Singapore’s Malay traditional music community strive to preserve reconstitute indigenous Malay concepts, practices, and perspectives through traditional music. Building on ethnographic fieldwork including participation in traditional music through the learning of traditional instruments, collaborative compositional projects, and performance with local Malay ensembles, this conference paper discusses the goals and motivations of Singapore’s Malay traditional music community. With an analysis framed on understanding regimes of value in this community, which privilege academic achievement and economic success, I advocate for a primarily affective and indigenous-centred understanding of the cosmopolitan processes through which Malay culture has developed and continues to evolve, both within the context of Singapore and throughout the wider world as inhabited by Malay people/s. I discuss Malay concepts of affective awareness, knowledge and expertise such as lembut (gentleness) and jiwa (soul), situating lembut as a possible frame through which to understand Malay perspectives in contestations between the Singaporean state and its Malay-Muslim minority population. By building on notions of syncretism and localisation within existing literature on Malay culture and particularly Malay music, I suggest that a concept I call “cosmopolitan indigenisation” is a mechanism through which new ideas may be incorporated into Malay cultural and creative expression. I explore the consequences of the fragmentation of musical knowledge within the traditional music community, in part linked to the absence of its previous generation of elders, and draw attention to the ways in which the community draws on epistemologies from other musical traditions in its multiple approaches to the reconstitution of a pathway to musical mastery for local traditional musicians. This results in a reclamation of affective space, a revitalisation of affective awareness, and, perhaps, the gradual reconstitution of indigenous ways of being for Malay communities in Singapore.

ABSTRACT. The traditional vocal repertoire of the Philippines’ Central Visayas encompasses linguistic traditions and subdialects, including Visayan, Bisayan, and Cebuano. This oral heritage provides a unique opportunity for comparative analysis, allowing scholars to discern normative patterns and outlier variations in pitch collections and scalar patterns across different song repertoires, geographies, and languages. In the mid-20th century, Silliman University and Indiana University supported the field recording and transcription efforts of Priscilla Magdamo. Her seminal work, "Folk Songs of the Visayas" (1957-58), comprising six volumes, stands as the largest corpus of traditional vocal repertoire in Visayan, Bisayan, and Cebuano languages transcribed by a single Philippine scholar possessing both linguistic and cultural expertise of the repertoire. Magdamo's transcriptions provide a foundational resource for scholarly analysis and exploration.

This presentation evaluates and juxtaposes various analytical approaches applied to this repertoire, drawing from the music pedagogical approach of Zoltan Kodály's pitch maps and post-tonal quantitative methodologies. Through employing contemporary analytical techniques such as tonic-centered successive-interval arrays and composite pitch collection mappings, normative patterns and outlier nuances of tonalities inherent in the Central Visayan vocal traditions can be identified. This presentation builds upon the analytic methodologies employed by the author assessing trends of other multilingual traditional vocal repertoires. By extending the scope of inquiry and incorporating such comparative analytic frameworks, this work contributes to the understanding of the cultural, linguistic, and musical dimensions embedded within these oral traditions.

Through these analytic approaches, analysts, pedagogues, and practitioners can gain insights into the intricate interplay between the music and language of Central Visayas, as a microcosm of other Philippine traditional song traditions. By engaging with both historical archives and contemporary analytical tools, this research serves to contribute to the preservation and appreciation of this vibrant cultural heritage for future generations of Philippine and diaspora music scholars and practitioners alike.

ABSTRACT. Contour in music has been extensively studied by theorists, discussed by musicians, and depicted graphically in notation and by computational means. Further, contour underlies countless metaphors and metaphorical relations between perception and conception of music. Despite this centrality, contour in music is not literal but metaphorical. The knowledge that contour in music is metaphor affords listening to the same phenomena through different metaphors and so can transform the way many understand music. The present paper explores one of these possibilities through a case study of Balinese gamelan in the context of ngaben, the Balinese cremation ceremony.

An important component of Balinese music is ombak, which translates as “wave(s)”. Ombak, formed in performance, are changes in tempo and dynamics that interact with, or even manifest, a piece’s large-scale structure. We propose that these changes in tempo and dynamics are not simply musical phenomena but are connected to a broader phenomenon: surges in social activity that move through a community in action. We refer to this phenomenon as “co-motion”. Listening to ombak in individual pieces of Balinese gamelan through the metaphor of contour can violently separate music from community, contain, and commodify. Listening in the context of ngaben—listening to the entire event—a different picture emerges, one in which ombak metaphorically represents co-motion, the movement of people participating in the ceremony, enveloping all of them into its structure. Listening to Balinese gamelan beyond the metaphor of contour affords a different understanding of the dynamic relationships between community and music and helps facilitate a decolonization of listening.

ABSTRACT. Kŏṭuṅṅallūr Temple and it’s month-long Bharaṇi festival, with its diverse ritual traditions and vast community participation, is a significant identity in the socio-cultural and religious sphere of Keral̤aṃ. The Bharaṇi Festival is a site of intense sacrificial paradigms that involve lower caste bleeding bodies. Thousands of Komaraṃ-s (oracles), believed to be the representatives and devotees of goddess Bhadrakāl̤i, mutilates their forehead and spill blood as an offering to the deity. From the next day is the Bharaṇi festival, following which the temple is closed for seven days - a period designated specifically to cleanse the temple of impurities. My research focuses here would be an attempt to understand the complexities of the definition of indigeneity in the context of Kerala or, in broader terms, India with the practices associated with Kodungallur Bharani. Self-mutilated bodies and their dance transcend their knowledge of worship, space, and faith in “original ways”. I shall also collect and analyze popular songs with obscene references that form an essential part of the ritual. The songs sung at the festival interrupt the conventional binaries of sacred/profane, and they challenge the moral codes of erotica and abuse. My paper will examine the complexities emerging from the celebration of lower caste bodies and their cultural beliefs in a space that no longer belongs to them but has been historically appropriated by upper caste groups. This research gains significance as the festival and its location exhibit the so-called ‘primitive’ cultural practices that challenge the colonial/post-colonial imagination of the nation and its ‘refined’ majoritarian Hindu religious identity, and as a result, is currently being challenged on legal and moral grounds. However, even in the current times, a symbolic set of performances continues to manifest and transmit the context of decolonization by asserting space and establishing identity through their songs and dance.

ABSTRACT. The bandio Williche corresponds to a musical instrument deeply rooted to the Mapuche Williche indigenous communities from San Juan de la Costa, in southern Chile, due mostly to it plays a central role in the development of several traditional practices. In general, this instrument can be described as a steel-string acoustic guitar with a body similar to a banjo. The bandio Williche is scarcely reported by the literature, presumably because of two factors. First, the study of Mapuche music culture has been articulated from the practices developed by culture bearers linked to the Araucania Region, which has led to the conformation of a cannon about the Mapuche that do not properly reflect some key features regarding its subgroups or territorial identities. Second, the bandio Williche differs from the ancestral and pre-Columbian imaginary construct on which the other Mapuche instruments are commonly related, causing that several Mapuche and no-Mapuche cultural agents tend to label this instruments as an artifact that is not part of the local indigenous culture. This presentation seeks to communicate the first findings of a study that aims to characterize the bandio Williche, addressing the probably origins of the instrument in the area, its repertoire and functions within traditional practices, as well as some aspects related to its making and performance. Moreover, this presentation seeks to outline the visions of some local culture bearers related to notions of cultural hybridity and indigenous essentialism.

ABSTRACT. For more than forty years, tourists have travelled en masse to Taquile Island in the Peruvian waters of Lake Titicaca, with the goal of experiencing local indigenous life among some of the “last Incas.” While critiques of similar model villages, heritage sites, and the potential for exploitation of indigenous peoples suffuse the robust literature on cultural tourism, Taquile’s model of grassroots control over the local tourist industry—assisted by the natural borders of the island itself and determined community leaders—have made it a celebrated, if regularly challenged, outlier in this narrative. In this paper, I focus on the Fiesta de Santiago, the island’s patron saint festival and now also a two-week arts fair, as a dynamic, autoethnographic text: a changing story expressed in music, dance, textiles, speech, food, and even modes of communal organization, that Taquileños tell to themselves and to the world about who they are as an indigenous community in the 21st century.

ABSTRACT. Rap artists of Mapuche origin in Ngulumapu (Mapuche territory to the west of the Andes), who came into their own during the 1990s and early 2000s, have a lot to say about processes of education and language revitalization, and about the relationship between their music and traditional expressions in Mapuche culture. This paper considers two emblematic examples, in the lives and music of Jaas Newen, and Jano Weichafe. Jaas hails from the San Joaquín sector of Santiago, and was initially immersed in hip hop during trips to Cerro Navia, an expansive, working-class area on the western periphery of the city. After having taken classes in Mapuzugun in Santiago, she traveled roughly 600 kilometers to live for a period in a Mapuche community in the south of the territory, often regarded as the geographic center of gravity for Mapuche culture. This experience consolidated her sense of self as a Mapuche woman and rapper, and served as the basis for several important projects. Jano, by contrast, hails from a lof (local territory) in the rural south, and was brought to the city of Temuco, where his family migrated around the time of Chile’s political upheavals in the 1970s, and where he began rapping as part of youth-oriented neighborhood initiatives involving Mapuche migrants. This paper discusses vectors of oral tradition in both artists’ repertoires and life experiences, in light of their transit from either the city to the country (Jaas) or vice-versa (Jano). Once considered evidence of the disappearance of Mapuche culture, the idea of a rural-urban dichotomy in Mapuche territory is called into question in myriad ways by hip hop artists, whose testimonies teach a great deal about cultural resistance, and about what to listen for in the study of contemporary Mapuche music.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, I inquire about how the global popularity of African-American jazz-related genres informed local ideas about Afro-Peruvian musicality in Peru in the 1920s. The popularity of jazz, charleston, and fox-trot in Lima captured the attention of the specialized local media, who compared those genres with Afro-Peruvian music, which they understood as an appendix of musical practice of Spanish descent. Along with those genres, international articles–primarily European–also arrived in Peru, exposing local audiences to new ideas on the relationship between music and race. Thus, the comparisons between jazz-related genres and Afro-Peruvian music advanced by Peruvian media writers entailed an engagement with global ideas that impacted the representation of Afro-Peruvians in the public sphere. Heavily featuring racial stereotypes, those comparisons suggested the superiority of Afro-Peruvian music–ultimately “assimilated” to Spanish-descendant culture–over the so-called “savage” jazz, which they saw as the product of the marginalization of African-Americans from the White USA establishment. The paper analyzes African-American and Afro-Peruvian music representations in Peruvian newspapers and illustrated between 1920 and 1931. Based on developments in critical race studies, I argue that the authors of those representations repeatedly used the comparative representation of both Afro-diasporic musical communities to advance a racial paternalist discourse on black musicality that legitimized the existing racial hierarchies in Peru. Such discourse dominated public representations of Afro-Peruvian musicality and musicians until the emergence of the Afro-Peruvian music revival (Feldman 2006) in the 1950s. The relevance of this research resides in the fact that, while ideas on indigenous musicality in Peru during the first half of the XX century have received significant scholarly attention, ideas on Afro-Peruvian musicality during the same period remain underexplored.

ABSTRACT. Puppetry, a traditional folk art in China, is a multifaceted discipline that amalgamates melody, repertoire, dance, and visual art, boasting significant historical, artistic, and educational value. Wuhua string puppetry, a variant within this genre, serves as a crucial component of Hakka culture, mirroring the cultural psychology and aesthetic preferences of the Hakka people across various epochs and exhibiting pronounced regional traits. This study adopts an ethnomusicological approach, utilizing both historical research and fieldwork. After delineating the context of Wuhua puppetry, this research focuses on a puppetry workshop in Meizhou City, Guangdong Province, as a case study. It examines the organizational structure, personnel dynamics, performance practices, and daily operations of the workshop. Additionally, it provides a comprehensive analysis of the historical evolution, current state of transmission, artistic features, cultural implications, and functional attributes of Wuhua puppetry. Concurrently, it addresses the challenges faced in its preservation, proposing strategies for its safeguarding within the framework of intangible cultural heritage protection. This extensive study of Wuhua puppet theater aims to authentically document and reflect on the enduring legacy of puppet theater culture, contributing insights for the safeguarding and development of puppet theater and folk arts, while offering guidance for the preservation and perpetuation of Chinese traditional culture.

