Introduction

This special issue began its life as a series of conference papers and panels during the 45th World Conference of the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM), held in Bangkok in 2019.¹ Colleagues who presented individual papers at this conference, which are included and extended in this special issue, are Day and Balosso-Bardin who formed part of the panel, ‘“I’m a Musician and a Researcher”: Three Performers’ Approaches to Practice-based Research’.² Swijghuisen Reigersberg, McKerrell and Corn convened a panel of three papers on ‘Valuing and Evaluating Musical Practice as Research in Ethnomusicology and its Implications for Research Assessment’. Pyper (2019) also presented; as part of this special issue Pyper did not include his paper but instead helped support the submission by his early-career researcher team comprised of Moshugi and Netshivhambe.

Other authors were selected following a call for papers, which solicited contributions relating to the value and valuing of music practice research across the higher-education and policy sectors. Value and valuing, we suggested, could be understood broadly in monetary, social, embodied and other ways. Another theme we wanted to explore was the question of what links and differences exist across practice research, applied music research and knowledge exchange, societal impact initiatives and the possible social benefits or detriments of these.³ A third area of enquiry included the potential for practice research to challenge Western educational epistemologies and frameworks and contribute to decolonising narratives in higher education settings internationally. Lastly, but not least, we were keen to receive any contextualised case-studies that would enhance understandings of theoretical concepts of embodiment, wellbeing and human performativity and creativity.

Definitions

As co-editors, we did not want to limit or influence submissions by providing one singular definition of what practice as research might be and left it with our authors to use the definition that best resonated with their contexts. Among our contributors – McKerrell; Moshugi, Netshivhambe and Pyper; and Day – therefore explore related concepts such as practice research, while McKerrell also examines the concept of artistic research in a comparative way. Balosso-Bardin calls herself a practice-based researcher and Roy refers to his work as ‘performance as research’.

Zhang and Lam coin the term ‘research for practice’ in relation to the reflective praxis of the world-renowned U.S.A.-based Chinese pipa player, Wu Man. They show how Wu Man, who is not a tenured academic, but has an honorary doctorate, innovates technically and compositionally while trying to introduce Chinese musical forms and instrumental techniques to settings outside China. They use the term research for practice to highlight Wu Man’s reflexive performativity and conscious development of self-presentation methods designed to inform, educate and enthral audiences, whilst she tackles subjects relevant to coloniality and decolonisation in her performances.

Miller, Davis and Bowen and Swijghuisen Reigersberg, Corn and McKerrell also use the definition of practice as research developed by Nelson (2013: 32), which is ‘the possibility of thought within both “theory” and “practice” in an iterative process of “doing–reflecting–reading–articulating–doing”’. Moshugi, Netshivhambe, and Pyper explore how musical arrangement and composition in South Africa afforded them the opportunity to centre their musical practices. Moshugi is a Christian church music practitioner, music director and arranger and Netshivhambe a member of a Venda-identifying community. They use embodiment, (auto)ethnography and, in Netshivambe’s case, dance approaches to answer questions such as ‘When does embodiment (and musical/dance practice) become research?’

The co-editors also encouraged authors to think broadly about the term ‘practice’ in acknowledgement that definitions of music vary globally and many such definitions include other art forms such as dance. Submissions included here, therefore, embrace the practice of music as education (Roy), while Miller, Davis and Bowen examine the relationships across Cuban music, dance, old film footage and animation when exploring the musical interactions between the flute player, Richard Egües and dancer, Rafael Bacallao. Day approaches her enquiry into shakuhachi playing using meditative auto-elicitation techniques and meditation practice and Balosso-Bardin shares how her ‘fieldplay’ encounters as an accomplished Mallorcan pipe player influence her progress in the field.

Decolonising ethnomusicology and academic practice

Through this issue, the editors and authors wanted to contribute to the on-going efforts of decolonising academic practice to challenge epistemic inequalities in how knowledge is created, disseminated and used.⁴ To this end, we especially encouraged submissions from early-career researchers, non-native speakers of English and co-authored pieces, including music and other arts practitioners.⁵

Throughout our conversations with authors, we suggested, where appropriate, they consider literature that was not written in English and could perhaps better reflect the thoughts and practices of local or Indigenous thinkers, researchers and practitioners from beyond Anglophone institutions. This way, we hoped to counter some of the citation biases that arise when scholars rely solely on the written English disciplinary cannon.⁶ Particularly, Zhang and Lam, Roy and Moshugi, Netshivhambe and Pyper heeded this call to action and referenced Chinese, Latin American and African researchers and performative outputs in their work. Miller, Davis and Bowen, as well as Swijghuisen Reigersberg and Corn, also show how collaborative research and co-authorship can empower practitioners to contribute to challenging Western systems of knowledge production and advance research overall.

