‘Give us a voice!’: voice, envoicement, and the politics of ‘world music’ at WOMAD

ABSTRACT

During the 1990s and 2000s, ‘world music’ became a contentious topic in ethnomusicology, with polarised exchanges of ‘anxious’ and ‘celebratory’ narratives. Recently, this debate has subsided, and many academics and industry actors have discarded the controversial label. However, attempts to simply bury the discourse are futile because the politics of ‘world music’ continues to play out within the industry. The problem with the debate was not necessarily the label itself, but the abstract and generalising narratives which simplified discussion of ‘world music’ production and consumption and excluded the voices of its participants. Applying the concept of ‘envoicement’ to WOMAD, I show that musicians value this festival as a platform for getting their voices — literal and metaphorical — heard. I argue that, by revealing perspectives which problematise past narratives, an ethnographic approach guided by envoicement could help to nuance understandings of the industry and break through the critical deadlock.

KEYWORDS:

• WOMAD
• world music
• music festivals
• music industry
• intercultural encounters
• globalisation

Introduction: entering the ‘world music’ debate

During the 1990s and 2000s, ‘world music’ became a contentious topic in ethnomusicology. The term, probably coined by American ethnomusicologist Robert Brown in the 1960s, was initially used to refer to the learning and performance of musical styles from around the world in the context of broadening university and school curricula beyond the study of European classical music (Campbell 2020; Weiss 2014). However, in 1987, a media campaign organised by international promoters in London popularised ‘world music’ as an industry marketing label to challenge the hegemony of Anglo-American pop, which instigated a debate over its implications as a discourse (Bohlman 2020; Jackson 2013).¹

Amid the uncertainties of globalisation as an emerging world order, this debate involved polarised exchanges of ‘anxious’ and ‘celebratory’ narratives.² The ‘anxious’ narrative, grounded in Critical Theory, viewed ‘world music’ as a force for cultural imperialism, focusing on global economic power inequalities and issues of control and ownership to suggest that the label facilitates economic exploitation, cultural exoticism, commodification of ethnicity, and fetishisation of difference. The ‘celebratory’ narrative, driven by postmodernism, lauded ‘world music’ as a symbol of multiculturalism and global empowerment, emphasising its potential for supporting new forms of hybrid creativity, anti-essentialist identification, and political resistance. Martin Stokes (2004: 48–50) reads the work of Viet Erlmann and Mark Slobin as representative of these positions, with the former describing ‘world music’ as a Western ‘aesthetic’ of the ‘global imagination’ that embeds ‘violently exploitative relations’ and the latter interpreting it as a network of transnational ‘flows’ that resist ‘totalizing systems’. Stokes shows that ‘anxious’ and ‘celebratory’ narratives were often asserted as ‘extreme theoretical pronouncements’ on an abstract level, offering ‘a poor guide to understanding the global circulation of music’ and ‘the meanings, practices, and pleasures of listening, dancing, and partying at the sites of consumption’ (50, 54–55). Some studies did include critical examination of specific industry practices, such as Timothy D. Taylor’s ‘ethnography of globalisation’ in Global Pop (1997). Some critics attempted to develop a more balanced appraisal of ‘world music’, with George Lipsitz suggesting in Dangerous Crossroads (1994: 11, 132) that it has both opportunities for ‘delight[ing] in difference, diversity and dialogue’ and threats of ‘render[ing] historically specific cultural expressions to little more than fashions’. However, generalising narratives still dominated the debate, limiting the discussion of ‘world music’ to this binary critical deadlock.

As the millennial angst concerning globalisation somewhat faded (Stokes 2004: 48), the debate over ‘world music’ lost its intensity, but these ‘anxious’ and ‘celebratory’ narratives continued to cast their shadow over perspectives on the industry. Taylor (2015: 115) warns that ‘simple binary oppositions’ are maintained in most scholarship on this topic, perhaps evidenced by persistent questions of whether ‘world music’ should be considered ‘imperialist poaching or avant-garde boundary transgression’ (Feld 2012: 46, my emphasis) and by ‘negative’ or ‘positive’ positions on music tourism (Krüger and Trandafoiu 2014: 2, 12–13). Literature on ‘world music 2.0’ refreshed the discussion by exploring the impact of the internet, including the democratisation of music technology, the increasing use of electronic sampling techniques, and the rise of indie movements aimed at redistributive circulation of regional popular music records and digital sharing of hyper-localised musics. However, David Novak (2011: 606–07, 630–31) shows that, despite this ‘noisy wake-up call’, the same ‘uneasy debates’ of the past were simply ‘recast’ for ‘a new online public’, suggesting that, while the subject matter may have shifted, the narratives and methodologies deployed remained largely unchanged.