ABSTRACT. Guangdong Music (also known as Cantonese music), a distinguished genre of traditional silk and bamboo music, predominates in the Pearl River Delta and the Guangfu dialect region, with Guangzhou as its nucleus. This genre stands as a pillar of Lingnan's folk cultural heritage. Throughout its evolution, Guangdong music absorbed various cultural influences, transitioning from an obscure art form in the late Qing Dynasty to a mainstream musical style by the early 20th century, earning widespread acclaim. The 1920s and 1930s marked a critical phase in its historical development, during which the genre flourished and matured. He Liutang, a seminal figure from this era, played a pivotal role in the evolution of Guangdong music. This study employs historical research, fieldwork and musical analysis to elucidate He Liutang’s background, contributions, and historical achievements, thereby enriching the understanding of Guangdong music’s genesis and progression. Regrading to research findings, an examination of his adapted works has revealed the dynamics and specific attributes of stylistic changes in Cantonese music in the early 20th century. Further, an analysis of He Liutang’s original compositions underscored his unique contributions and innovations within the framework of traditional cultural amalgamation. This research offers both practical and scholarly insights, facilitating the exploration and innovation of traditional musical culture in contemporary settings.

ABSTRACT. The Guoshan Yao folk songs from Northern Guangdong are characterized by their absence of rigid pitches and rhythms, demonstrating their flexible and free characteristics. In their singing, the Yao people embrace the freedom of rubato, adeptly altering the rhythm, frequently repeating lyrics, and using an array of lining words to enrich the lyrical content with colour and artistry, singing in an improvisational style. They make use of both broad and narrow scales, flexibly modifying the sequence, length, volume, and dynamics. They skillfully incorporate a myriad of ornamental techniques for melodic development, expressing a wide range of emotional nuances.

ABSTRACT. The Rebab is the only bowed string instrument in the Central Javanese Gamelan ensemble, playing contrasting decorative melodies; it holds an important position and role in the ensemble, being seen as a leader in melodic aspects. This paper focuses on the performance system and rules of Central Javanese Gamelan music, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between the presentation of Rebab music and the cognitive processes and behaviors of the performers. The Javanese term "rebaban" not only refers to the music played on the Rebab but also signifies a unique method of incorporating Rebab parts into Gamelan music. This method is understood as a way of playing music that adheres to the rules and requirements of Javanese Gamelan music and specific musical pieces. It is linked to an aesthetic tradition with historical and cultural roots, continuously created and developed by individuals. Drawing from two important concepts in the performance tradition of Central Javanese Gamelan music - "garap" and "rasa", this study discusses the various rules, experiential knowledge, improvisational elements, and aesthetic pursuits and expressions in Rebab playing, and interprets these through ontological analysis of specific Gamelan music pieces. The concept of "garap" can encompass the cognitive and behavioral processes of Rebab instrumentalists, involving steps such as analyzing, understanding, interpreting, creating, and enhancing music. Ultimately, it points towards the aesthetic concept of "rasa" as a holistic emotional experiential goal. The Rebab players, based on traditional experiential knowledge, make a series of instant musical choices within a framework of rules and improvisation during performance. This process involves both conventional elements and personal creative factors, directly linked in traditional societal concepts to the performer's individual abilities and level. It is worth emphasizing that the experience derived from "tradition" has gained tremendous energy in the Javanese Gamelan music performance, serving as a guarantee for the inheritance and continuation of traditional ethnic musical styles, while also obtaining lasting vitality and vigor in creative performance practices.

ABSTRACT. Choreographer Ohad Naharin’s unforgettable work for Batsheva Dance Company, “Echad Mi Yodea,'' is a stirring study of choreomusicological embodiment: a rock adaptation of the traditional, accumulative Passover song, “Echad Mi Yodea” by Israeli rock band Nikmat HaTraktor, plays as dancers accumulate ever-intensifying choreographic phrases throughout the piece. The repetitions in the music and unyieldingly physical choreography demand acute sensory responsiveness to maximize the piece’s effect. Using Brian Massumi’s (2002) theories of proprioception, viscerality (interoception), and the autonomy and escape of affect, I address how the Batsheva dancers physically embody Naharin’s choreography and the musical viscerality of “Echad Mi Yodea.” Particular attention is paid to the music and movement’s interactions within my analysis to consider how “Echad’s” physical and sonic intensity produces a viscerality that has ingrained the piece into contemporary dance history. In doing so, my paper addresses the sonic-affective gap in Elinav Katan-Schmid’s Embodied Philosophy In Dance—the only book on Naharin’s philosophy of embodiment to date—through the 2016 performance of “Echad” by the Batsheva Young Ensemble. My paper ultimately argues that “Echad Mi Yodea'' remains Batsheva’s most memorable piece because of the dancer’s embodiment of its physical and musical relentlessness.

ABSTRACT. In Dunhuang, an oasis in Central Asia and the birthplace of Buddhism in China, paper treasures such as Buddhist sutras, frescos and rare musical scores have been preserved in caves. These have been spectacularly staged and reappropriated for artistic, cultural and identity-related purposes. In order to protect intangible cultural heritage, such as music and dance, an effective way of transmission has gradually emerged which is to combine it with the stage, in English staging, in Chinese wutai biaoyan 舞台表演 (a stage performance), in French mise en scène or mise en spectacle. Because of this, phrases like "reconstruction," "revival," "revitalization," and "reinvention" have gained popularity. And they are gradually entering the arena of ethnomusicology and playing a very important role in the preservation of intangible cultural heritage.

This paper will analyze the question of how to reconstruct ancient music and dance and bring it to the stage through a folkloric performance Silu huayu丝路花雨 (Rain of Flowers on the Silk Road) for the public and tourists. Silu huayu is a folk performance, and it's part of a tourism development program based on a reconstruction of music and dance, and costumes from the past. Its inaugural performance took place in 1979, two years after its conception in 1977, marking a significant milestone as the first non-political art show in China following the conclusion of the Cultural Revolution. This music and dance drama is not only about culture, but also about how culture is integrated into modern society, the public, tourism, intangible cultural heritage and so on.

ABSTRACT. Karanga dances like many other African traditions, have been explored largely focusing on movements as just mere manual routine patterns. Yet these movements are a physical language that equally express underpinning community philosophies and worldviews. It is argued that Karanga mhande dance tradition is practiced and performed mainly informed by the community ideologies and perspectives perceived in this study as philosophies. In mhande dance tradition it is the Karanga philosophy that embodies and influences the execution of dancing styles, choreography, ceremony of the venue, gestures, props and attire. Yet, in most cases such underlying principles in dance research studies are overlooked. It is therefore the purpose of this study to demonstrate the manifestation of a community philosophy as an embodiment in mhande dance, a rain asking practice of Karanga ethnic group in Zimbabwe. This study was an ethnographic study in which data was collected through in-depth interviews, participant observation, focus group study and document analysis. Based on its qualitative nature, the study engaged thematic data analysis. The study reveals that the Karanga philosophy broadly embodies and visualizes the knowledge systems (broadly perceived as a philosophy) of mhande dance culture creators.

ABSTRACT. The Janggu(장구), an hourglass drum with an asymmetrical shape, is an essential traditional Korean percussion instrument. Mainly in traditional Korean ritual music, the Janggu is combined with various percussion instruments according to the dance steps and movements of the performers, resulting in different rhythmic patterns of accompaniment. Moreover, along with the further development of Korean traditional rituals, more musical forms and performance styles using Janggu have gradually developed. This paper examines the use of Janggu music in today's Korea and shows that since the country's founding in 1948, performers and participants in traditional Korean rituals have negotiated and collaborated to create a new musical performance space for Janggumusic, the 'third space.' In this space, ritual performers and participants engaged in a prolonged aesthetic "mediation" that profoundly affected the aesthetics of Janggu music and ultimately produced new Janggu music texts. This paper demonstrates the hybrid nature of contemporary Janggu music performance. It explains the impact of the process of "de-ritualization" of Janggu music and the practice of "intangible cultural heritage preservation" on the construction of a "third space" for Janggu music. At the same time, the impact of the "third space" from the collision of the traditional ritual environment and social performance on the future creation and educational transmission of Korean Janggu music, as well as the response and theoretical innovation of Korean Janggu music in the face of the problem of constructing the "third space" are discussed in depth.

ABSTRACT. As an expression of traditional culture, the folk songs of the Slovaks of Vojvodina have survived for almost three centuries. They represent a specific area of ethnomusicological research which has been receiving increased attention recently. Interest in Slovak folk songs from Vojvodina has existed since the time of their first systematic collection. They were noticed not only by domestic, but also by foreign researchers. However, a major part of their work consisted of the documentation of the songs, whereas their theoretical reflection remained a lot more modest. Some research areas have not received major attention for several reasons. The presence of individual song forms and genres in the song repertoire of the Slovaks of Vojvodina is also an inadequately researched area. This paper focuses on a single song genre – war songs. These enjoyed a prominent status in the past. They were recorded in several Slovak villages in this region, but latest research has pointed out their significant presence in localities situated close to the former Military Frontier between the Habsburg Monarchy (later Austria-Hungary) and the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. The first part of this paper will briefly outline the historical context of the arrival of the Slovaks in this region. The second part will introduce a classification of Slovak war songs proposed by the prominent Slovak ethnomusicologist Soňa Burlasová. The third part will point out the occurrence and significance of war songs in the song repertoire of the Slovaks of Vojvodina. We consulted songs from archival units and published collections, drawing also on the songs we documented during our fieldwork in several localities of Vojvodina between 2014 and 2021. We compare these songs with war songs from the territory of Slovakia and point out some of their changes in their new environment.

ABSTRACT. Most often, musical sounds are on the move. Some sounds move together with people who make them. Other sounds move through other means such as radio, TV, social media, recordings and other forms of sound reproduction. This paper discusses the process of music mobility by focusing on the music of a Tanzanian musician Arnold Chiwalala who since the late 1990s has been living and working in Finland. First, it examines how Chiwalala fuses Tanzanian traditional music and playing techniques of Tanzanian stringed instruments Zeze and Litungu with Finnish music and the playing techniques of a Finnish national instrument Kantele. The paper argues that the Tanzanian music and sounds used by Chiwalala undergo various morphological, thematic, and performative transformations when they travel and are hybridized with Finnish music. To illustrate this thesis, the paper analyzes selected songs and video presentation of Chiwalala’s song performances. The hybridization process is vividly displayed through a new musical style invented by Chiwalala called Chizentele, a name that Chiwalala himself coined to refer this new musical style that combines styles of playing Tanzanian Zeze and Finnish Kantele instruments.

ABSTRACT. The original version of K’naan’s "Wavin’ Flag" speaks of wars, displacement, rising up against oppression, poverty and violence. Re-worked for Coca-Cola’s sponsorship of the 2010 World Cup, the song speaks of celebration, joy and unity. Again transformed to raise money for victims of the earthquake that devastated Haiti in 2010, the song morphs into a call for aid with each Canadian artist bringing his/her own voice and interpretation to their assigned lines, including Drake’s rapped verse. This paper takes a closer look at the changes "Wavin’ Flag" underwent, from a deeply personal, almost defiant work, to a peppy, upbeat call for soccer fans to wave their countries’ flags with pride, united under FIFA, to one of compassion, calling on Haiti to hold up their flag in the face of unspeakable tragedy. Each reworking of the song involved lyric, instrumental and other types of changes to suit its new intended audience and purpose. In following these chameleon- like adaptations we seek to understand "Wavin’ Flag’s" (and its Muslim-Somali-Canadian writer’s) ‘place in this world’.

ABSTRACT. At the 2019 Society for Ethnomusicology Pre-conference on Audiovisual Ethnomusicology, Frank Gunderson described cine-ethnomusicology as perpetually stuck in potential. From Margaret Mead’s critical comments about ethnography training in the introduction of the 1974 Principles of Visual Anthropology to this panel, cinematic ethnomusicology has perhaps not yet found itself.

Cine-ethnomusicology was derived from the concepts in the field of visual anthropology, mentioned by the scholars like Dauer (1969), Feld (1976), Zemp (1988), and Baily (1989). It laid an important groundwork in the descriptive techniques of filming music, and more important, with strong ethical implication. These approaches were mainly taken as a tool for documentation. Practical and pedagogical questions have not only not been settled but radical technological changes have proposed many new questions and approaches. A great deal has happened in recent years with a number of publications, the creation of the working group for Audiovisual Ethnomusicology and the creation of the online Journal for Audiovisual Ethnomusicology.

Ethnomusicology has always been open to influence and inspiration from outside the discipline, this is no different for cine-ethnomusicology. This panel of practicing cine-ethnomusicologists will discuss their practices and will show clips of their work. We will emphasize that perhaps potential is not a weakness but instead an ongoing openness that can contribute to the ongoing development of ethnomusicological theory and practice.

Paper 1: Beyond Observation: Perceptual Methodologies in Cine-Ethnomusicology

Cine-ethnomusicology was derived from the concepts in the field of visual anthropology, mentioned by the scholars like Dauer (1969), Feld (1976), Zemp (1988), and Baily (1989). It laid an important groundwork in the descriptive techniques of filming music, and more important, with strong ethical implication. These approaches were mainly taken as a tool for documentation.