As ethnomusicologists, we are becoming more aware of how efforts to decolonise our research and teaching are an ongoing process. We have only just begun considering, however, the much larger epistemic challenges implicit in our publishing practices, such as our common compulsion to publish single-authored text-based outputs in efforts to obtain promotion or tenure. Many such outputs, it could be argued, are based on co-authored content. This challenges us to expand the concept of authorship (see Foucault [1969] 1984) and acknowledge the non-written intellectual contributions of our research collaborators (Swijghuisen Reigersberg and Lloyd 2019; Corn, De Largy Healy and Ormond-Parker 2019). Following Foucault (1969), we should continue asking ourselves: ‘What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate and who can appropriate it for himself? What are the places in it where there is room for possible subjects? … What difference does it make who is speaking?’ (Foucault in Rabinow 1984, 120).

As Swijghuisen Reigersberg, McKerrell and Corn demonstrate in their article on practice as research and research evaluation, Anglophone publications and institutions still set the global benchmarks for research excellence that others around the globe seek to emulate.⁷ In the context of the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF),⁸ Balosso-Bardin comments that, as a practitioner who also opted to become a practice-based researcher, her identity is not always understood by colleagues who see her practice as being mutually exclusive or unrelated to her research. Outputs of her practice, like musical albums, concerts and tours, are not always acknowledged as being research-related. She argues, however, that musician–researchers can simultaneously use their professional musical abilities to negotiate fieldwork contexts and inform academic enquiry into the social constructs and contexts relevant to music-making. Like Swijghuisen Reigersberg, McKerrell and Corn, Balosso-Bardin questions the privileging of text-based outputs over those that are performative in nature. Swijghuisen Reigersberg, McKerrell and Corn do, however, acknowledge that, for pragmatic reasons, the use of text to describe outputs based on practice as research is usually still necessary to procure research-related income institutionally.

Zhang and Lam, in examining Chinese and US contexts, provide a perspective from two nations that do not support a national research assessment exercise. They suggest that, although exercises such as the REF do allow some forms of practice to qualify as research, they also exclude performers and practitioners whose work could be classified as research. Often practitioner affiliates do not qualify for REF entry due to their contractual arrangements, especially when their performance practice does not include explanatory written outputs. This is even when, like Wu Man, they hold honorary doctorates.⁹ In turn, this suggests that universities are not capable of fully capturing the entire spectrum of research excellence they support through research assessment exercises alone. Research assessment exercises also create challenges for practitioners who aspire to careers in research or those wishing to develop careers in countries that coordinate national research assessment exercises. As Neylon (2020) puts it, ‘research excellence is a neo-colonial agenda’.

Moshugi, Netshivhambe and Pyper in South Africa and Roy in the US argue the same might be said for educational systems and approaches to pedagogies. Netshivhambe explicitly positions himself as supporting a pan-African approach to music-making and research, drawing on aspects of Euba’s creative musicology (2014). He consciously prioritises Western high-art forms in his musical practice as a reflection of his Westernised musical training at a South African university. Yet he also seeks to develop his own voice by empowering Venda dancers and musicians to include their embodied knowledge through music and dance in his compositional responses. He writes that his African philosophical approach to composition means that his work ‘starts from performance practice to paper instead of from paper to performance’ (Netshivhambe). Moshugi explicitly chooses to practice epistemic disobedience, after Mignolo (2009), ‘as a way to counterbalance the influence of South African research institutions of learning, which remain structured on historically European standards and practices’. Such institutions exclude or filter out ‘non-European’ thought, Moshugi argues. Epistemic disobedience allows him, instead, to accord greater value and prominence to South African creative approaches, including his compositional arrangements of historically Western hymns.

Practice as research case studies

As well as challenging established educational practices and modes of knowledge dissemination, the authors also suggest that current methodologies do not go far enough in embracing practice as research. Day, for example, employs auto-elicitation, a micro-phenomenological interview technique developed by Claire Petitmengin (2006), to describe experiences of meditation while playing. Through her exploration of meditative practice while playing shakuhachi, Day challenges what she sees as research methodologies that are too narrow in scope. They do not adequately account for the spiritual nature of some musical practices, which is often classified as ‘too personal’ or ‘irrelevant’ to academic enquiry. She also suggests that the fine-grained praxis and inner knowing that musicians spend their time investigating is all too often mistaken for an unconscious modus operandi that is related to virtuosity, rather than a conscious practice designed to inform and refine musical performance, reflexiveness and research enquiry. In her article, Day develops a language designed to assist with the assessment of creative meditative practices.

Balosso-Bardin, an accomplished musician on recorder and pipes, argues for an increased understanding of how musical expertise can be key to a researcher’s ability to engage in fieldwork or ‘fieldplay’. She suggests that the student–teacher model, often favoured within academia, might not elicit the positive responses she was able to garner through her work as an expert performing musician. Her status as a musician/researcher opened doors to her that might have remained closed to less proficient players. Her pre-existing sensitivity and ability to reciprocate to the performance culture, context and economies of her fieldwork eventually led to her being accepted by the Mallorcan piping community. She argues that this transition might not have been as fluent or expedient if she had been a beginner player.