Recently, some critics have attempted to move on from the debate by simply discarding the ‘world music’ label. This strategy has been used by both scholars and industry actors, with a flurry of articles pronouncing ‘world music’ as ‘dead’ or ‘outdated’ (Canavan 2021; Figueroa 2020; Kelleher 2019). Several UK-based record labels publicly committed to stop using the term in 2019 and the Recording Academy in the United States renamed its Grammy Award for ‘Best World Music Album’ over ‘connotations of colonialism’ in 2020.³ However, attempts to simply bury the discourse with the label are futile because the politics of ‘world music’ continues to play out within the industry. Aleysia K. Whitmore (2020: 212–24) shows that ‘2.0ers’ who have rejected the ‘world music’ label still rely on ‘past debates’, recycling and repacking these discourses without critical treatment.

The problem with the debate is not necessarily the label itself, but the abstract and generalising narratives which simplify discussion of ‘world music’ production and consumption and exclude the voices of its participants. Bob W. White (2012: 2) suggests that these narratives have maintained a greater focus on ‘the culture of globalization’ rather than music cultures ‘in a time of globalization’ and, discussing the Buena Vista Social Club as a case study, Lucy Durán (2014: i) shows how ‘sweeping generalisations’ can actually be very far removed from the realities of ‘world music’ as experienced by its participants. Indeed, Durán ‘question[s] the methodology of writers who feel they can speak for the views and attitudes of industry actors ‘without consulting or interviewing them directly’ (i).

Some works on music and globalisation have attempted to address these issues by examining the dynamic relationships between local musical forms and ‘world music’, such as White’s Music and Globalisation (2012) and Whitmore’s World Music and the Black Atlantic (2020), and some scholars have applied ethnographic approaches to the industry itself, for example engaging in dialogue with ‘world music’ producers (Cottrell 2010; Durán 2014; Krüger 2015; Robins 2010) or publishing media interviews with artists (Wald 2007). This ‘actor-centered’ research (Taylor 2015: 115) marks a shift in methodology that has helped to broaden the ‘world music’ debate, but I argue that this move needs to go further by examining the communicative practices of actual intercultural encounters in the ‘world music’ industry and by bringing the voices of its participants into the critical dialogue.

To this end, I apply the concept of ‘envoicement’ to WOMAD (World of Music, Arts and Dance), the UK’s largest international music festival and one of the most influential ‘world music’ encounter spaces in Europe. In this article, I ask: How do musicians at WOMAD perceive their interactions at the festivals? And to what extent do their perspectives problematise past narratives about ‘world music’? In addressing these questions, I seek to challenge the monolithic narratives of the past and find a way forward involving closer communication between academia and the music industry. In this brief survey, I have necessarily summarised only a selection of relevant literature on the ‘world music’ debate, but what is clear is that there is a need for a greater balance between theory and practice, generality and specificity, and speaking and listening.

WOMAD offers an interesting case study for this purpose not only because of its pivotal role in the industry, but also because of its personal significance for many ethnomusicologists. Passing mentions in monographs and my own conversations with colleagues at conferences suggest that WOMAD has impacted on the lives and careers of many scholars. Some discovered a new music culture at its festivals that they would go on to study in its home country, some were even nudged into ethnomusicology after attendance at WOMAD as a student expanded their musical and cultural horizons, and others have used it as a means to contact musicians, conduct interviews, and make recordings for research, teaching or archival purposes.

Given this, I found the lack of previous scholarship on WOMAD rather surprising. Although there are many passing references to WOMAD in articles and texts, there are very few studies of the festival itself.⁴ Peter Jowers (1993) and John Hutnyk (1998) have written chapters on WOMAD as ‘a response in the field of culture to the condition of postmodernity’ (52) and as ‘a kind of commercial aural travel consumption’ (402) respectively, but these only commented on WOMAD from a theoretical perspective to advance an ‘anxious’ or ‘celebratory’ narrative about ‘world music’. My critical ethnographic account of WOMAD (Nissen 2020) responded to this by engaging with the particularities of the festival itself, which underpins this intervention on the ‘world music’ debate.

It is worth discussing my motivations for this intervention. From an early age, festivals have been an important part of my life, offering an essential space for taking part in collective musical and social experiences. I attended Reading and other festivals as part of the summer rite of passage for British youth and I performed as a musician at various events such as the Youth Music Festival. Coming from a mixed-ethnicity background and growing up around the multicultural city of London, I also had a strong personal interest in listening to diverse musics. After moving to Manchester in 2010 to study music, these interests merged, and I started going to ‘world music’ venues such as Band on the Wall and festivals like WOMAD alongside studying ethnomusicology, where I learnt about music cultures from around the world and indeed the controversial ‘world music’ debate. It was after this, as I walked through the fields of WOMAD and saw the musicians sing and speak on the stages, I was compelled to wonder: What do the musicians themselves think about this? What drives the organisers of the festival? What do these experiences mean to audiences? This critical moment signified my first step on the road to study the festival and engage with the perspectives of its participants through an ethnographic methodology guided by envoicement.

