Introduction: ethnomusicologies of radio

ABSTRACT

This introduction sounds a call for ethnomusicologies of radio. Radio remains amongst the most widespread electronic mediums on earth. The tensions that accompanied its development continue to populate our present media landscapes, and many of these same tensions animate ethnomusicological endeavour. Here, we develop two central arguments. First, histories of radio and ethnomusicology are bound up together: that ethnomusicology is radiophonic and radio is ethnomusicological. Second, that radio is a vector of modernity that means different things in different times and places. Through these multiplicities, radio is less a thing or an apparatus than it is an ethnographic site. We begin by listening to the modernities that radio makes audible, before turning to the kinds of citizenship that are constructed through radio broadcasting. We close by sketching the disciplinary formations, theoretical concerns and ethnographic orientations that ethnomusicologies of radio might entail; and by introducing the articles that sound out these ideas and comprise this special issue.

KEYWORDS:

• Radio
• ethnomusicology
• infrastructure
• citizenship
• modernity

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the BFE Committee for their support and assistance in organising the 2016 One Day conference out of which this issue arises, and the Museum of Communication for hosting us. We also extend many thanks to Timothy Taylor for his keynote address, and to all the presenters and participants at the event. Finally, we thank the anonymous reviewers of the articles, and especially Abigail Wood for her guidance and patience in bringing this issue to print.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributor

Tom Western is an Early Career Fellow in the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford. His research bridges ethnomusicology and forced migration studies, examining the relations between sound, borders, displacements and citizenships. He completed his PhD in music at the University of Edinburgh in 2015, exploring how ethnographic recordings and media infrastructures were used to construct nations and borders in postwar Europe, and how migration was silenced in the process. His current research listens to experiences of displacement and emergent forms of sonic citizenship in Athens, Greece.

Notes

1 The word ‘ethnomusicology’ first appears in print in Kunst’s (1950) Musicologica: A Study of the Nature of Ethno-Musicology, its Problems, Methods, and Representative Personalities. In the United States, the Society for Ethnomusicology was founded in 1955. See Stokes (2013) for a good overview of this history.

2 http://radio.garden/ - last accessed 29/10/2018.