My research explores a new avenue by employing audiovisual tools to analyze and interpret music within its very own cultural context, providing a comprehensive approach that expand and advance the methodologies in the field of cine-ethnomusicology, by sharing my experiences in filming instruments, ritual, and stage performances of indigenous musics in Yunnan and other regions in China. The new methodology I discovered through these experiences are: 1) a channel for understanding and communicating the local knowledge/wisdom embedded in a community’s musical traditions; 2) discover the multiple dimensions of indigenous people’s music making beyond the researchers’ visible spectrum; and 3) as a sensory amplifier, enriching our interactive perceptions of sound/music between the locals and ethnomusicologists. This shift from a primarily observational and documentary approaches towards an analytical and interpretive approaches in Cine-ethnomusicology suggests a new direction for the field, especially in terms of encouraging the researcher’s great and a more ethical imagination towards the indigenous people and their music.

Paper 2: How Can Ethnomusicologists and Commercial Cine-Documentary Filmmakers Collaborate? A Proposed Set of Guidelines

“Should one person be both filmmaker and anthropologist? Or should there be a filmmaker in addition to the anthropologist?” (Heider, 2006, 114) How does this apply in the case of ethnomusicological films? These questions lay at the heart of our ethnomusicological cine-documentary “Beyond Tradition”, which was successfully screened in public cinemas and at film festivals in Switzerland, Germany, and Austria in 2024, and won an honorary mention from the ICTMD film prize committee. In retrospect, however, the collaboration between an academic ethnomusicologist and a professional film team did not always prove easy, and as a team, we faced several severe challenges. In this paper, I would like to self-critically reflect on our entire film project, considering the often-contradictory interests of members of the film team’s artistic, scientific, and commercial perspectives. Comparing my own experiences to secondary literature by Heider (2006), Ballhaus and Engelbrecht (eds., 1995), D’Amico (2020) and others, I evaluate where “Beyond Tradition” was successful and where it failed. Based on this evaluation, in a second step, I propose some guidelines for a more successful collaboration between professional and commercial filmmakers and ethnomusicologists, demonstrating how I am currently applying these insights to my new ethnomusicological cine-film project “Herding Calls”: during the film’s preparation, while fund-raising, on location and during the editing process.

Paper 3: CineWorlding: feminist materialism and research-creation as inspiration for a renewed cine-ethnomusicology

CineWorlding (MacDonald 2023) as ritual performative (liminal) space extends the ongoing project of connecting performance studies and ethnography (Keil 1989; Waterman 2019) to investigate contemporary complexity (Marcus 1998) by making “trials or contests of norms” (Marcus 2013:200) in ethnomusicological practice. Turner’s theory and the performance studies that it contributed to has been enhanced by feminist technoscience and is taking new shape in research-creation (Stevance & Lacasse 2018; Loveless 2019, 2020; Manning 2016; 2020). CineWorlding, following Deleuze and Guattari, inquires after the ways that the intensive energies of homo sapien sapien are machined into the extensive coordinates of modern Humans and extramodern Humans. It is also more radically interested in the potentially ecologically problematic pharmotechnocapitalist enhancement of modern Humans and their transhuman becoming, along with the emergence of a variety of xhuman responses or modern Human alternatives (posthuman, metahuman, ahuman etc.). X is both a variable and a negation. An xhuman image of body and its transmemory goes far beyond the flesh of homo sapien sapien and in different directions with different orientations, histories, values, ethics, and dreams for the future. What happens to modern Human ethnographers when they become enhanced by cinema technologies?, does our becoming cyborg invite us to rethink cine-ethnography through feminist technoscience?, does it open new directions for cine-ethnomusicology?, does it shed light on xhuman formation?, and does it open new questions of political and ethical practice?.

ABSTRACT. American percussionist Arthur Hull has established an internationally popular group performance form “Drum Circle” by playing hand drum in recent years. In African societies, Drum Circle symbolizes unity and harmony, and play an integral role in celebrations, rites of passage and even conflict resolution. In Native American culture, Drum Circle is seen as a connection to the spirit world, with each beat representing the heartbeat of Mother Earth (Smith, 2020). Today, Drum Circle has found a place at festivals, therapy sessions and community gatherings, using rhythm as a universal language and transcending cultural boundaries (Faulkner, 2017). American dancer Gabriel Roth once said, "Rhythm is the mother tongue." Thus, when rhythm-based Drum Circle utilizes non-pitched instruments for training, it reduces the interference and difficulty of melody, lowering the barriers to learning and participation, thus enhancing the accessibility of Drum Circle (Cudd, 2020). Drum Circle is typically with one person in the center conducting through gestures and vocal cues, guiding participants to constantly change rhythms, and integrating sounds and beats with bodily movements (Anderson, 2010; Vinesett, Price & Wilson, 2015). To showcase its flexible forms, Drum Circle leads learners to become facilitators, introducing the principle of “teach without teaching” includes the transformation of leadership roles, focusing on group interaction to attend to every participant, and the giving and receiving (Hull, 1998). Research also presents the application of Drum Circle in teaching strategies from the military training, including Community, Educational, Training & Development, Health & Wellness Drum Circle (Hull, 1998, 2014a, 2014b; Stevens, 2012). Through participants engaging in mutual simulation training and practical experiences of performing in the community, Drum Circle demonstrates its inspiration for bodily discipline, liberation, and the cultivation of positive mentality constructed during the training process (Cole, 2002). Subsequently, aligning the benefits associated with Drum Circle in various fields with the objectives of military training demonstrates the gamified agency. It shows that Drum Circle can achieve training objectives through non-conventional training modes such as teaching, interaction, participation, and attention.

ABSTRACT. This study delves into the dynamics of Beijing's experimental music scene in the post-COVID-19 pandemic period (2022-2024), examining the participation of musicians and audiences, the characteristics of the music itself, personal experiences as both an experimental musician and audience member and the broader societal functions of experimental music performance. It highlights the vital role of this vibrant community in rebuilding social connections and nurturing expression, especially for marginalized young artists who operate outside established systems.

The participatory landscape of experimental music in Beijing encompasses a diverse array of musicians and audiences, characterized by innovative improvisation and creativity that reflects social realities and creates immersive sonic experiences.

Drawing on firsthand experiences within this scene, the study reveals how experimental music acts as a catalyst for social interaction and emotional connection among Beijing's youth after the pandemic. Through participatory practices and communal experiences, experimental music becomes a vehicle for rebuilding social bonds and fostering solidarity within the community.

Furthermore, the research underscores the broader societal functions of experimental music, including its role in facilitating community support and solidarity, providing a platform for identity and representation, and prompting critical reflection on the role of art in times of crisis. By creating spaces for dialogue, expression, and collective action, the experimental music scene emerges as a vital conduit for navigating the challenges of post-pandemic life and rebuilding a sense of social cohesion and belonging.

ABSTRACT. Western researchers have yet to discuss the significance of the body in music aesthetics. After studying guqin music for a long time, the author noticed that the fingering tablatures of ancient Chinese guqin music combined visual, auditory, and kinesthetic aspects while retaining the value of the body in musical aesthetics. The question arises: how is guqin music understood, accepted, and interpreted? It is not just through sound but also through the players' introspection and cultivation of their body and mind. Playing guqin music embodies a kinesthetic sense by combining hearing and vision. The ancient Chinese called this kinesthetic sense: "qi." This kinesthetic sense is related to the inner natural body energy when the body energy is associated with the external natural energy.

The author examines the synesthesia type that combines visual, auditory, and kinesthetic sounds produced by the imitated wild geese sound of the famous guqin tune "Wild Geese Descending on the Sandbank." It can be found the differences in the "onomatopoeic playing" of this piece with Western music only achieve imitation effects through auditory effects, changes in scales and melody, or intensity of sounds. Instead, it combines emotions through the synesthetic combination of vision, hearing, and kinesthesia. In addition to integrating consciousness into the music, the expression of the composer's "intention" also signifies a return to the state of "tranquility." Although the sound gradually changes from light to quiet to distant before disappearing, even if human ears cannot hear it, the player can still embody the characteristics of guqin music through the kinesthetic sense of the body and pulsation of the soul.

The above research can highlight the characteristics of guqin music in ethnomusicology and allow today's people to understand the secrets of guqin teaching and inheritance.

ABSTRACT. The "Nine Emperors' Meeting" in Ezhou City, Hubei Province, China is a Taoist ceremony held every year from the first to the ninth day of the ninth lunar month. It has a long history. At first, it was a primitive folk sacrificial activity. Later, it formed a traditional Taoist ceremony. Now, under the influence of the Internet, it has formed a simple and stylized performance model. This article takes the perspective of ethnography of ritual music performance, and explores the relationship between the performance behavior, performance context, and interaction methods among ritual participants in the current Ezhou "Nine Emperor Meeting" ritual music. It reveals the performance form of traditional Taoist rituals in the current Jingchu cultural environment, thereby expanding the writing style of ethnography of Jingchu Taoist music.

ABSTRACT. Mariachi music has experienced several waves of popularity in primary, secondary, and higher educational contexts throughout the United States since the 1950s. Currently, another wave is taking place in which mariachi classes, programs, and clubs are being founded in areas where they have not been considered traditional (e.g., Kansas, New England, etc.). Due to varying state curriculum standards and program resources, however, the ways in which mariachi music has been adapted in each state or community often differ. For example, in some states like Texas, complex arrangements for competition-bound groups are prioritized at all educational levels. Meanwhile, in states or regions with fewer Spanish-speaking students, music teachers who do not specialize in mariachi music need to seek out practical arrangements of standard repertoire that will be accessible for students in a new program. While mariachi musicians and music teachers have generally viewed the increase of mariachi programs and inclusion of Latin American musical styles in curricula as a positive shift, many mariachis share concerns about how teaching mariachi in schools––where learning is primarily based on transcriptions or unique arrangements of songs––is altering core stylistic practices valued within a traditional mariachi context. Some of these skills include improvising in stylistically appropriate ways, facility in transposing, and realizing chords for harmonizing across melodic voices. My paper will draw from my own experience as a music teacher (in secondary and higher education) and a mariachi musician. I will also draw from discussions with fellow teachers and mariachis, including their insights on designing inclusive curricula that considers some of these challenges.

ABSTRACT. Forms of critique are inherent in scholarly practice, both in the university and after graduation. Scholars build arguments designed to withstand external rebuttals. This “hermeneutics of suspicion” (Felski, 2008) trains scholars with a capitalist and colonialist mindset which ignores an ethic of care and a collaboration-focused approach to academic successes. Although this is considered a common mode of writing, there is a lack of care at the core of this practice. In this paper I show methods of counteracting this defensive writing strategy within scholarship. To move away from critique, Cheng suggests that academia needs to embrace a form of slow scholarship and slow writing, one that places care as the main priority (Cheng, 2016). This will build restorative approaches to the research that is conducted that challenges the hermeneutics of suspicion. I examine these calls for slow scholarship and a scholarship with an ethic of care juxtaposed with current modes of research presentation to show how scholarly practices are already attempting to disentangle from colonial practices based on critique and suspicion (la paperson, 2017). This is what I call the de-mything of a scholarship of isolation. The myth of a scholarship of isolation can be discredited is through a practice of acknowledging. The tradition of acknowledging has roots in Indigenous “intertribal visiting protocols,” (Law et al., 2023). Positionality statements are an invitation into Indigenous ways of knowing and being that serve to further contextualize both the researcher and their work. After a discussion of Bissett Perea’s model of positionality, I suggest a new category of positionality, the “scholarly family,” which will help de-myth a scholarship of isolation. If university educations truly are a form of preparation for scholarly work, then the neoliberal university must also become a slow and caring academic space that is disentangled from colonial priorities.

ABSTRACT. How do vernacular musical traditions find place in academia in the United States? What compromises and obstacles attend their inclusion? What opportunities could higher education afford these musics? This paper considers these challenges and opportunities through the lens of bluegrass music. This sub-genre of country music, a fundamentally oral tradition featuring tight harmony vocals and virtuosic instrumental breaks can be found in an increasing number of institutions of higher education in the US. In particular, it has thrived at East Tennessee State University (ETSU), where it has had an institutional presence since 1982, which I will describe in this presentation. At ETSU, the 50+ majors in the Bluegrass, Old-Time, and Roots music program take a three course sequence in Bluegrass History, a four-course music theory sequence tailored to the peculiarities of the genre, private lessons with top-level performers, and perform in one of 20+ bands. The program employs five tenured or tenure-track professors, several other full-time instructors, and over a dozen adjuncts. In this presentation, I will detail how the program arrived at this point through several iterations: 18 years in the department of music, the tensions that eventually led to relocating to a different department, and the following 22 years of sustained growth and expansion. This example offers an on-ground example of the potential of culturally diverse music teaching aspired to in Lind and McCoy (2016), and Sarath, Myers, & Campbell (2016). It also highlights how some US institutions might resist musical and cultural diversity, and offers one model of how traditional musicians can push against long-standing ideologies and entrenched cultural practices in order to facilitate meaningful, robust, and authentic inclusion.

