Welcome to the first issue of the thirty-first volume of Ethnomusicology Forum. We craft this editorial in the midst of considerable devastation to life and livelihood in Ukraine. We watch in horror the rise in casualties and consider, too, the profound loss of heritage and culture. In some sense, these images seem too familiar and are reminiscent of past conflicts in Vietnam, the Balkans, Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan; in other senses, we have so much access to footage of missile damage, explosions, queues at border checkpoints, and ad hoc music performances that this latest conflict feels viscerally – and at times dizzyingly – in the moment. With the mass exodus of refugees from Kharkiv, Mariupol, and other cities and towns reduced to rubble, scholarly communities grapple with the ways we can provide some kind of assistance. The editorial team extends its thanks to those who have incorporated Ukrainian music and heritage into classrooms to cultivate new listeners. We thank, too, those who have donated financially to charitable relief organisations and have donated time to helping Ukrainian academics move their digital files to servers outside Ukraine.
As ethnomusicologists, we can do more to assist Ukraine and other locations afflicted by violence, dispossession, and dislocation. Firstly, we can review and teach previous scholarship on these topics to better understand the traumas of departure and arrival that refugees have – and will – face. Volume 30, issue 2 of last year’s Ethnomusicology Forum, for instance, offers insight on the impact of violence on sound and music. Secondly, we must continue our own research projects. The ethnomusicology community holds diverse perspectives about music- and sound-making, and we support one another by engaging with previous theories, methodologies, and ideas, and proposing nuanced amendments to them. The work done now may well serve others in the future, including those impacted by adverse global events.
This issue features a series of poignant articles on practice research or practice-as-research. The three guest editors, Muriel Swijghuisen Reigersberg, Aaron Corn and Brett Pyper, offer perspectives from the United Kingdom, Australia and South Africa, respectively, and bring these perspectives into conversation with authors based in the United Kingdom, Denmark, China, the United States, South Africa, and Australia. The volume is a rich one and slightly longer than the typical issue. We hope it will generate conversations at universities, in our discipline, and in our field sites about what constitutes a broader horizon of research topics and research practice. The guest editors provide a fuller description of their goals in their Introduction.
The issue also features a shortened reviews section to make room for the articles of the special issue. Alexandra Ballandino discusses an example of a monograph which effectively knits together practice and research to form an important and insightful account of the experiences and concerns of music professionals in the Greek popular music industry in Athens. Ioannis Tsioulakis’ Musicians in Crisis: Working and Playing in the Greek Popular Music Industry is clearly a book which reflects the author’s personal experience of living and working within this musical environment, and, as Ballandino observes, ‘offers an excellent description of the precarious environment in which musicians work in urban Greece’. We will return to a full complement of reviews in the next issue.