Roy, in turn, continues to ‘critique and productively destabilise the divides between performance disciplines, music research, teaching, and service through decolonial praxis and anticolonial thought’ through his examination of how three classroom modules can be used to move towards decolonial pedagogies of world music in the U.S.A. His enquiry into the colonial history of music education describes a three-module lesson that allows students to centre their lived experiences, stories and ancestries. Students choose a contemporary musical artefact that represents a particular place, lifestyle or product and are subsequently encouraged to collaborate in creating a critical, semiotic reading of it. Students then develop their own solutions and responses to the artefacts chosen by modifying their originally intended meanings or forms.

Lastly, Miller, Davis and Bowen respond to McKerrell’s suggestion in this issue that we use performance as ‘a central methodology’ in the ‘translation of artistic performance aesthetics’ and as a ‘research outcome sited in original performance’. They provide us with an interdisciplinary case study based on the analysis of a live television performance of ‘Los Problemas de Atilana’ by Orquesta Aragón de Cuba (1964: A2). The authors show how musical gestures are embodied in the duet performed by the Cuban flautist, Richard Egües and dancer, Rafael Bacallao. This example reveals the shared memories of a common cultural experience within a community. The interdisciplinary analysis, provided by a musician/scholar, a film scholar/practitioner and a professional Cuban dancer/animator, unearths details of an embodied repertoire and translates culturally implicit knowledge for those outside its original artistic community of practice.

Conclusion

Ultimately, we hope this special issue will usefully illuminate how these new approaches to value and valuing of music practice research can enrich our research overall.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Muriel Swijghuisen Reigersberg

Dr Muriel Swijghuisen Reigersberg is both a research affiliate and a senior research impact and knowledge exchange manager at The Open University, UK. Her research interests include Australian Aboriginal Christian choral singing, spirituality and Indigenous agency, practice and applied research, and research ethics. Muriel is currently vice-chair to the International Council for Traditional Music's Study Group on Indigenous Music and Dance and Chair to the Society for Ethnomusicology's ethics committee.

Aaron Corn

Professor Aaron Corn is Inaugural Director of the Indigenous Knowledge Institute at the University of Melbourne. He has a background in music, collections management and Indigenous knowledge, and collaborates closely with Australian Indigenous colleagues and communities on research projects. He serves as Director of the National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia and on the Board of Directors of the International Council for Traditional Music Study Group on Indigenous Music and Dance. His work engages with intellectual traditions that remain fundamental to Indigenous cultural survival and investigates new strategies for strengthening human cultural diversity in the Digital Age.

Brett Pyper

Brett Pyper is a South African arts practitioner and scholar. He holds an MA from Emory University in Atlanta (in Interdisciplinary Studies) and a 2nd Masters and PhD from New York University (in Ethnomusicology and Popular Music Studies). From 2008 to 2013 he was CEO of the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival, and was Head of the Wits School of Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg from 2014 to 2021, where he is currently an Associate Professor in the department of Curatorial, Public and Visual Cultures. He is PI of the Arts Research Africa project that prioritises global South perspectives on artistic research, leads a research cluster on the arts, culture and heritage as knowledge production supported by the NIHSS-BRICS Think Tank, and codirects the Re-centring AfroAsia project.

Notes

1 This special issue was made possible through the generous assistance of the ICTM, who allocated the Barbara Barnard Smith Travel Award to Swijghuisen Reigersberg (2019). This allowed her to attend the 45th World Conference of the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM), held in Bangkok in 2019, from which this issue flows.

2 This panel also included work by Hyelim Kim.

3 We did not receive contributions to all themes we proposed in the call for papers. One area where we feel there was a gap in contributions, is how practice as research in ethnomusicology is able to generate positive societal change and impact.

4 Ethnomusicology Forum special issue editor Alexander M Canon was able to arrange for additional copy-editing and other author support to help bridge the linguistic differences among contributors. Anthea Skinner at the University of Melbourne, Australia, also dedicated some of her time to assist with linguistic editing, all for which we are very grateful.

5 Editors Swijghuisen Reigersberg, Pyper and Alexander M Cannon also facilitated a workshop for the early-career South African authors to guide them through submitting their first academic piece to be published in a British ethnomusicological journal. Individual conversations and Zoom calls were also arranged with several other contributors with the editorial team to clarify the various ways in which practice as research is understood and valued globally.

6 The Society for Ethnomusicology in the USA, for example, has an ongoing project to translate texts of note into the English language to widen their circulation. Such projects, however, require time and skilled translators. Within the time frames on which research projects operate, it is also not always possible acquire an entirely new language to read available literature on a subject.

7 For many in the Global South and other parts of the world, this requires a proficiency in academic English, which is an insurmountable hurdle to some if not adequately supported.

8 The REF is a research assessment exercise designed to capture the quality of UK research and allocate financial resources accordingly (UK Research and Innovation 2020).

9 The REF does allow for the support of performances and the achievements of affiliates to be captured via what is called an Environment Statement, where it is possible to describe local research cultures, student activity, infrastructures, and activities that support research. This accounts for 15% of the overall assessment mark awarded via the REF, whereas research outputs receive 60% of the overall allocation. Staff without a significant responsibility for research, such as affiliates are usually unable to submit their outputs under the most recent regulations.