ABSTRACT. This article is an ethnography of the connections between musical performance, tourism, and space in a cultural neighborhood in Xi’an. The Grand Tang Dynasty Everbright City (GTDEC) is a renovated pedestrian street that is adjunct to well-known tourist attractions in the city. As a planned area for sightseeing, performing, entertainment, and business, it has continuously contributed to phenomenal tourism revenue in mainland China. In this article, I introduce the spatial and cultural practices within the neighborhood to demonstrate how music in the historical context has been applied in tourist practices and how the spaces have been shaped in the process of image construction and urban regeneration. Taking the year 2020 as the dividing time and present fieldwork before and after it in comparison, in order to illustrate how these “Tang” elements were foregrounded through music and dance, such as the historical profundity of Chang’an, the majesty of the emperors and generals, cultural exchanges with foreign countries on the Silk Road, as well as grand court scenes. Invoking the work of Joseph Lam (2007), I use “musiking” and “musikscape” to describe and analyze musical activities as they relate to the cultural, historical, and spatial contexts they inhabit. Different scenes and sonic montages are constructed on the various stages, they are consistent but independent, providing a way to perceive the place by narrative and reinvention of tradition and history, shaping a nightly landscape and diversified urban musikscapes. However, the problems of adaptation, curtailment, and fictionalization of performances in tourist attractions still exist, the GTDEC in Xi’an, to a certain extent, realizes the imagination and satisfaction of this group of tourists in search of culture for a particular dynasty, a certain region, and a specific Chinese history.

ABSTRACT. Jiangnan Silk and Bamboo Music江南丝竹 is a distinguished representative of Chinese culture. On June 10, 2023, coinciding with China's Cultural and Natural Heritage Day, the“Yuanlin Sizhu园林丝竹，Shanshui Qingyin 山水清音 Concert”was held in Songjiang Fangta Garden（方塔园）in Shanghai. The concert producer endeavored to explore “historically informed performance” in the Chinese classical garden setting. Literary works from the Ming and Qing dynasties often mention: “After the garden was established, songs and dances were taught. People in the garden enjoyed flowers, got drunk, basked in the spring breeze, and indulged in Sizhu music.” Fangta Garden primarily consists of the Song dynasty Fang Tower, Ming dynasty decorative screen wall, and Qing dynasty palace complexes. Accordingly, We designed a route for " Soundwalking in the Fangta Garden ", with the characteristic landscape of the garden. When the scenery is changed, the Silk and Bamboo Music also changed. As the scenery changes with each step, so does the music, allowing the audience to wander through the classical garden, enjoying music and scenery at different times and in various settings. Strolling through the garden, the restored sounds of ancient Ming and Qing musical instruments can be heard, arousing a sense of history built upon years of research by Chinese ethnomusicologists. The concert is presented in a manner that adheres to historical “customs” and “fashions”, hoping that ethnomusicological research provides a solid foundation and references for the various details of traditional music performance practices.

ABSTRACT. In music performance, practice-led research methods focus on exploring and generating new knowledge and understanding through music performance activities. Music narrative is a new approach among the diversified analytical methods used since the second half of the 20th century. Under the practice-led research paradigm, through the textual interpretation and performance practice of the narrative works of traditional Chinese pipa, the audience can gain an in-depth understanding of the cultural connotations of the works through the representational narrative discourse, thus strengthening the audience’s understanding of the connotations of pipa’s Ping Hu school, and rebuilding their knowledge of the music of the Ping Hu School.

This article takes two representative works of the Pinghu School, Huaiyin Pingchu (淮阴平楚) and Yulun Pao (郁轮袍), as examples. Taking music narrative as the starting point, from the perspective of analysis and practice, it deeply analyzes the works' structure, emotion, and intention. It uses a series of technical performance treatments to convey the story and literary connotation of the work. The purpose is to shorten the distance between the performers and the audience on the stage so that the audience can deeply participate in interpreting the work based on synesthesia.

This article's attempt from a new perspective provides exploratory research for the audience to deeply understand the storytelling and humanistic nature of the work from a practical perspective. Ultimately, it helps to deepen new performance research methods and bring the distance between listeners and performers closer.

ABSTRACT. Name: Du mengsu Institution: Sichuan Conservatory of Music Position: Associate Researcher Email: dmsms@126.com Title: The Innovative Communication Pathway of Contemporary Sichuan Opera's Percussion Abstract: “Chuan-ju” is a typical local music drame in Sichuan Province that is one of the wonderful arts in Chinese Xiqu. It was once called Sichuan Opera. The gong and drum ensemble is pivotal in Sichuan opera, constituting a time-honored tradition integral to the performance. Boasting a wealth of gong and drum routines and a kaleidoscope of sounds, it stands as the most distinguished of all Chinese opera gong and drum ensembles. The primary method of inheritance lies in the apprenticeship of master-craftsmen within the profession.

To spread the art of Sichuan opera drumming more widely among the public, this project has selected 40 students in Sichuan Province, including elementary school music teachers, middle school music teachers, and undergraduate students majoring in percussion and composition at the Conservatory of Music. The project team has hired the best drummers from Sichuan Opera School and Sichuan Opera Troupe to teach the students during a 10-week course.

The course offers three approaches: protective inheritance, transformative inheritance, and creative inheritance. Protective inheritance aims to preserve traditional music varieties in their original and authentic form through traditional practices. Transformative inheritance seeks to transform traditional music varieties into practical classroom teaching formats in primary and secondary schools through transmission and learning. Creative inheritance refers to the innovative development of traditional music varieties on the basis of protective learning.

The inheritors of Sichuan opera gongs and drums orally impart the classic gongs and drum scriptures face-to-face in the course; Hand in hand, playing gongs and drums. At the same time, inheritors also provide theoretical explanations and cultural interpretations of Sichuan opera gongs and drums from multiple perspectives such as structure, timbre, and application, in order to enrich learners' overall understanding of traditional Chinese music culture.

The completion of this course presents two results: firstly, through the learning of music teachers in primary and secondary schools, Sichuan opera gongs and drums have been integrated into the music basic education platform, achieving innovative integration of traditional music professional communication and social music education. The second is to create new works that go beyond the traditional Sichuan opera drums and gongs through the study of students majoring in percussion and composition at the music academy. This forms an innovative path for the dissemination of traditional percussion music in contemporary times.

ABSTRACT. Short form video content is fast evolving, offering a medium for information dissemination that increasingly seeks to go beyond entertainment and speak to the level of the expert. Furthermore, short form videos are highly effective tools for sharing knowledge: as the fastest growing media in the world, they represent 80% of mobile traffic in North America, with studies showing that viewers retain around 90% of the content.

Beyond pop culture and entertainment, platforms such as RED in China have been using short form video content to promote arts education, and in China, academics in the social sciences have begun to look at how short form content is being used in arts education (Zhou, 2022 and Zhang, 2022), while traditional artists are using this and other platforms to connect with other artists and promote their work.

As short form video content becomes the world’s main mode of information dissemination and consumption, this paper asks how the study and practice of traditional music and dance forms are already making use of this media, and how they can utilize it to gain growth and traction. This paper will explore how traditional music and dance studies can embrace new modalities and technologies to increase awareness and raise the profile of the field and “trigger students’ interest in independent learning” (Zhou 2022) through content created by academic and industry experts to convey complex knowledge in attractive ways.

ABSTRACT. This study employs the Social Construction of Technology framework alongside a global historical perspective to investigate the socio-technical dynamics within popular music production and recording studios in Taiwan from the post-war period to the 1990s. Contrary to the prevalent acceptance of technological determinism in music production practices, which often attributes musical innovation primarily to Western technological advancements, this research proposes considering "making music" as an inherently technical practice. It focuses on how diverse relevant social groups within recording studios redefine this practice through their distinct cultural engagements, thereby challenging the deterministic narrative of technological evolution in historical writing. The analysis identifies key users of audio technology behind the popular music scene in Taiwan, including arrangers, producers, musicians, and recording engineers. It re-conceptualizes how these individuals from varied cultural backgrounds constitute distinctive social groups, each with their illustrative methodologies of music production. This study emphasizes that musical creation is a co-constructed process of technology and culture. This perspective not only deepens the understanding of music production but also introduces a novel approach to examining the interplay between technology and society, thereby advancing our comprehension of the interactions at both global and local levels.

ABSTRACT. In 1954, ethnomusicologist Klaus Wachsmann made around 200 recordings featuring music and dance from the Acholi people of Northern Uganda and, despite claims in academic circles about their relevance to a broader range of listeners (Nannyonga Tamusuza and Weintraub 2012, Topp Fargion 2012, Kahunde 2012), few audiences beyond scholars have engaged this collection thus far. Following current approaches from archival sound curation emphasising indigenous involvement and artist collaboration, I develop research methods as part of my PhD to circulate these recordings in the region. In this regard, I work closely with Leo PaLayeng, an Acholi traditional musician and producer who became interested in sampling these recordings within lakubukubu, a popular electronic genre based on Acholi traditional music which he pioneered in the early 2000s. Since 2021, PaLayeng produced new tracks based on the archival materials, and together we designed and delivered back to back DJ sets as a way to combine new and old recordings intended to reach audiences in Northern Uganda. While scholars have criticized the extractive dynamics in sampling ethnographic recordings —using them as ‘raw’ sonic materials without considerations for the contexts in which they were produced (eg. Seeger 1996, Théberge 2003, Zarza 2021)— sampling has also been considered as a way to repurpose those sounds along the cultural contexts that framed their content (eg. Jadinon 2017, Lobley 2020). In this paper, Leo PaLayeng and I discuss our reinterpretation of those archival materials through sound production and DJ sets and its relation to local and international dynamics of authorship, ownership and power.

ABSTRACT. How do national anthems construct their subjects through lyrics, rhythms, and social performance? Which subjects are included and excluded within national anthems? At their core, anthems attempt to unite citizens of the nation through music. While a feeling of “unisonance” might be created while singing (Anderson 1983), anthems generate widely different meanings to listeners/singers based upon their unique backgrounds and experiences. These thoughts led me to develop Detuning the Anthem: A Choose-Your-Own Audio Adventure, an interactive web-based audio artwork that encourages critical reflection and self-education about the role “O Canada” plays in Canadian society, and in their own personal lives.

The term “detuning” describes an approach to research-creation rooted in the idea of critical deconstruction, applied within the realm of musical composition. R. Murray Schafer’s The Tuning of the World (1977) famously argued that we need to hear the resonances of the earth and become attuned to them. I have adopted an oppositional reading to suggest that detuning the world can focus instead on dismantling the unjust social structures of settler-colonialism. I am motivated by Paulette Regan’s (2010) notion of unsettling the settler within, as well as Dylan Robinson and Keavy Martin’s concept of “aesthetic action” in my ongoing artistic projects that seek to produce affective, embodied, and sensory artistic experiences to reveal how “public spaces and national discourses privilege certain bodies and contribute to the ongoing oppression of others” (2016: 2-3).

Detuning is both an artistic practice and critical pedagogy that examines the ways in which sound and power intersect, most specifically within the context of nationalism and music in settler-colonial nations. This paper/performance will outline the ongoing and evolving research-creation approach used to develop Detuning the Anthem and provide audio excerpts from the full experience to demonstrate how this technique is materialized.

ABSTRACT. Jenny Game (composer and saxophone); Hemi Titokuwaru (countertenor); Māori singer Hemi Dibble and Australian saxophonist Jenny Game live in small townships the Yarra Ranges near Melbourne, Australia. Their music explores themes of environment and place, displacement, and reconnection. The proposed workshop will involve collective chanting and improvisation as vehicles for experiencing connectivity to nature and for change. Hemi’s vocal music is created in a communion with nature, specifically the forests of the Dandenong Ranges, where he expresses the “unrelenting grace of suffering” stemming from his post-colonial trauma and alienation from Māori culture. This expression “does not have to horrible, it can be powerful and beautiful.” For Hemi, the forest is observing him, and the music also communicates gratitude for this. Jenny Game composed an electroacoustic piece called The Hills Are Alive that celebrates these same forests and the vibrant First Nations communities that have always been and are still living ‘on country’. Hemi and Jenny presented this piece as part of a project entitled Reimagining Landscapes, at the Grainger Museum, University of Melbourne in 2023. The project was a collaboration with First Nations artist Amos Roach and centred on reimagining physical environments as well as social and cultural ‘landscapes’ around Melbourne prior to invasion and colonisation. The Hill Are Alive will be explored and used as a basis for the proposed workshop.