Envoicement: making the absent ‘other’ present

The concept of envoicement, as deployed in this research, was primarily developed in feminist and postcolonial studies. Beyond a focus on women, gender systems and sex discrimination, the ‘enactment of feminist politics in the research process’ has involved reflecting on the relationship between ‘the “knower” and the “known”’ in fieldwork and questioning who has the ‘power to speak’ in ethnography (Chapman Sanger 2003: 30). Since at least the 1970s, feminist scholars have critiqued the videocentrism of traditional observational methods and demonstrated how this objectified women as an absent, silent ‘other’. Instead, they proposed using ‘voice-centred’ approaches, drawing on dialogic methods to ‘envoice’ women directly in the ethnographic text, restoring their agency as individuals with the capacity to express and reflect on their own lives and experiences (Dunn and Jones 1994: 1–2). This was enriched by the rise of postcolonialism, which showed how Western depictions of the ‘East’ have misrepresented local cultures (Said 1978) and how ‘subaltern’ subjects such as formerly colonised peoples are systematically denied the right to speak for themselves (Spivak 1988). This positioned the need to ‘include a polyphony of voices’ in ethnographic research as part of the movement to ‘decolonise’ Western hierarchies, especially as the ‘multiplicity of knowledges’ revealed can challenge ‘universalist’ narratives which often victimise ‘others’ (Chávez and Skelchy 2019: 137–38).

Thus, prior to the ‘crisis of representation’, a moment of intense reflection that questioned the authority of fieldwork and ethnography in the late 1980s (Clifford and Marcus 1986), feminist and postcolonial scholars had already been tackling the problems of partial truths and the power dynamics between observer self/observed other. Nevertheless, the ‘new fieldwork’ which emerged from this ‘crisis’ encouraged more scholars to adopt humanising methods such as ‘friendship’ models of fieldwork (Hellier-Tinoco 2003) and polyvocal ethnography (Rice 2014). It also seemed to cement the envoicement methodology within feminist musicology, as evidenced by the ‘international conversations’ in Pirkko Moisala and Beverly Diamond’s Music and Gender (2000: 2–3), Jane A. Bernstein’s use of ‘voice’ as a metaphor for ‘autonomy, authority and agency’ in Women’s Voices Across Musical Worlds (2004: 4), and Ruth Hellier’s exploration of the relationships between ‘a singing voice and voice as agency’ in Women Singers in Global Contexts (2013: 5–7). However, Ellen Koskoff (2014: 24–25, 179) notes that one of the great ironies of this crisis is that it also gave rise to existentialist tendencies which disposed of fieldwork entirely and replaced it with abstract analytical models drawn from literary criticism and cultural studies, erasing the advances made in decentring authorial power by privileging the scholar’s ‘ideas about people’ over ‘the real experiences of people’. It seems that the generalising narratives about ‘world music’ emerged from this moment when non-ethnographic studies ‘dehumanized music makers and listeners by ignoring their perspectives’ (Berger 2008: 73).

To challenge this, I used the concept of ‘envoicement’ to guide my fieldwork at WOMAD festivals 2014–2019. While my approach did include empirical methods such as participant observation and cultural critique, I prioritised interviews, conversations, and other means of interaction and communication with musicians, organisers, and festivalgoers, and I always put my own reflections into critical dialogue with their perspectives, stories, ideas, and experiences.⁵ I recruited research collaborators for interviews onsite at festivals, to ensure that our conversations were grounded in ‘actual experience’ of having ‘truly “been there”’ (Geertz 1988: 4–5), but our interactions extended well beyond this. I forged relationships and even friendships with some individuals by seeing them over successive years at WOMAD and by meeting up beyond the festival itself. I also shadowed and interviewed organisers more intensively during a trip to WOMAD’s offices at Real World Studios and I have worked closely with several artists I first met at WOMAD, collaborating with them for performances and other projects.⁶

My path to envoicement could thus be understood as a practice of ‘fieldwork at home’, where the ethnographer conducts research in a cultural context that is ‘already deeply familiar’ as ‘a means of envisioning broader concerns’ (Stock and Chou 2008: 109) and where they never truly ‘enter’ or ‘exit’ the ‘field’ but instead constantly negotiate fluid configurations of ethnographic relationships within their ‘home’ context (Caputo 2000: 19–20). Indeed, it was my prior participation in WOMAD which led me to question the application of abstract narratives to ‘world music’ without engaging in dialogue with musicians, promoters or audiences in this context. Of course, ‘fieldwork at home’ raises its own issues, with some questioning the ‘objectivity’ of ‘native ethnomusicology’ (see Stock and Chou 2008: 108–09, 113), but its benefits such as prior knowledge and long-term immersion outweigh its risks and envoicement can be used to help broaden the perspectives presented beyond those of the researcher, which is ultimately a concern that applies equally to fieldwork ‘at home’ or ‘abroad’.⁷

