Welcome to the third 2019 issue of Ethnomusicology Forum, which we deliver slightly out of season even as we gladly report that our first issue of 2020 is under way. We write this Foreword in the midst of sudden, changing times where the impact of a global pandemic has never been more catastrophically felt. While we see our immediate lives and practices as academics, researchers, teachers, performers, composers and activists transform overnight, we hope our readers and the wider ethnomusicological community remains safe and healthy.
As we mourn the traumatic losses of musicians to the disease, well-known as well as intimately held dear, we have also witnessed musical communities all over the world spring up to sing, play and listen ‘together, 2-meters apart’ on balconies in solidarity. As many jobs and professions have been scaled—up or down—online, overnight, we have also seen a corresponding, heartening spike in sounded internet responses to public health and other campaigns, sparking the creation of several ‘coronavirus playlists’. As the streets heave into relative silence with enforced or unofficial quarantines, we listen to urban birdsong, rustling leaves, minute changes in weather, ominously panting runners, Netflix marathon broadcasts, and the suddenly-creepy whirr of distant traffic with eerie wonder and (unjustified) irritability. There is unease and discomfort while we ‘press pause’, knowing that all is never going to be the same again in spite—or because—of the fact that the basic systems of society continue to run, tenuously and miraculously at unimaginable costs: COVID-19-related racism, inequality in healthcare provision, economic impacts of industry shutdowns, the decimation of livelihoods.
What can and should ethnomusicologists do here? We do not simply live in ‘pause mode’, as different territories struck by the disease enter remission, reinfection, and eventual recovery at worryingly different rates. Instead, along with musicians, educators, and researchers around the world, we rethink the way we make, write about and teach music. We share teaching, research and musicking resources. We build physical music communities into virtual spaces with offline as well as livestreamed performance pacts across the globe’s different timezones. We rethink syllabi for ethnomusicology, public health and virality.
And, in many cases, we continue to write, research and publish as a matter of carrying on. No doubt, we anticipate a raft of new COVD-19 related articles to come in our further issues this and next year. For now, however, we bring our readers a suite of articles we have been working on pre-pandemic which remind us that in the pre-2020 world, there were already many complex, musical global challenges whose need for addressing will hopefully not be diminished by a force majeure event. As a gesture to our readers, and in consultation with our publisher Taylor & Francis, we are making this issue of Ethnomusicology Forum free access for the first month of its publication.
Opening this issue is Eric Schmidt’s critical investigation of post-subcultural world music scenes, related in a rich ethnography and careful analysis of two Tuareg music labels, Sublime Frequencies and Sahel Sounds. Styling themselves as ethically-motivated international agents for grassroots and ground-up musical initiatives in West Africa, the companies eschew tourist-friendly or exoticised world music circulatory products. However, probing deeper into visual representations, production relations and the musical sounds themselves, Schmidt asks important questions about asymmetrical entanglements in the carefully-signalled activities of musical curation as a form of knowledge-based social capital, as he also does of US-centric subject positions in processes of commercialisation in the World Music 2.0 industry.
David Irving takes a rich historical perspective on the Malay biola (violin) of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, which have been inhabited since 1826 and form part of Australia’s Indian Ocean territories. With a repertoire reflecting both Malay and Scottish influences, the biola is principally played today in the context of Islamic religious festivals to accompany dance. While emblematic of Coco Malay music, the tradition has been maintained by a handful of elderly players, this decline motivating a recent revitalisation project. It is commonly believed that the biola (violin) tradition was derived from the Anglo-Scottish family who controlled the islands between 1827 and 1978, featuring in the many dances and events they hosted, including a visit by Queen Elizabeth II in 1954. However, Irving argues that the biola was already familiar to the Malay-speaking slaves brought to the Islands when they were first populated in 1826.
Andrew Alter's rich account of the annual Bhūṅkhāl Melā goddess festival in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand in Northern India looks closely at how Hindu sonic theology is revealed through drumming and ritual action. Drawing on ethnography from the mid-1990s, when buffalo sacrifice was still practiced, highlights a few key moment of this three day festival. Low caste drummers come to acquire special status, as they play almost constantly to motivate and control possession dancing, coordinate action, and accompany processions. The festival culminates at the hill top temple to the goddess, where numerous similar village-based groups converge in shared euphoria for their sacrifices, followed by the drums' sudden silence. Alter relates these drum-coordinated actions to the wider dynamics of sonic theology, in which Hindu cosmology connects the sounds and creative force of deity-associated drums with bringing forth existence.
Fay Hield and Paul Mansfield’s study of folk clubs in England, consolidated over more than a decade of fieldwork, addresses notions of participatory and behavioural norms. Revisiting ideas of genre-insiders vs. outsiders, locals vs. visitors, and experts vs. amateurs, they examine gatekeeping approaches to the musical sharing of platforms and performative inclusivity. In so doing, they pin down fascinating conclusions on the exercising of humour and sarcasm in order to regulate performance contexts, event structure and the definition of the folk genre in itself.
In our final piece, Zita Skořepová’s article on Dáša Vokatá and Oldřich Kaiser, two Czech singers of historically-opposing political backgrounds who have come to form an unlikely but successful duo after the fall of Communism, sheds light on the rehabilitation of cultural memory through music. Channelling Svetlana Boym’s theories of reflective versus restorative nostalgia, she analyses how musical collaborations strategically deploy humour as a means of rehabilitating and re-presenting ‘difficult’ personal and political pasts. Through the aesthetic and visual interrogation of a deliberately incongruous partnership, Skořepová relocates new political and cultural positionalities for a former indie/underground resistance singer who strategically aligns herself, post-1989, with a former state-propaganda artist. The result is a commercially-successful collaboration which has brought official recognition to one and ‘street cred’ to the other, filtered through the lens of nostalgia branding.
The reviews section opens with Stefan Williamson Fa’s discussion of Music, Sound, and Architecture in Islam, edited by Michael Frishkopf and Federico Spinetti. Williamson Fa notes the disciplinary breadth covered by the volume’s chapters, and suggests that the book’s strength lies in its bringing together diverse methodological and conceptual approaches to the study of sound and space. Two further edited volumes are reviewed in this issue. The first is Antti-Ville Kärjä’s review of Music as Heritage: Historical and Ethnographic Perspectives, edited by Barley Norton and Naomi Matsumoto, a volume that contributes to Intangible Cultural Heritage studies through its inclusion of historical and Western art music perspectives, in addition to discussions of the audiovisual representation of music heritage. The last of the edited volumes reviewed is Qupai in Chinese Music: Melodic Models in Form and Practice, edited by Alan Thrasher. Reviewing the volume, Elizabeth J. Markham guides us through the chapters’ contributions to scholarship on Chinese qupai, the system of melodies that act as structural models for most traditional Han Chinese instrumental music. Markham suggests, in conclusion, that the volume calls out beyond the field of Chinese music studies for further work on the significance of the ‘short tune’ as a basic unit in music making across traditions.
Reviews of two monographs follow. The first is Jack Draper’s review of Voices of Drought: The Politics of Music and Environment in Northeastern Brazil, by Michael B. Silvers. Describing the book as an exploration of the intertwining musical and ecological soundscapes and landscapes of the northeastern state of Ceará, Draper finds that it provides a helpful portrait of recent economic, cultural, and political developments related to the subgenres of electronic and traditional forró. Closing the reviews section, David Henderson finds much to admire in Anna Marie Stirr’s Singing Across Divides: Music and Intimate Politics in Nepal, proposing that this ethnography of dohori is an important work for those interested in affect in song and the efficacy of song.