ABSTRACT. Kochari is one of the well-known Armenian folk dances, the varieties of which were traditionally widespread in each Armenian inhabited place. A short abandonment from kochari dance tradition refers to the Soviet Union period, when the culture, including folk culture, endured strong censorship. In post-Soviet period, kochari’s folk performance and former popularity was restored. In nowadays Armenia, kochari dance is very widespread. Not only elderly people, but also the youth and children dance kochari and perceive it as source of energy. Each region of Armenia has its own sub-variety of the kochari dance, and regional differences are displayed in the dance movement elements and music of the dance. At the same time, they share common concept, dance steps, and performance style. Kochari is registered in the UNESCO list of intangible heritage. This workshop proposes learning two varieties of Kochari dance. The participants will learns the dance steps, the performance details, and an original staging will be done by the end of the workshop. During the staging process, the performance abilities and interests of the participants will be considered. The accompanying music will be recordings by Kayt Band.

ABSTRACT. My paper deals with the issues of ethnomusicological study of Islamic devotional music of South India, particularly Tamil devotional songs, also known as gaana in regional as well as popular circulation, analyzing their lyrical and musical quality of expressing idioms of shared devotion. Most ethnomusicological studies of Sufi music in South Asia, such as Regula Qureshi, Abbas Burney, Akbar Hyder, Frishkopf, Manuel, Leiwnshohn among others have focused on North Indian or Dakhani/ Hyderbadai qawwali as the only form of Sufi music performed in South Asia, reflecting a colonial hegemony, prioritizing musical performances in Hindi, the dominant language of India, over vernacular counterparts.

Scholars of ethnomusicology in South Asia have overlooked an enormous repertoire of mystical poems in Tamil, Malayalam, as well as Arabic Tamil, i.e. Arawi language, composed by practicing Sufis, and published as Malās, somewhat similar to the composition of Mapplila songs, although the content of the lyrics is more specific to the local history of Kerala in the latter. The songs sung by Tamil singer turned parliamentarian E. M Hanifa, express the interconnections between shrine spirituality, particularly the dargah of Shahul Hamid, Islamic devotional songs or Nāts, and film music since the 50s, before A R Rahman was associated with the dargah, suggesting a hybrid and intersectional style, or rather, tradition of singing of Sufi musical practices with electronic, punk, rock, African and other forms of music. A proponent of this trend is Susheela Raman, with works like Vel Undu/Nuri Nuri, wherein she brings Hindu and Muslim devotional music together in the same song. Such musical fusion has also led to Coke Studio Tamil where devotional music is reconfigured as spiritual Sufi music and thus the “Sufi” in Sufi music needs to be critically understood in light of recent and past means of proliferations across South Asia.

ABSTRACT. In his Code de musique pratique (1760), Jean-Philippe Rameau introduced a whole-tone hexachord that he purported to be recorded by a Chinese, describing it as “perverse” (vicieux). This Chinese whole-tone scale was drawn from the pitches of a pan flute illustrated in Jean Joseph Marie Amiot’s De la musique moderne des Chinois (1754), which is a partial translation of Lülü zhengyi (The Correct Principles of Music, 1713), a music treatise commissioned by the Kangxi emperor. The pan flute in the treatise has sixteen pipes. According to the pitch labels of the pipes, each of them appears to be a whole tone apart from the adjacent pipes, seemingly forming two interlocking whole-tone scales.

What was not translated in Amiot’s manuscript and thus was overlooked by Rameau is the musical system giving rise to the apparent whole-tone scales, founded on a pipe tuning system that divides the octave into fourteen pitches. Although some Chinese music historians also interpreted them as whole-tone scales, I argue that they are actually hemitonic in nature. The Chinese pitch labels are dissociated from the twelve chromatic pitches that they are supposed to represent, as a pitch (lü) is not conceptualized as a perceptual property but rather as a physical entity associated with the length of the pipe that absolutizes it. By analyzing the fourteen-tone system and reconstructing the pitches and hence the scales that the system generates, I show the way in which pitch name translations could pose challenges in understanding traditional Chinese music theory.

ABSTRACT. Panel abstract

Taiwan is home to many indigenous peoples who have faced multiple waves of settler-colonialism since the seventeenth century, which drastically altered their sovereignty and ways of life. This panel focuses on forms of staged performance as sites for highlighting coloniality, indigenous modernity, and resurgence in three periods of indigenous-colonial encounters on this island over the last century. As Han researchers inspired by the frameworks of “density” (Anderson 2009; Perea 2022) in critical indigenous studies and world-shaping “encounters” (Bohlman 2013) in ethnomusicology, we aim to not only make perceptible strategies of settler-colonial governance that shape indigenous performance but also center indigenous tactics for maintaining agency and reshaping self-other relationships in rapidly changing socio-political environments. The first paper examines how the Thau people engaged with Japanese and Chinese KMT “control through placation” and strategies of co-opting “Nation” (ethnic group) into “Nation” (state) through staging “Thau pestle music and dance” between the 1920s to 1960s; the second paper explores the indigenous modernity of songs transmitted by Pangcah and Truku students, in song books co-created by indigenous students and a Han music teacher, newly arrived with the KMT government and martial law, in 1950s eastern Taiwan; the third paper focuses on the vital role of the pan-indigenous and indigenous-led Formosa Indigenous Song and Dance Troupe in resurgence, transmission, and education in post-martial law Taiwanese society, and its challenges and possibilities under the current multiculturalism governance. Through complex, changing, and heterogeneous forms and functions of dance and song, the three papers highlight how various groupings of indigenous people increase their density of subjectivity and actively engage with the changing structures of colonial modernity. Through these case studies, this panel seeks to contribute to the decolonization of knowledge on indigenous music-dance and build allyship for indigenous resurgence through music-dance performance in the multicultural present of Taiwan.

Paper 1:

Imagining National Community: Strategies of Assimilating the Thau into Nation through Tourist Music and Dance during the Transwar Period (1920s-1960s)

The gaze on Thau pestle music is intertwined with the colonial-modern tourism of Zintun (Sun Moon Lake). Thau people living on its lakeshores were forced to relocate due to the Japanese hydroelectric power project that aimed to transform the colony from agricultural to industrial society; Lalu, their ancestral place, was altered into a Japanese shrine. Thau people’s music and dances are deeply woven with the imagination of national communities, made possible through state social mobilization and active indigenous practices during different political periods. Taiwan’s colonial regimes used the Thau’s music and dance to control through placation, by incorporating the Thau Nation, as an ethnic group, into the Nation-state. Yet placation through education and submission, signified through designating Thau as “huafan,” still connotes colonial strategies. In this paper, I will examine three episodes of Thau people using pestle music and dance as a “contact zone” for facing colonial hierarchies between the 1920s and 1960s. First, during the Japanese colonial period, the Thau used their pestle music and dance to welcome the Japanese royal family, and perform in state celebrations and exhibitions about Taiwan in Japan. Second, during the twilight period (1945-1949), a time of confusion over local identification with the Japanese or KMT (Kuomintang) government, the Thau participated in a symbolic narrative of indigenous-Han intermarriage through pestle dance-music in a movie, that translated and strengthened the national identity put forth by the KMT government. Finally, during the war between the KMT and the Communist Party in 1949-1950, the Thau people performed music and dance to provide soldiers entertainment on artillery fire battlefields. Through this trilogy, I examine how the Thau used their pestle music and dance as a strategic tool for working with different colonial governments to cultivate imaginations of “national community” during the Transwar period.

Keywords: Transwar period, Thau Pestle Music and Dance, From “Nation”(ethnic group) to “Nation”(state), Colonial Modernity, Community Imagination

Paper 2:

Co-producing “mountain compatriot’s songs” in early Cold War Hualien, Taiwan (1949-1959)

Hualien city and its surrounding areas in eastern Taiwan is the home of many indigenous peoples and a zone of multiple colonial encounters. This paper focuses on a set of notated song books co-produced by indigenous students, Han students, and a newly arrived Han music teacher between 1949 to 1959 at the Hualien Normal School, during an early period after transition from Japanese to Chinese (KMT) rule. As a descendent of Han settlers, I seek to reflexively explore the history of settler-colonialism embedded in structures of knowledge on indigenous music in Taiwan: thus I attend to these song books, titled “Taiwan shanbao geshuan (Selected songs of Taiwanese mountain compatriots),” as an archival site to listen to both structures of colonialism, as well as assertions of indigenous modernity and subjectivity. Within the Hualien Normal School, which trains elementary school teachers, the student-teacher collaborations included transcribing songs by Pangcah, Truku, and Bunun students, adding Mandarin lyrics and harmonic arrangements, and forming a choir to perform on various occasions. Drawing on newspaper archival material, I show how the publication and performances of these song books contributed to KMT’s governance of “minority ethnicities in China,” bolstered by global Cold War structures: these songs aided policies of forced Sinicization, cultural “improvement,” and normalizing military presence in society; furthermore, due to the influence of Japanese ethnography, the Truku students’ songs were miscategorized as Tayal. Yet closer examination reveals that the notated songs were not “ancient folk tunes” as imagined by Han audiences. Instead, many were recent compositions that appropriated Japanese-style melodies. I focus on three such songs to discuss how a “density rather than difference” approach (Perea 2022) might help listen for inter-community movements and creative incorporations in response to changing environments, and the possibility of the indigenous students’ flourishing through sharing of songs.

Keywords: Han-Chinese settler-colonialism, transcription and notation, group singing, indigenous modernity, Japanese-style indigenous compositions

Paper 3:

The Challenges and Opportunities for the Formosa Indigenous Song and Dance Troupe in the Contemporary Era: Insights from My Field Experience

The Formosa Indigenous Song and Dance Troupe (FISDT) was established in 1991 for self-conserving indigenous culture by performing pan-indigenous traditional song and dance. This study explores the FISDT’s critical role in the contemporary transmission and education of indigenous music and dance culture in Taiwan, based on my experiences of attending the FISDT’s performances, cultural and dance workshops, classroom assistantship, and different communities’ ritual events. I underscore the impact of cultural learning and choreography by the FISDT in rebuilding or reconstituting Taiwanese indigenous dance, cultural knowledge, and ethnic identity. I also combine archival material to show how the FISDT has been influential in indigenous music research, performance productions, and educational workshops, including the continuation of traditional repertoire, development of new pieces, and even the reconstruction of traditional rituals, facilitating cross-tribal cultural dissemination. These efforts reflect the FISDT’s transformations with the times, effectively articulating traditional performance with new societal changes, maintaining its vibrancy and relevance, and playing a key role in preserving and transmitting culture; this resonates with understandings of “indigenous modernity as a continuous process” (Levine 2019: 2). In the context of ethnic justice and instant social media, Taiwanese indigenous performance groups face challenges due to stronger indigenous protection laws, rising indigenous consciousness in respective communities, and changing market demands, which complicate repertoire sourcing and increase box office pressures. The FISDT struggles to continue operating precisely due to emphasizing the authenticity of their performance. Despite government efforts to protect and transmit traditional cultural assets, contemporary indigenous youth, whether in villages or cities, struggle to lead or follow in song and dance, highlighting the ongoing generational gap in traditional dance and music transmission among indigenous peoples today. This study reveals the challenges for Taiwanese indigenous performance groups in contemporary society, and aims to rethink their educational significance as possibilities beyond stage performance.

Keywords: indigenous musical modernity, sustainability of music and culture, music transmission

ABSTRACT. This panel aims to discuss the active role that musical practices, radio broadcasting and records played in the language debates during the Portuguese decolonization process. For this purpose, the panelists will analyse case studies pertaining to radio archives in Mozambique, as well as historical recordings and contemporary musical practices in Goa, India. The primary objective is to explore multilingualism in formerly colonized territories, particularly when expressed through music and sound. Language is a key part of post-colonial discourse because the colonial process itself starts with language. During the liberation movements, there have been a number of ways to address the dominant language, but two of them stand out: subversion or rejection. The panel relies on concurrences as a topic and a method to acknowledge the diverse ways in which language communities develop concurrent claims on reality without necessarily engaging with one another. To focus on concurrent narratives is a way to avoid the epistemic violence of insisting on a monolingual history. In colonial Mozambique, amateur radio broadcasters swiftly recognised the benefits of radio broadcasting in african languages, such as Makhuwa, Ronga, and Changana as a means to achieve political objectives of cultural sovereignty. In Goa, it was only in 1987 that Konkani was recognized as the official state language. However, music composed by Goans in Goa has been always based on Konkani even when the language was disregarded by the colonial Portuguese regime. Additionally, the establishment of music festivals featuring repertoires in Konkani played a significant role in this recognition and in fighting for the recognition of Goa as a different state in India. By examining the intersection of music, sound, and language, the panel intent to discuss how local languages, in spite of their subaltern status, were crucial when used by music for the freedom fighter movements and for reaching cultural sovereignty of the nations and territories during historical colonialism and postcolonial contexts.