It is important to recognise that envoicement itself is not necessarily a simple solution to all the problems outlined above. Some feminist scholars have questioned whether scholars are really ‘giving’ voices or simply ‘taking’ voices for their own gain (Lengel 1998: 237), particularly given that ‘the power of authorship’ remains with the researcher who can ‘extract’ words ‘to illustrate points of [their] choosing’ (Roseneil 1993: 204). Others have highlighted risks of essentialism, as cultural tropes can be ascribed to exoticise the voice of an individual and reduce their subjectivity to stereotype (Davies 2019: 142–43). Similarly, Caroline Bithell (2003) has shown how, beneath their utopian claims, friendship models can risk feelings of betrayal as collaborators may feel that they have a greater stake in the research but it may be difficult for the researcher to please all readers in the final ethnographic text. I certainly encountered related issues during my fieldwork, for example when the ‘shadows’ of abstract ‘world music’ narratives initially made WOMAD’s organisers reluctant to speak to me. However, I see this as part of the messy but valuable work of envoicement, which is after all a complex dialogic process rather than a simple ethnographic device. Despite its limitations, I have found that this voice-centred approach is effective for unpicking binary narratives, reducing the ‘insurmountable chasm’ between researcher and researched (Walley 1997: 405–7), and offering ‘a more nuanced abstraction’ that ‘registers fine-grained differences’ often lost in social commentary (James 2019: 51–86). Neither scholar nor collaborator can attain perfect observation or interpretation, affirming the need to bring a plurality of voices into critical dialogue to enrich understanding. Envoicement offers a means of challenging the exclusion of ‘world music’ participants whose voices have for too long been marginalised from a debate that essentially concerns their direct lived experiences.

WOMAD: an archetypal ‘world music’ festival

WOMAD is the UK’s largest annual international music festival and one of the prime events for ‘world music’ in Europe. WOMAD has produced more than 200 festivals in many different countries, while its sibling company, Real World, is one of the most prominent record labels in the industry and its charitable arm, the WOMAD Foundation, has helped to advance multicultural music education in the UK.⁸

WOMAD offers a fascinating case study for discussing the politics of ‘world music’ because of its influential position in the contemporary industry and its historical importance as the archetypal ‘world music’ festival in Britain. WOMAD was founded in 1980 by former Genesis prog rock star Peter Gabriel and several enthusiasts working for independent music magazine The Bristol Recorder. It was the product of anti-racist, multiculturalist social movements which started in the 1960s and gained momentum during the 1970s, such as the Anti-Apartheid Movement and Rock Against Racism. Gabriel’s direct involvement in these movements underpinned his idea for a ‘cross-cultural event’ designed to ‘celebrate the diversity of the world’s music’ and ‘show the worth and potential of a multicultural society’.⁹ WOMAD’s inaugural festival in 1982 was the first major international music festival in the UK. It brought together more than 50 performing artists, encouraged cross-cultural collaborations, and entertained and educated diverse festival audiences in an open, friendly environment through performances, workshops, talks, interviews, carnivalesque parades, and other participatory activities.¹⁰ WOMAD heralded the birth of a new era for British music festivals: its inclusion of musicians from a wide range of places and cultures around the world and its educational activities, facilitated directly by performing artists, were both pioneering ventures in this context at the time.

WOMAD has had a complicated relationship with the ‘world music’ label, but it certainly played a role in its popularisation. Some of the earliest uses of this term in an industry setting, rather than music education contexts, were applied to WOMAD, which may be due to the strong connections between WOMAD and ethnomusicology.¹¹ WOMAD’s Festival Director, Thomas Brooman, and Real World’s Manager, Amanda Jones, participated in the meetings that culminated in the 1987 ‘world music’ media campaign, and the editor of the folk music magazine fRoots, Ian Anderson, has suggested that WOMAD was one of the main inspirations for the campaign, as it had proven that there was a ‘larger audience’ for international music beyond longstanding specialists and enthusiasts.¹² However, it is worth noting that WOMAD’s own 1982 mission statement did not use the term and, even during the campaign itself, its festival programmes and press releases tended to avoid the label, instead using language such as the ‘world of music’ and ‘the diversity of music and culture around the world’ alongside discourses from the 1970s anti-racism movement.¹³ Brooman has suggested that WOMAD was founded with ‘the absence of any boundaries to guide or define the festival’ and consciously maintained its distance from the label, which he has depicted as an ‘albatross’ that cast a shadow of ‘otherness’ over the industry.¹⁴ WOMAD nurtured a nascent interest in musical and cultural diversity before the campaign and maintained its momentum after this boomlet, so its fate was evidently independent from that of the campaign. Yet, WOMAD did festivalise ‘world music’, introducing debut artists and setting new trends in the industry, and world-ise music festivals, influencing the programming and activities of other UK events.¹⁵ My conversations and interviews with WOMAD’s organisers affirmed that they still maintain this critical stance on ‘world music’ today. Paula Henderson, who started working in the WOMAD office in 1989 and became its Festival Programmer in 2008, suggested that the label ‘pigeon-holes people’, stating that ‘WOMAD is, and always was, an international arts festival’. Mandy Adams, WOMAD’s Education Manager who has worked for the WOMAD Foundation since 1990, regarded it as ‘very Eurocentric’ because it ‘assumes some kind of “other”’, suggesting that WOMAD instead celebrates ‘music from around the world’ and ‘the world of music, arts and dance’.¹⁶ In 2019, they made this position public, as Paula was one of the UK promoters who publicly disavowed the label and led the charge to discard it for good.

