Welcome to the first issue of Ethnomusicology Forum for 2019. We apologise for its late appearance, due to scheduling issues in the pipeline and a slight delay in handing over of journal editorship. Abigail Wood has kindly extended her term as Co-Editor for this issue, as we await the coming aboard of Henry Stobart later this year. We are extremely grateful to Abigail for her tireless and vigilant work on the journal, alongside her support of emerging scholarly approaches in ethnomusicology publishing. Henry will continue challenging and broadening the remit of the discipline as he prepares to join us in our forthcoming issues.
We would like to draw your attention to other news from the British Forum for Ethnomusicology (BFE): our recent annual meeting at the Elphinstone Institute in Aberdeen saw more than 100 scholars from around the world congregate to discuss issues on collaborative ethnomusicology. We look forward to two more exciting conferences with returning partners this and next year: the BFE will join forces with the Société française d’ethnomusicologie in autumn (October 31–November 2) to present a meeting on Music, Sound, Space and Place: Ethnomusicology and Sound Studies. In January 2020, the BFE will work with the Royal Musical Association to organise the Research Students’ Conference at the Open University. In the spring of 2020, we also look forward to our annual symposium, to be held at Bath Spa University.
In other news, we are also pleased to report that Lea Hagmann from the Universität Bern has been nominated to join the board as outreach officer, and will spread the good word about the BFE’s activities in Europe and beyond.
Meanwhile, we continue doing our work in the dissemination of ethnomusicology concerns via scholarly discussion. Turning to our journal proper, this issue includes articles from a wide geocultural reach, with the integration of new conversations on musical and sounded practices in the negotiation of public space, emotionality, instrument construction, networks of practice and indigenised education campaigns.
Samuel Horlor uses the approach of frame-shifting to rethink sociality between singers and audiences at public musical events in Wuhan, China. Through challenging notions of the ‘performance of the everyday’ via music and tricky and oft-contested socio-economic interactions around it, he reflects on how ethics has come to play an important role in the experiential power of music-making.
Taking the same theme of interpersonal relationships among musicians to a different conversation in Santiago, Chile, Shannon Garland examines the idea of amiguismo. This is the notion that ‘music in Chile is produced through interpersonal favours’, thus disrupting potentially organic or systemic approaches to the scene’s wider and sustained development. Arguing for a more nuanced look at the compromised positions of musicians and their intra-community relations, she looks at how they operate tactically as well as ideologically under the constraints of limited resources in a late capitalist context.
The geocultural focus on Latin America takes a transnational turn in Yuiko Asaba’s essay on Argentine tango in Japan. Here, she delves into the artist’s plumbing of personal life history amidst transcultural Japanese notions of personal suffering for emotional capital in tango performance. In the ensuing construction of a politics of poignance fusing performer biography with performance aesthetics, Asaba posits that an imagined tango ‘authenticity’ and spirit is reached in song and music.
Turning to the interrelationship between the material cultures of music and performance practice, Scott Linford explores the history, construction, performance and symbolic resonances of the ekonting, a plucked lute played by people of the Jola ethnic group in Senegal, Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau. While recent scholars and performers have remarked on the relationship between the ekonting and the American banjo, Linford highlights the context of the instrument within Jola culture, based on rich historical and ethnographic research.
Our final article by Jessie Vallejo on Mohawk language immersion programmes makes a case for actively using music as a pedagogical tool deployed in complement with language teaching in approaches to decolonising school curricula. Arguing that musicians and musical practices do not so much serve language educators in a hierarchy than work with them on an equal, symbiotic basis, she rethinks culture-based-education campaigns from the perspective of interdependence.
The reviews section opens with Helena Simonett’s discussion of Sounds of crossing: music, migration, and the aural poetics of Huapango Arribeño by Alex E. Chávez, in which the book is praised for its account of this vernacular musico-poetic genre, and for its insights into musical practice and transnational living. Following this, Burcu Yıldız reviews John Morgan O’Connell’s monograph Commemorating Gallipoli through music: remembering and forgetting, which examines music and memory in the commemoration of victories and defeats in the Dardanelles during the First World War (1914–1918).
Next in line are reviews of two edited volumes, both of which focus on popular culture. Islam and popular culture, edited by Karin van Nieuwkerk, Mark LeVine, and Martin Stokes, is reviewed by Stephen Wilford, who notes that the volume provides a timely analysis of music’s place within Muslim societies around the world. Following this, Dafni Tragaki’s edited volume Made in Greece: studies in popular music is reviewed by Oded Erez, who describes the volume as issuing a theoretically-minded challenge to ‘popular music’ as a category. Finally, Kyle Devine reviews Current directions in ecomusicology: music, culture, nature, edited by Aaron S. Allen and Kevin Dawe. While noting the significance of the book, being the first edited volume to make a concerted exploration of ecomusicology as a field, Devine also interestingly explores the very notion of academic ‘fields’.