Paper 1: Political Uses and Social Meanings of Broadcasting in Local Languages in (Post)Colonial Mozambique

This communication delves into the negotiation, and resistance surrounding the use of Portuguese versus Mozambican local languages in songs and radio broadcasting in Mozambique since 1950s. It aims to help us better understand the political and social significance of broadcasting in local languages in (post)colonial Mozambique. During the Portuguese presence in Mozambique, efforts were made to "acculturate" the local population by censoring or prohibiting traditional cultural practices considered "primitive" and mandating the adoption of habits and customs seen as modern. These actions were enforced through various methods of coercion, including racial laws that created a bifurcation between "citizens" and "indigenous" in Mozambique. For instance, the Statute of Portuguese Indigenous People of the Provinces of Guinea, Angola, and Mozambique of 1954, approved by Decree-Law nr. 39,666, of 20 May, outlined criteria for acquiring Portuguese citizenship, including the requirement to "speak the Portuguese language correctly" for black citizens. These actions led to the marginalization of local Bantu languages, which were not featured on Rádio Clube de Moçambique (RCM) during its first few years of operation (between 1933 and the first half of 1950). Since the late 1950s, promoting black Mozambican folklore on the radio played a significant role in introducing programs in Mozambican local languages. The “Hora Nativa" (native time) was one of the earliest programs to feature these languages. Following this, Regional Broadcasters, now known as Provincial Broadcasters, began airing programming in both Portuguese and local languages. This period coincided with changes in the international political scenery and the expansion of the liberation movements in Africa and Asia.

Paper 2: Translated in Konkani. Goanizing north American country music in colonial Bombay

This paper has at its center piece the historical record 'Sezari Muji Sogle Poule' released under the Young India label. Recorded in late 1930 in Bombay by a duo singing in the Konkani language, it is accompanied by three instruments: guitar, violin and mandolin. Konkani has been the official language of Goa since 1987. During the colonial period, it was disregarded by the Portuguese administration.The record is a comic adaptation of the North American song 'Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane', written in 1871 and made famous by Riley Puckett's recordings in the 1920s. Through the listening and analysis of the record, I will raise key questions about the role of Goan musicians in the colonial Bombay music industry, the global circulation of musical styles and idioms, and the 'translations' of songs, with a special focus on the musical idiom being translated. The recorded music industry in India began in 1902, and just eight years later, His Master's Voice produced the first Konkani record. These vernacular phonograph records were not labeled as Goan music; rather, they were categorized according to the specific linguistic group. Goan musicians received early training in Western classical music and theory through the church-based education system in Portuguese India, after which many migrated to Bombay. The cosmopolitan nature of this city, with its theaters, film music industry, and jazz cabarets, along with its diverse musical influences, shaped the individuals involved in music creation, composition, performance, production, and distribution. In this case study I propose to explore the phenomena of musical 'translation', which showcases the Goan involvement in these multifaceted cultural interactions.

Paper 3: Indianizing music through language. The case of the musical genre mando in contemporary festivals in Goa.

This paper aims to debate how Goa’s musical practices, particularly the mando saw a kind of transformation in its compositions over a period, from the colonial context to the context of mainstream nationalism. During the colonial period, Portuguese was the official language of Goa and all formal education were made in Portuguese being Konkani not considered as a language. So, for all purposes, art, or literary forms, were registered and created in Portuguese. But when it came to musical practices, almost all the traditional repertoires were composed and performed in Konkani. The musical practice of mando being one such example. When this musical genre originated under the colonial context, although it was composed in Konkani, yet it had a multiple sprinkling of Portuguese words in its composition. This was a result of the Portuguese influence on the Konkani speaking Goan Christians, who were the original composers of mando. This reality, however changed when Goa entered the mainstream nationalism on account of Goa’s annexation by India. The composition of mando, now began to witness transformation. It began to have fewer or no Portuguese words at all in its composition, while some of the Konkani words were Sanskritized, which can be vividly seen at the Mando festival, a case under my study. The above reality will be analysed through the lyrics of two selected manddea compositions, one composed during the colonial context, and another composed specifically for the Mando Festival, under the mainstream nationalism context. What triggered this transformation? Are these changes occurred only on new compositions or are they affecting the classical repertoire of mando? The paper attempts to delve deeper into these research questions.

ABSTRACT. PANEL ABSTRACT: Music is a significant expressive form precisely because it is a tangible product of human activity through which individuals and groups tell themselves and others who they are and what they value. In addition to providing aesthetic pleasure, music is frequently the site and subject of social and political struggle, debate, and activism. In many cases, music is a practice through which definitions of identity and relations of power are articulated and contested, reproduced and reconfigured. Taking these anthropologically-informed premises about the relationship between music and culture as a point of departure, the papers on this panel document and analyze the artistic, social, political, and cultural significance of music created by Black people, past and present. The three panelists are engaged in research that examines the ways individuals, groups, and institutions use music to do significant cultural work. We use fieldwork, interviews, archival research, and close readings of musical performances to examine both the social contexts and the aesthetic qualities of a range of musical productions and practices in order to explain their significance to those who engage with them. The panel’s three case studies will offer musical and cultural analyses that detail the creative priorities of Black artists; attend to the impact of the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, class, and nationality on their work; and map connections to relevant artistic lineages, intellectual and creative genealogies, and geographic locations. By using interdisciplinary and intersectional approaches that deploy the tools of ethnomusicology, musicology, cultural anthropology, popular music studies, African-American studies, African diaspora studies, religious studies, black feminist studies, and gender and sexuality studies, the papers on this panel will provide a rich exploration of the Black experience through the study of music and practices related to music-making. [289 words]

PAPER ABSTRACT #1 “‘It was sex, drugs, and the Holy Ghost’: Grace Jones and the Production of Religious Excess”

How do scholars, cultural critics, and audiences read religious “excess” when it becomes unmoored from a religious context? This paper analyzes the production of Jamaican American Apostolic Pentecostal “excess,” which is hidden in plain sight, in the musical work and persona of pop culture icon Grace Jones. In her fourth decade of a professional career that includes high fashion model, actress, and recording artist, Jones has served as a symbol for unexplainable excess in the popular imagination. Descriptions of her by scholars and critics have included: “a question mark followed by an exclamation point” and “sci-fi fantasy.” Examining Jones’s (re) production of religious excess in the public sphere, through the lens of her transnational Pentecostal upbringing, reveals the policing of raced, classed, gendered, and sexual “excess,” in both religious and profane settings, and Jones’s critique of bounded lives. As well, Jones opens a door to understanding the particularities of “excessive” knowledge that Black women produce with their sounding bodies and why. [161 words]

PAPER ABSTRACT #2 “Ultrasonic Tastemaker: A Critical Gastromusicology”

Shortly after the term “soul food” was popularized on the heels of the “soul music” genre, culinary anthropologist and Sun Ra touring musician Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor published the cookbook-memoir Vibration Cooking or The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl (1970). In the tradition of Zora Neale Hurston’s ethnographic research and Ms. Edna Lewis’ culinary culture-bearing, Vibration Cooking challenged the primacy of the “soul food” concept by centering on food as a source of pride, a site of sensuality, an art of multisensory storytelling, a validation of Black womanhood and Black consciousness-raising. Deeply rooted in her musical experiences, Smart-Grosvenor wrote, “When I cook, I never measure or weigh anything. I cook by vibration.” Through her cultural anthropological writing, she pinned an intersection of music/sound, sensuality, and culinary perception that has yet to be explored through the lens of music or sound studies. Probing that constellation of soulful, musical, sensual, and culinary perception, this paper investigates the interconnectedness of African American embodiment, oral transmission, cultural production, wealth extraction, and consumption in the global marketplace and argues that these connections are emblematic of what I coin as gastromusicophysics or multisensory “taste.” Highly competent culture-bearers in the marketplace that I call “ultrasonic tastemakers” resonate with and register their talent, tapping into high vibrations, and frequencies of creative expressions, decision making and influencing what is, will be, and their products endure as en vogue, succulent, and mellifluous. [231 words]

PAPER ABSTRACT #3 “Music as Mediation: The ‘Soundtrack of America’ Concert Series and the Politics of African American Music”

On April 5, 2019, The Shed, New York City’s new multi-disciplinary arts and performance venue, opened with “Soundtrack of America,” a five-night concert series celebrating the legacy and continuing vitality of African American music. Conceived by Black British filmmaker Steve McQueen, developed with the input of a creative team that included African American composer and producer Quincy Jones, and featuring 25 emerging artists, the production made an artistic and political statement about the significance, influence, and power of the music African Americans have created during four centuries of life and struggle in the United States. In this presentation, I discuss this public-facing event in order to reflect on the role of music as an important form of cultural mediation. In the first portion of the paper, I outline the ways music mediated the intellectual, artistic, and entertainment goals of the production, and The Shed’s developing image as a new cultural institution. I then relate the “Soundtrack of America” to a long-standing pattern of artists, activists, and scholars deploying music and discourses about music as mediating tools to reshape narratives of U.S. history, press for citizenship rights for African Americans, and insist upon the humanity of African Americans. By considering these various forms of music as mediation, this paper offers a layered view of both the politics of African American music and of music’s centrality to the Black experience. [235]

ABSTRACT. Within the national context of Aotearoa New Zealand, music theory has been primarily associated with western music notation, harmony, and tonality (Haami, 2022; Ka‘ai-Mahuta,2010; Nunns, 1993). However, Indigenous Māori music contains unique key elements of its own musical theories through forms such as waiata (songs), karakia (prayers), ruruku (incantations), haka (posture dances), pūrākau (stories), whakapapa (genealogies) and many more, which are all integral within Māori lifeways and represent Māori creative expressions and legacies. Through examining Indigenous Māori musical knowledge systems and worldviews there emerges conflicts and adaptions for how traditional western definitions of music may be confining for Māori creative expressions due to colonisation. Māori creative expressions are legacies informed by distinct tribal, genealogical, environmental, historiographic, and intergenerational elements culminating towards its purpose, sound, practice, and pedagogies (Burgess & Koroi, 2024; Burgess & Painting, 2020; Gifford, 2021; Haami, 2022; McRae, 2017; Smith, 2019; Wilson, 2010).

This roundtable aims to draw on the knowledge of five Indigenous Māori wāhine (Māori women) to share the many dimensions of Māori creative expressions and legacies that draw on Māori musical knowledge systems for the transmission and retainment of mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge). Drawing from Roberts (2013), this panel will discuss how whakapapa (genealogy; descent; lineage; relational connections) can act as an ontological and epistemological construct that is relationship based, tying humans with species, non-human phenomena, and the environment. These aspects will be explored through waiata, pūrākau, kapa haka, and kai (food) practices. This roundtable will dive into Indigenous Kaupapa Māori methodologies to discuss how decolonising and re-indigenising Māori music theories and practices for Māori creative expressions can enable pathways to accelerate Māori well-being. Kaupapa Māori methodologies draw on mātauranga Māori with a metaphysical base that is distinctly by Māori for Māori focused on using anti-colonial frameworks (Eketone, 2008; Pihama, 2015; Smith, 2017; Smith, 1999). This critical discussion looks to examine the multifaceted systems of knowledge revolving around Māori music and dance as told through Māori creative expressions and legacies.

ABSTRACT. With perspectives from Aotearoa, the US, and the UK, this roundtable discussion invites listeners to unsettle notions around how we engage with music. What becomes possible when we focus on creative collaborations and de-emphasize the end product in contemporary popular music spaces? Thinking through Indigenous and minoritarian contexts, we provide examples from our musicianship and scholarship in which artists focus on process, notably Taonga Puoro orchestra workshops, cyphers by female and two-spirit Indigenous musicians, and workshops for female and nonbinary producers. Across our geographies and positionalities, we listen for how, with an awareness of past exclusions, digital tools and maker spaces can transform to support creators and encourage musical storytelling. Experimentation and genre-bending take center stage in local music scenes where paying attention to whakapapa, or lineage, is prioritized over commercial viability. Presenters bring accessibility into the conversation, making space for vibration and sensation in a music production space in which digital audio tools adapt for multiple kids of ears, brains, and bodies as equals. Musical sovereignty emerges as a guiding principle, emphasizing artists’ autonomy and self-determination in crafting their sonic narratives. This principle finds expression across the initiatives presenters discuss in spaces curated to amplify diverse voices and narratives. As composers, producers, jazz and pop performers, and ethnographers, roundtable participants reflect on how interrogating notions of "good music" can encourage creators to forge deeper connections with craft and community. Scholar-performers’ experience with projects for access and inclusion focus on expanding compositional software for diverse needs and incorporating collaborative compositions using multisensory experiences. Roundtable presenters probe critical questions on sovereignty and creativity and share experiences from our music making in order to invite audience members to listen for how these resonate in their contexts and creative processes.