Although WOMAD has changed its physical location several times, it has remained remarkably consistent in purpose and format over the years.¹⁷ At Charlton Park, WOMAD now puts on a programme of more than 100 artists who perform on stages scattered across the festival site. These stages create spaces with different atmospheres, including: large outdoor and tented stages, featuring sets from ‘world music’ stars and upcoming artists; smaller stages nestled amongst the greenery of an arboretum area, where attendees often sit or lie down on the grass while they listen to performances in a more relaxed setting; sound system tents, where festivalgoers party to electronic music; and workshop tents, where enthusiasts go to learn more about an artist and their music and culture through a variety of activities, including participatory musicking, demonstrations with Q&A, and talks and interviews.¹⁸ Drawing on participant observation and interviews, I consider how WOMAD’s musicians perceive their interactions at the festival and the extent to which their perspectives may problematise past narratives about ‘world music’.

Platforming voices: the politics of communication at WOMAD

Over the period that I conducted fieldwork at WOMAD, more than 600 artists performed at the festival and, each year, over 35,000 festivalgoers attended the event. Each artist had a unique approach to performing on its stages and each attendee attached their own personal meanings to their individual experiences. As such, it is a difficult task to make connections between the perceptions of WOMAD’s participants. However, a common thread which emerged when collaborators shared their perspectives and described their experiences was the notion of WOMAD as a platform where artists could get their voices heard. Organisers spoke of the festival as ‘trying to give artists a voice and a platform’ and musicians and festivalgoers consistently used this language or related images, referencing not only the musical voice — whether the literal singing voice or the sounds of musical instruments — but a series of metaphorical voices, including subjectivity and collectivity.¹⁹

Many artists consider their performances at WOMAD as an expression of subjectivity, using song, music, dance, speech, and other mediums to communicate their thoughts, feelings, experiences, and worldviews. Some artists present this through the prism of celebrating a particular cultural tradition, while others emphasise how their individual creativity transgresses essentialist groupings.

Parvathy Baul, a Baul practitioner from West Bengal, India, performed at WOMAD in 2017. Coming from a Brahmin family, Parvathy studied Hindustani classical music during her childhood, but discovered the Baul tradition at a later age when she was seeking a greater sense of completeness. In her late-night performance, she sang and danced over the drone of the ektara, a one-string lute plucked by her right hand, and the rhythms of the duggi, a small kettle drum attached to her waist and struck by her left hand. At times, she became a vessel of pure movement, her long hair and the base of her orange sari rising up as she spun around in circles, pouring out her emotion through the sound (Figure 1).²⁰

Figure 1. Parvathy Baul performing at WOMAD 2017.

Parvathy explained how her performance sought to create a ‘gateway’ connecting ‘the inner person with the vastness of the truth’:

The performance [was] to celebrate the love inside. It’s a way of connecting yourself, it’s very meditative. These sounds are like spoken wisdom. Through the vibration, positivity, joy and love fills the air. It’s a way to experience bhakti [worship]. When you sing and dance, your heart opens and you are able to go beyond something called ‘the mind’ towards your truer self.²¹

However, it is not necessarily a simple process for an artist to express themselves in the highly mediated ‘world music’ context, especially when their musical style eschews established genres. The band Tulegur appeared at WOMAD festivals internationally between 2015–2017. I attended their performance at Charlton Park in 2015 and I also saw them at a gig in Beijing in 2018. In both settings, the group shared their mix of rock, heavy metal, electronic and khoomei [throat singing] and delivered a high-energy set full of virtuosic solos and comedic exchanges with audiences. Their singer, Gangzi, highlighted that WOMAD’s organisers had encouraged them to perform freely, so they felt comfortable to play their music in the same way as they do in China, and affirmed that performing at WOMAD boosted their international profile and opened up new opportunities.²² When I asked him about the ‘world music’ label, however, he highlighted the risks that can accompany greater visibility in the industry:

The world comes to me and says my music is ‘world music’, or somebody called it ‘nomadic post-rock’ and another ‘Mongolian grunge’. Actually, I don’t know what is that! I never thought ‘I’m world music’, but it is the person who writes the characters who can name something, not me.²³

The labels applied to Tulegur frame their music as Western pop (post-rock/grunge) with an exotic flavour (nomadic/Mongolian). Gangzi explained that this framing clearly misrepresents their musical journey because, despite coming from a Mongolian background, it was the cosmopolitan underground scene in Beijing which was their greatest influence:

I came to Beijing in 2003. At that time, I was playing metal music, rock ‘n’ roll guitar. I got into the ‘underground’. . . . I started playing some Chinese folk music and, in 2005, I saw somebody doing Mongolian throat singing. I was like, ‘I’m Mongolian’, so I really wanted to know what the fuck was Mongolian throat singing! I asked everybody, including my parents who worked for the local music radio station, but nobody knew. So, I watched videos online and then I went to the grasslands to live with the herdsmen. Now, I play Mongolian with rock ‘n’ roll rhythm and, later, I added electronic influence too. . . . I cannot say ‘I am Chinese music’ or ‘this is Mongolian music’, our music style is Tulegur!²⁴

This kind of misrepresentation is far from an isolated case in the industry. Amira Kheir, a Sudanese-Italian singer based in London, performed at Charlton Park in 2014 and a WOMAD event at the Southbank Centre in London in 2017 (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Amira Kheir performing at WOMAD River Stage in London 2017.

After the latter performance, we sat down to talk in a bar by the river. Amira described her style as ‘Sudanese music’ with a combination of ‘different influences’ such as jazz, soul, Latin and reggae, which she suggested came from ‘growing up in different places’, and she also spoke about using performance as a ‘door’ into her ‘spiritual life’:

Music helps me understand my purpose. It allows me to explore the emotional part of myself. It’s my search, my journey. It’s my foot into another world.²⁵

From her performance and our conversation, it was clear that Amira is a calm, genuine, and modest person, very conscious of being kind and respectful towards others and speaking thoughtfully and eloquently on issues from women’s rights to multiculturalism. Towards the end of our interview, I asked her, then, what she thinks about having been labelled ‘the diva of the Sudanese desert’. Rolling her eyes and laughing, she replied:

Yeah, I don’t know how to answer that! Someone just decided that and it stuck. It’s just how these things go with the press. It just makes me laugh because it’s so inaccurate!²⁶

The ‘diva’ label appears to be drawing a parallel with Dimi Mint Abba, the Mauritanian iggawin [griot] who was dubbed ‘la diva du désert’. This gendered and racialised term is often problematic, usually applied to frame ‘women of colour’ as ‘embodiments of excess’ i.e. ‘too dramatic’ or ‘too demanding’ (Vargas 2012: xiv–xv), and it is particularly inappropriate when imposed on an artist like Kheir whose performance style, outlook, and temperament is about as far away from this stereotype as possible. The ‘desert’ aspect of the label is also inaccurate because, although Kheir has recorded songs about the desert and her second album is titled Alsarhraa [Desert] (2014) in homage to this aspect of her heritage, Amira affirmed that she would never identify herself as ‘from’ the desert because this would reduce the nuances of her story of growing up across Italy and Sudan and being based in London since adulthood. Indeed, her experiences have been primarily urban and cosmopolitan, a fact lost in this narrative which instead essentialises and exoticises her identity based purely on her ethnicity.

The labels imposed on both Tulegur and Kheir were devised and promoted by media outlets rather than by WOMAD, but the labels nevertheless became more prevalent as the artists gained wider recognition after their WOMAD appearances. Despite this, both artists praised the efforts of WOMAD’s organisers to create such an open platform for self-expression and many musicians I interviewed at WOMAD suggested that, because of this, the festival actually offers a means of resisting industry labelling practices. In fact, several artists used their performances at the festival as an opportunity to protest specific labels. During a hard-hitting set in 2016, Congolese-Belgian rapper Baloji took aim at ‘world music’ itself, calling on audiences to recognise that: ‘This isn’t “world music”, it’s my music. You can’t put me in a box just because I’m African’. Clearly, imposed labels in the ‘world music’ industry have the potential to limit an artist’s freedom and, by promoting artists and raising their profiles primarily within that industry, WOMAD is somewhat complicit in these practices. Nevertheless, by enabling artists to communicate their subjectivity on their own terms, artists still value WOMAD as a platform where they can share their voices and express themselves and thus transcend or even transgress these wider limitations on their agency.

Artists also framed WOMAD as a platform for voices of collectivity. Many discussed their experiences of performing at the festival in terms of sharing their music and culture across divisions such as geography, race, ethnicity, gender, age, and social background. They often suggested that music is an effective tool for this because it can transcend language and communicate both differences and commonalities simultaneously. This communication takes place both on and off the stages at WOMAD, between performers and audiences and also amongst the artists themselves.