ABSTRACT. On 21 December 2023, a student of Charles University in Prague, one of the safest places in the world until then, shot dead 14 academics and students. All of society was shocked, the event became the main subject in the media for many days. The process of coping and “healing” started immediately, manifested in particular through a series of events called the “Month for the Faculty”. The crisis team around the dean also asked anthropologists from the university to document these events; this presentation is based on the ethnomusicological team’s participation in these activities. It has three parts. The first one is contextualizing and theoretical. The most appropriate theoretical concept was Durkheim’s “piacular rites”, the aim of which is to “reconfirm [a] community´s solidarity.” Following the recommendations of Bin Xu (2016), we investigated who the main agents were in the decision-making as to the format for these events and why they made their decisions in the specific way that they did. The second section presents the process of renewal at the level of the university: events connected with the creation of commemorative sites, which became temporary “lieux de mémoire” (Nora 1989), e.g. “Embrace of the Faculty” event with its commemorative procession, culminated in choir singing and lighting a commemorative flame in front of the building; The third section focused on two face-to-face communities where music played a crucial role. The student society “FFugatto,” consisting of musicology students: the students shared a need to spend time with those who had undergone the same traumatizing experience – and they used music as a vehicle. For the community of the Department of Religious Studies, through singing emblematic songs, students and academics aimed to spiritually cleanse the building once it was re-opened.

We look at the negotiations behind the organization of these (musical) events as well as their execution and what was expected from them.

With respect to part a), the character of the events which were part of the “Month for the Faculty” oscillated from big events intended for the whole city (or rather for all the academic community), to small-scale events for specific study programs. Music played a significant role in these, on the one hand because of their community/remembrance nature, and on the other hand because the first identified victim of the shooting was the head of the Institute of Musicology. Our search for an explanatory theoretical framework initially started (more or less unsuccessfully) with the area of coping with trauma and with memory studies (e.g. Fauser – Figueroa 2020). The concept that turned out to be the most appropriate was Durkheim’s (1995, first published in 1912) “piacular rites”, the aim of which is to “reconfirm [a] community´s solidarity.” Following the recommendations of Bin Xu (2016), we investigated who the main agents were in the decision-making as to the format for these events and why they made their decisions in the specific way that they did. With respect to part b), the activities organized by the leadership of the university (or the Faculty of Arts), were of two types – events, and the creation of commemorative sites which became a kind of temporary “lieu de mémoire” for a period of time (Nora 1989). The opening “Embrace of the Faculty” event with its commemorative procession through the center of Prague, which was attended by several thousand people, culminated in three choirs from the Faculty of Arts singing and lighting a commemorative flame in front of the building. Other events involved the cultural institutions, which are neighbors of the Faculty of Arts: the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague; the Czech Philharmonic; and the Prague Conservatory. Other events were held in the public spaces between their buildings (group singing, the creation of artworks from the candles left by the public at the Faculty of Arts to commemorate the dead, the keeping of the commemorative flame) and ranged from what was called the “soft re-opening of the Faculty”, featuring rituals of song, to the full opening of the building at the beginning of the new semester. With respect to part c), the student society “FFugatto,” consisting of musicology students at the Faculty of Arts, was one of the groups which organized several musical events during the “Month for the Faculty.” The link between the tragedy and the Department of Musicology was obvious, since the department head had fallen victim to the shooting. According to our findings/understanding, the students shared a need to come together and spend time with other members of the same community who had undergone the same traumatizing experience – and they used music as a vehicle. They offered a helping hand by inviting people to participate in various musical events such as musical meditation, improvisation, singing around a campfire, a soundwalk, and a workshop on medieval manuscript writing. The second face-to-face (“un-imagined”) community was connected to the Department of Religious Studies. Singing emblematic songs, students and academics aimed to spiritually cleanse the building once it was re-opened. We look at the negotiations behind the organization of these (musical) events as well as their execution and what was expected from them.

ABSTRACT. The broad panorama of musical activity in Australia today incorporates a myriad of ‘micromusics’ and subcultural scenes, many of them linked to diaspora groups as well as other musical and cultural networks or institutions that bring Australia’s musical diversity to wider audiences. Diaspora groups are often multi-generational, heterogeneous and interconnected in various ways into the cultural mainstream. They are also distinct in their social, political, cultural and demographic dynamics and in the way they interact with broader Australian society.

The paper focuses on the local ‘world’ of Indonesia-related music-making in Australia to exemplify the complex dynamics of musical activity emanating from or linked to individual diaspora groups. The field of music discussed as Indonesian or Indonesia-related encompasses both participatory community-based music-making such as a Batak choir, a Sundanese calung (bamboo xylophone and rattle) ensemble or a Balinese dance group and ‘staged’ presentational forms, whether bands performing Indonesian pop or independent artists whose creative work draws on Indonesian elements. It also crosses into communities of interest, especially those focused around gamelan traditions. The paper deploys Slobin’s interlocking concepts of subculture, superculture and interculture to understand the interplay of cultural forces within and across diasporic music scenes. It also points to how the present musical environment in Australia and the policies and institutions that support it valorise cultural diversity and fluidity where ‘Hybridity and fusion become the marks of a new form of authenticity’ (Bennett). Identities projected by performers can be constructed through, variously, ethnicity, an assumed and contingent musical persona, or even a generalised musical cosmopolitanism (Smith).This ‘micromusic’ case study illustrates how the the specific dynamics of a migrant or diaspora grouping shape the activation of its musical expressions within its broader Australian environment as well as underlining how the complexity of present-day musical diversity resists generalisation.

ABSTRACT. In West Java, Indonesia, bamboo has long been an emblem of Sundanese cultural values and a potent marker of a Sundanese sense of place. Twenty-first-century residents of Bandung (the cosmpolitan capital of West Java) have (re-)adopted/adapted bamboo musical instruments to articulate a variety of alternative musical modernities. This paper compares three musical organizations that have pursued different approaches to music made with bamboo instruments: (1) Angklung Web Institute (AWI), an independent organization dedicated to the promulgation and performance of diatonic angklung (tuned bamboo rattle) music using the tools and methods of the internet age; (2) Galengan Sora Awi (GSA), a neighborhood-based group of musicians who render a variety of traditional Sundanese musical styles (each associated with a particular traditional musical ensemble) on bamboo instruments of their own invention; and (3) Karinding Attack (KARAT), a group of heavy metal musicians who play their heavy-metal-inspired compositions on formerly obsolete village bamboo musical instruments (karinding [mouth-resonated lamellophone] and celempung [idiochord tube zither]). Thus AWI and KARAT redeploy traditional bamboo instruments to perform wildly different modern music with roots outside of West Java, while GSA innovates novel bamboo instruments to reimagine traditional Sundanese music.

All these efforts are united by their reliance on bamboo — the look, sounds, and feel of which provide potent means for constructing, evoking, and sustaining uniquely Sundanese histories, modernities, and identities. Since long before the beginning of recorded history in West Java, Sundanese people have performed their relationship to the land and with each other with bamboo technology. Bamboo music's long association with a particularly Sundanese landscape, with pre-modern agricultural ceremonies, and with the aesthetics of participatory music making make all of these modern interventions make sense, and provide a fertile context for investigating how musical meaning commingles with environment and culture.

ABSTRACT. Since the major migration of Dutch East Indies soldiers of Moluccan descent to the Netherlands in 1951, there have been several renaissances of traditional languages, cultural practices and Indigeneity in Maluku-Dutch communities (Habiboe 2007; Manuhutu 2021). Such traditional practices have often been lost during the colonial era yet are currently revived in ways that centralize Maluku Indigenous ways of knowing as equal to Western epistemologies through contemporary art, literature and music. These revivals are part of a decolonized identity formation process for Maluku-Dutch communities, as well as the larger cluster of Indo-Dutch communities. The renaissance of various Indigenous languages has proved to be particularly challenging with very few people left on the Moluccan islands able to fluently speak one of the many languages (Smith 2021; Van Engelenhoven, n.d.; Tahitu 1988).

This paper addresses a possible role for improvised music in this process of identity formation. It proposes a consideration of improvisation as a musical language that is able to function as a substitute for forgotten Indigenous languages through the concept of non-sounds. These Indigenous languages, or Bahasa Tanah of Indonesia, were often forbidden during the colonial period, resulting in the loss of knowledge of many of these languages. Non-sounds will be elaborated on as enunciations of the unexpressed or unknown through non-spoken and non-defined words – or rather, music – which are open to interpretation. Rather than becoming a direct alternative for forgotten languages, non-sounds should be understood as cultural foundations on which individual and collective Maluku-Dutch identities can be formed. Building on Van Engelenhoven’s idea that silence is empowering in the sense that some things cannot be expressed in words, I argue that silences and non-defined sounds as non-sounds through improvisation are capable of forming and protecting ones identity (2022).

ABSTRACT. In China, from over 1,000 years ago, musical scores or rather ‘tablatures’ (showing the finguring needed to play melodies by different type of instrument) have survived. Each melodic and dance transcription is identified by the name of its lyric type. These lyrics show a characteristic prosodic pattern which allow new lyrics to be filled in (tian ci) following the same mould i.e. of rhyme scheme, speech-tonal pattern and line-lengths. Since the scores from this early period (Tang to Five Dynasties) are without accompanying lyrics, the challenge remains: how exactly to set the lyrics of a given title to a melody or dance of the same title and type? How many notes and beats per syllable or move? In the absence of other information on dynamics and interpretation, outside the notes themselves, lyrics can provide vital clues of emotive expression. We are fortunate to have some of the world earliest musical manuscripts, dating to the tenth century, recovered from a sealed store in a Buddhist cave temple at Dunhuang (Gansu). These consist in two kinds: those for the four-string pipa-lute and those for dance. Both contain pieces divided by lyric-title. The notational systems of each have long been obsolete in China. Yet the pipa-lute tablatures have been deciphered using those transmitted to Japan during the Tang dynasty and lovingly conserved there. The dance notation, being without parallel, has remained an enigma. Could it be that, in tandem with the lute tablatures, its symbols relate to the ‘fingering’ of another instrument, that of the human body, so as to correlate dance movements with musical notes? Sequences of the symbols in its scores, with affinity to runs typical of melody, may be extrapolated to actions of the hands and arms in dancing. From these I have proposed a method for decoding these in a system of transcription that integrates them in palpable musical tunes with the rhythms and moves of dance.

ABSTRACT. This article will discuss how jazz musicians in Taiwan's taxi dance halls from the 1950s to the 1970s used and produced music notations. Western jazz musicians traditionally played music through memory and improvisation, with notations sometimes serving mostly as indicative frameworks. Consequently, jazz notations have rarely been discussed by researchers. However, post-war Taiwanese jazz musicians heavily relied on this visual musical tool. Therefore, this article will explore the attachment relationship between these musicians and their notations: how they used them and how the latter shaped their ways of listening to music and transcribing. This unique attachment particularly occurred in taxi dance halls, where jazz musicians predominantly played cover jazz pieces from Europe and America, as well as Japanese and Taiwanese popular songs without original compositions. These musicians mainly produced and reproduced notations through hand copying or transcription from records, partly because Taiwan lacked systematically published scores suitable for jazz bands, and partly because photocopying technology was not yet widespread. For these musicians, notations were not only performance indicators and learning materials but also served as currency for exchanging musical labor, and the number of notations a musician possessed reflected their musical reputation. This article will first describe the materiality of notations, discussing how they circulated within musician circles and how musicians acquired and hand-copied them. Then, it will examine how musicians transcribe to produce scores, drawing insights from a 93-year-old jazz musician who was a band leader in several taxi dance hall bands in southern Taiwan and was responsible for score production for a long time, representing the experience of post-war dance hall musicians. Through this study, I found that producing notations involved not musicians reproducing auditory musical objects but understanding and imagining heterogeneous actors such as objects used on-site, bodily movements, and spatial habits of professional venues in the past. In other words, their transcription represented a bodily knowledge of specific musical spaces and was a set of choreographed listening and embodied musicking acquired through collective practice.

ABSTRACT. In the 1880s, in the UK and North America, charitable festivals called "kermisses" incorporated dances from various nations for entertainment. From the 1890s-1900s, Omer Sheets, an entrepreneurial single father with a spring in his step, worked his kermiss magic across Canada. His dance repertoire for children included the Highland Fling, Irish Jig, Sailor's Hornpipe, Spanish Cachua and many more. His trademark piece for adults was the Living Whist, a live-action game with 52 dancers dressed as playing cards: hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs. Mr. Sheets organised numerous Kermiss and Living Whist fundraisers in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. Townspeople welcomed him. Reporters commended his charisma. Money was raised for good causes. When discrepancies were discovered in the balance sheets, though, Mr. Sheets was nowhere to be found. Geographical distance may have helped to conceal Mr. Sheets' kermiss con in the early 20th century. Today, however, Mr. Sheets' story can be traced via digitised newspapers from Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. These sources reveal not only the extent of Mr. Sheets' deceit, but the abhorrent reason he suddenly fled Canada, never to return. This presentation will chronologically examine the story of Major Sheets and his unconventional methods of dance knowledge dissemination, always one step ahead of the law.

Erica Nielsen Okamura holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in Dance from Arizona State University (Tempe, Arizona). In her 20s, Erica spent two years traveling across the USA to research dance communities for her book "Folk Dancing" (2011), part of the American Dance Floor Series by Bloomsbury. Erica moved to Australia with her family in 2018. Her current research focuses on the adoption of national or folk dances for children's physical exercise and organised play at schools and playgrounds in the early 20th century.

ABSTRACT. Abstract It is no more news that technology has made the entire teaching and learning process easier and music education is not left out. One of such technological advancement is Artificial Intelligence (AI). Unfortunately, this advancement in technology which is common in developed countries cannot be said same of developing country like Nigeria. Hence, this paper sought to investigate the level of awareness and utilization of artificial intelligence in teaching of music education among music lecturers in tertiary institutions in Nigeria. The study adopted the descriptive survey design. The population of the study consisted of over 326 music education lecturers in Federal Universities in Nigeria. The sample size for the study was 34 music education lecturers from six (6) Federal Universities in the six south-south states in Nigeria drawn using Multi-stage sampling procedure. An instrument named “AI Awareness and Utilization Questionnaire” (AI-AUQ) was used in the study. Factor analysis was used to validate the instrument while Cronbach Alpha was used in determining a reliability index of 0.84 for AI-AUQ. Administration of the instrument was done face to face with the help of three trained field assistants. Data collected were analized using item by item analysis, one-sample t-test and independent t-test. Findings revealed that there were significant awareness (p=0.03<0.05) of music AI applications among lecturers. Also, there was no significant level of utilization of AI application by lecturers (P=0.20>0.05). Finally, there was significant differences in the awareness level of male and female lecturers (P=0.001<0.05) as male lecturers were more aware of music related AI applications than females. Based on the findings, it was recommended among others that more orientation should be given to lecturers as well as more exposures on AI.

ABSTRACT. A liberal arts curriculum helps students “develop a strong sense of social responsibility as well as strong and transferable intellectual and practical skills,” including “communication, analytical, and problem-solving abilities, and a demonstrated ability to apply knowledge and skills in real-world settings” (Hollis 2024). Accordingly, students are exposed to a “broad knowledge of the wider world,” which in turn prepares them “to deal with complexity, diversity, and change” (Ibid.). During the past twelve years I have developed and offered an African music and dance performance course that gives Middlebury College students these educational experiences. Enrolled students primarily learn by doing, as most course assignments and activities are experience-focused or public-facing. The immersive, hands-on pedagogy in which students engage for twelve weeks culminates in an end-of-semester concert that is open to community members. This paper examines how this process fosters a sense of community and inclusion that hones students’ abilities to interact with other people. As I demonstrate, my objective as an instructor is not to simply produce African music and dance performers. It is also to help students understand how they can draw on modes of African musical performance to engage and positively impact their surroundings. I argue that African music and dance pedagogy is one of the most effective ways students can develop community building and engagement skills.

ABSTRACT. Three decades after the dawn of democracy in South Africa, significant transformations have reshaped the offerings of university music departments. Former bastions of Western art traditions during apartheid, these departments have undergone profound changes spurred by advocacy for epistemic inclusivity, particularly following the 2015 and 2016 student protests. The Odeion School of Music (OSM), University of the Free State, exemplifies this shift with the establishment of its ethnomusicology programme in 2021. This study examines the complexities surrounding the OSM’s ethnomusicology programme, investigating its impact on student preparedness for professional careers (graduate attributes) and global citizenship. Using the Delphi Technique and inductive analysis conducted in Nvivo, I gathered insights from purposively selected ethnomusicology experts in the US, Brazil, UK, and South Africa, alongside OSM musicology experts, ethnomusicology students, and freelance musicians from Bloemfontein. Contrary to notions of ethnomusicology’s irrelevance in contemporary times (Amico, 2020), findings reveal the field’s vital role in fostering inclusivity and cross-cultural empathy within contexts of historic racial divides. Ethnomusicology may thus be construed as a sui generis "humanning" field (Nzewi, 2021), poised for integration across music programmes, including performance, composition, music education, and music technology. This study challenges the insularity of the model of specialisation programmes prevalent in South African music departments, advocating for a holistic approach that addresses societal segregation. It contributes to postcolonial discourse, emphasising the cultivation of ethical reasoning and global citizenship amidst contexts fraught with social justice issues.

ABSTRACT. In the late 1940s, a small group of musicians from Shanghai traveled to San Francisco, where they recorded four pieces for the Folkways Records release Chinese Classical Instrumental Music. In his effusive but wildly inaccurate liner notes, composer Henry Cowell describes the recording as a revival of Tang Dynasty music, but the music performed is actually Jiangnan sizhu silk and bamboo music, a regional style native to the Shanghai area: three ensemble arrangements of pipa pieces and a dizi (transverse flute) and sheng (mouth organ) duet adapted from the Hakka/Kejia repertoire. The recording is credited to the Shanghai Theater Arts Group (probably the Zhongguo Guoyue Hui—Chinese National Music Ensemble), led by pipa (plucked lute) and xiao (end-blown flute) master Sun Yude (1904-81). Presumably on the same trip, the musicians made a brief appearance at a Chinese wedding banquet, filmed in Los Angeles's Chinatown, in the film noir Sleep, My Love (1948). In the film, they perform snippets of two ensemble pieces: "Hua Liuban" (Ornamented Six Beats) and "Pu'an Zhou" (Incantation of Monk Pu'an), with the latter also appearing on the Folkways recording. This may be the earliest filmed documentation of a Jiangnan sizhu ensemble. Taken together, the recording and film offer a revealing snapshot of Chinese small ensemble practice on the cusp of the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. This paper examines the instrumentation, musical style, and editing choices in these performances, both in their historical context and in comparison to the performance of the same repertoire by amateur music clubs in the 1980s, based on the author's participant observation and field recordings.

ABSTRACT. From 2020 to 2023, the COVID-19 pandemic brought profound changes and impacts to China. People had to adapt to new ways of living and working, and significant changes took place in various fields such as the economy, culture, and society. However, under the influence of the pandemic, we can also observe many positive changes. Many people have begun to pay attention to social problems and the fate of mankind.

Inspired by the Decameron, a new and humanistic wave of creativity shines particularly bright. While disasters may weigh heavily on people's mental states, contemplating suffering can stimulate people's spiritual resilience, leading to the emergence of new creations. This study aims to investigate the positive changes in China observed under the impact of the pandemic from an anthropological and sociological perspective. The primary approach adopted entails participatory observation to comprehend the evolution of musical practices during the pandemic era.

This study explores how music, as a form of humanistic expression, fosters community solidarity and individual well-being amid adversity. The specific performance is how musicians and the music industry responded to the pandemic by embracing humanistic values, fostering a communal experience, and aiding in societal healing.

It also explores how the COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on the music industry, prompting a new order within the industry. Now, the music industry needs to pay more attention to the application of digital, online, and social media to adapt to the new normal post-epidemic. Streaming media platforms can help protect and preserve music cultural heritage through digital means, aiding in fostering better understanding and respect for different cultures and musical traditions.

ABSTRACT. Changgeuk, a form of musical theatre derived from the traditional Korean sung storytelling form pansori, has long been one of the most marketable genres in the extended scene of what can be collectively termed gugak, or traditional Korean music. Within the space of the last few years, concerts of the National Changgeuk Company of Korea (NCCK), have begun selling out ever more rapidly, now often being sold out months before the production first opens. While the NCCK has long had its poster stars, such as An Sukseon or Park Aeri, the newest generation of NCCK performers are demonstrating a very different form of stardom, with the interaction with fans being a particularly notable difference. Performances of fan behaviour more commonly seen in the K-pop and musical worlds, such as sending coffee carts, or decorating snacks with the faces of the fan club’s idol, are becoming increasingly common in the changgeuk scene as well. Nevertheless, showing appreciation of music in the gugak scene has some noticeable differences to audience engagement in both K-pop and musicals, and there is a lot of negotiation necessary for fans and stars to find a suitable common ground. This paper will explore how these processes of negotiation occur, and analyse the potential impact of this phenomenon on the gugak scene as a whole.

ABSTRACT. This roundtable discussion focuses on how NGOs relevant to music and dance studies at large, and more specifically societies such as ICTMD and nonprofit organizations such as Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale, relate to and engage with the various plans and projects proposed by UNESCO. What does it mean for music and dance scholarship and its supporting organizations to engage with Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH)? How can and how should we represent music and dance studies according to our missions? How do organizations such as ICTMD and RILM create a strong multilateralism, promote inclusion and understanding, and mobilize education? In turn, how can music and dance studies influence UNESCO's goals and objectives as well as policies, such as the UNESCO Framework on Culture and Arts Education CLT-ED/WCCAE2024/1. Panelists will approach these questions from different angles, taking into account the opportunities and limitations related to digital heritage and globalism as well as the opportunities and challenges related to global vs. local arts and culture education. In short position papers, the panelists will provide the basis for discussion: Zdravko Blažeković will provide two examples to show how local music culture (in this case Aboriginal and Croatian songs) has been useful in land tenure policy making, thereby highlighting the invaluable role of music in intergovernmental work. Don Niles will share recent experiences of working on the International Research Centre for Intangible Cultural Heritage in the Asia-Pacific Region's project to compile ICH bibliographic sources on Papua New Guinea, how this relates to the goals of making the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies the resource center for research on music and dance of the country, and how these goals contrast with that of other countries involved in the research center project. Susana Sardo will highlight ICTMD's triangular commitment to ICH, reflecting on the ethical balance between research, action, and cultural policy when the same institution, through its members, is deeply involved in all three. Focusing on knowledge conservation, Tina Frühauf will elucidate how UNESCO's 2003 Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage—and more specifically safeguarding at the national level, at the international level, and international cooperation and assistance—has informed RILM's past and recent initiatives.

ABSTRACT. In the context of the 48th ICTMD World Conference, we propose this intercultural research-creation workshop to perform and reflect on the researchers’ ways of knowing-learning music and dance. Our intention is to bring together musicking and dancing within a critical discussion about the sensorial, affective, and political issues involved in the intercultural experiences, both in our fieldwork and our personal genealogies.

Our point of departure is a singular and disruptive case documented in our research-creation process, which is based on the exchange of music and dances between Qom indigenous peoples from South America and Kanak indigenous peoples from Melanesia, initiated in 2006. This process involved the sharing of Melanesian dances as a kick-start in the revitalization of Qom dance heritage. From a postcolonial perspective, we highlight the emergence of interculturality, as an impulse that crashes with the concepts of authenticity, ancestrality, and diversity, and that contributes to the construction of other modes of know-how within academic spaces, based on the exchange of experiences, dialogues, and collective research-creation processes.

In the first part of the workshop, we will invite Qom and Kanak knowledge holders to share their experiences: Rosa Suárez y Carlos Lorenzo, members of the Qom dance group Pocnolec of Great Chaco-Argentina, and Jean Luc Marengo, Kanak musician of New Caledonia. In the second part, we will work with trigger questions and prompts that invite participants to bodily perform their own genealogical ways of knowing diverse practices of music and dance. We will discuss the inscriptions of affective relationships and their links to the communities and places of belonging. Finally, we will invite all the participants to create an experimental collective performance of their shared embodied experiences.

ABSTRACT. Authority, access and return have been growing preoccupations of ethnomusicologists and institutions in relation to First Peoples’ musical knowledges over the past 35 years. In recent years this work has become increasingly aligned with developments in Indigenous Data Sovereignty. However, agency, authority, and power in relation to new tools and media for creative and cultural resistance and thrivance, have much longer histories. This is partially reflected in discourse on broadcasting and media movements over the past 50 years, but moreso in First Peoples’ accounts of creative responses to changing environments from deep history to the present.

This roundtable, comprising speakers from Australia and Canada, will present perspectives on and approaches that are relevant to data sovereignty, across a range of historical and contemporary, community, field, and institutional contexts. The goal is to support a dialogue about and develop practice in relation to data sovereignty in community, institutional and disciplinary contexts, where community-based creative action, archiving, and research, are held as thriving, authoritative and critical spaces.