Hamid El Kasri performed at WOMAD in 2018. As a maalem [master] of gnawa, he shared ancestral melodies exchanged through call and response singing and cyclical rhythms created by the deep winding lines of his gimbri and the oscillating patterns of his group’s percussion.²⁷ After his performance, Hamid stated that he felt satisfied by the experience because he was able to create a spiritual atmosphere of trance and communicate his culture to the audience:

I really liked it a lot because of the interactive opportunity. It was up to my expectations. Gnawa is a spiritual trance, it’s going beyond the lyrics. Its soul is there in the sound. When people meet these sounds, we communicate, and the people recognise themselves in the trance. This kind of interactivity is very important.²⁸

After speaking to Hamid, I bumped into him various times at other performances around the festival site and in the backstage area while I was talking to other artists. He was taking in the sounds of music from different places and cultures, making connections with other musicians, and even exchanging melodies and engaging in impromptu jam sessions. While some artists do simply shuttle in and out of WOMAD to perform, particularly if they are in the middle of a UK or European tour, many others follow Hamid’s pattern of participation, where they become part of a collective of festival artists and also experience other performances from an audience perspective. Hamid emphasised the ‘power’ of music to bring people into each other’s worlds:

Musicians are becoming the new ambassadors. I’ve worked with lots of great musicians and, when they discover gnawa, they are amazed by this new world, and, myself, I discover a lot from other musicians. . . . Thanks to these meetings like WOMAD, we can find different ambassadors from all over the world. . . . The feedback is the same everywhere: it’s not a commercial exchange, it’s a cultural exchange.²⁹

However, it is worth considering whether the power relations at play undermine this sense of collectivism at the festival. While artists may overwhelmingly affirm that WOMAD provides a platform for their voices, the administration of this platform is ultimately under the control of its UK-based organisers, perhaps mirroring the wider power inequalities of the industry where ‘world music’ is curated by gatekeepers from the ‘West’ even though it is created by musicians from the ‘rest’ of the world. Although none of the musicians I interviewed perceived their relationships with WOMAD’s organisers in this way, a cynical reading might suggest that such criticisms may be more pervasive if artists could speak out without fear of biting the hand that booked them. During his tenure as festival director from 1982 to 2008, Brooman himself reflected on the paradox that WOMAD’s power to greatly amplify the voices of some musicians inevitably risks marginalising others:

WOMAD has frightening powers over the fate of musicians. If we really get behind an artist, it opens up real international opportunities. The downside is that we can’t give that to everybody.³⁰

Artists in WOMAD’s lineups might thus be considered, in effect, the ‘lucky’ ones, those who have managed to navigate an unequal industry and claim a share of its power, leaving behind others who were never ‘given’ this chance.

Nevertheless, these inequalities at the structural level do not seem to undermine WOMAD’s function as a platform for voices of collectivity at the interpersonal level. According to the artists I interviewed, organisers make a conscious effort to abate power imbalances by cultivating an environment of respect for musicians. Several described the festival as a ‘dream’, not only for empowering them to overcome barriers such as visas and unlock new doors in the industry, but primarily for giving them a platform to share their voice as part of this collective experience. Artists often contrasted the openness of WOMAD’s organisers with other contexts in the ‘world music’ industry where they have experienced impositions or exploitation such as refusal of payment, regulation of their repertoire, or control over their clothing. Performing at WOMAD necessarily involves some limitations in terms of staging, timing, and technology, but the musicians I spoke to simply viewed these as adaptations similar to those that they encounter when performing in different settings even within their ‘home’ contexts.

Diabel Cissokho and Msafiri Zawose performed at WOMAD in 2016 and 2017 respectively (Figure 3). They both come from griot lineages, Diabel a Mande musician from Tambacounda, Senegal, and Msafiri a Gogo musician based in Bagamoyo, Tanzania. The two affirmed that the intercultural communication dynamics in their WOMAD performances were similar to those for audiences within their multicultural homes:

WOMAD is about sharing. It’s a pleasure for people to discover my music, just like it’s a pleasure for me when I discover different music. In Senegal, it’s multicolore too. I’m singing Mandinka songs and, even in my hometown, there are people who don’t actually understand my language, my culture, but they still love the music, they appreciate musique du monde [music of the world]. Music is sans frontières [without borders]. (Diabel Cissokho)³¹

We keep all the traditional things, but we are performing a bit more modern, to make audiences understand. But this is not for [WOMAD], it is the same in Africa. We need to keep it relevant. (Msafiri Zawose)³²

Other musicians mentioned previously in this article similarly affirmed their freedom of performance at WOMAD and highlighted the significance of this in terms of creating a sense of collectivity at the festival:

At WOMAD, I sang the silence songs in Bengali without even changing them. I didn’t feel there was a need, because the audience was just really going into it. Those who come to WOMAD love the music, they like to absorb different sounds. This gives recognition to that human being and their artform, and I truly admire that. (Parvathy Baul)³³

With music, you’re not just meeting people beyond your own perspective, you’re really journeying with them through an entire world, going along with the stories that they’re telling with their music. . . . At WOMAD, the audience was so present and communicative with us. I think WOMAD has that environment where people really are in it for the music, so they’re open to being transported, so we get transported as well. (Amira Kheir)³⁴

Gnawa is a spiritual trance, I have to feel that there is this kind of trance when I’m onstage. At WOMAD, the people came to communicate, we brought so much to each other. . . . I don’t see any difference between WOMAD and Essaouira, really, because I have to adapt my performance everywhere. Our [festivals] in Essaouira are also about meetings and this really rewarding cultural exchange. (Hamid El Kasri)³⁵

This is an important point because some scholars drawing on narratives from the ‘world music’ debate have sometimes made assumptions about similar adaptations, for example by suggesting that they necessarily represent the ‘domestication’ of artists to ‘Western practices’ (Taylor 2017: 116–17, 124–25). Discussing ‘world music’ festivals specifically, Johannes Brusila (2001: 158) suggests that, to reproduce ‘European images of Africa’, organisers force ‘African bands’ to wear ‘folklore clothes’ onstage, even if they do not wear this dress in everyday life. Given that some musicians do wear different clothing on and off stage at WOMAD, it would be easy to assume that this could signify this kind of coercive relationship between organisers and artists. However, the artists I interviewed were adamant that they had freedom over this aspect of their performances. Adams also affirmed that organisers have a conscious ‘hands off’ policy that puts artists in control:

We respect artists’ integrity, musicians choose what they play. We don’t try to mould that in any direction. Everyone is free to perform however they like. . . . We would never do anything like [telling a musician what to wear]. We don’t interfere. Some people wear traditional dress and some people don’t and it’s totally up to them!

The variety of attire worn by artists at WOMAD seems to support this, with different musicians from the same music cultures often choosing different types of dress, even sometimes within the same performing groups. For example, in a workshop on traditional West African rhythms led by Ivorian master drummer Sidiki Dembele in 2017, onstage performers were sporting a range of ‘ethnic’ dress, casual wear (t-shirt and jeans), and ‘African contemporary’ fashion (Figure 4).³⁶

Figure 3. Interviewing Diabel Cissokho at WOMAD 2016.

Figure 4. Sidiki Dembele workshop at WOMAD 2017.

Zawose, who actually decided to perform in different dress on different stages during his performances and workshops at WOMAD, explained the on/offstage clothing discrepancy by questioning whether it is ‘exotic’ for a classical violinist to dress in formal black clothing to perform even though they do not wear this clothing in everyday life (Figure 5).

Figure 5. Msafiri Zawose performing at WOMAD 2017.

This implies that, at least in cases where musicians are given a choice, this costume change is about the special ontology of performance rather than cooption into exotic fantasies. Msafiri also highlighted that artists are not always afforded such freedom of choice and pointed out that this can undermine their ability to honour their music or culture:

The people [organising] WOMAD are very open. Musicians always come out to perform here like they want. There are many places where I perform that I am not allowed to show part of my body, where I have to wear a t-shirt. This is very hard for me, because my bracelets, my necklace, my body, it all has meaning. I am happy at WOMAD we have this choice.

In framing WOMAD as a platform for sharing their collective voices, some artists actually positioned the festival as a force for resistance against the broader power inequalities which underpin the ‘world music’ industry as a whole. LADAMA performed at WOMAD in 2018 (Figure 6). Bringing together musicians from Brazil, Colombia, the United States and Venezuela, the group presented a mixture of ‘pan-American’ styles from son to maracatu. They performed five times over the course of the festival, using the different stages of the event to deliver presentational performances, facilitate participatory workshops, and engage in talks and interviews, particularly focusing on raising awareness of global inequalities, racial discrimination and violence against women.

Figure 6. LADAMA performing at WOMAD 2018.

When I spoke to the group, they suggested that their main goal at WOMAD was to build community and fight inequality:

Music is politics. Our music is saying, ‘Give us a voice!’ Politics is not the newspaper or the radio or the TV, it’s inside us. I think this is the first festival where it’s a good space for us to just talk about this resistencia [resistance]. (Mafer Bandola)³⁷

We have this voice and this opportunity here to tell people what’s going on in the world, because the media is not always honest or clear. It’s about power and taking away the fear to speak out. . . . WOMAD have given us an opportunity to think about this. (Daniela Serna)³⁸

Many artists I interviewed shared this sentiment that WOMAD offers a platform for voices of collective dissent, both against the social problems they face around the world and those within the ‘world music’ industry itself. Ripton Lindsay is a Jamaican dancer who has performed at WOMAD festivals and worked with the WOMAD Foundation for many years (Figure 7).

Figure 7. Interviewing Ripton Lindsay at WOMAD River Stage in London 2017.

When we sat down to talk at a WOMAD event in London in 2017, after his spirited Carnival-inspired dance workshop, Ripton suggested that WOMAD celebrates the ‘essence’ of multiculturalism:

Respect, integrity, humanity. This is what matters. I don’t speak this because I have a mouth, this was taught to me by my ancestors. I’m coming from people who went through the hardship of slavery, but they didn’t have one ounce of hate in them. WOMAD is about communication, it’s lifechanging. You got all this global politics of segregation, racism, fear, but artists coming together in the name of music and dance and singing for unity against all the negativity, WOMAD shows the stupidity of racism. There are musicians all over the world who, if WOMAD ever gets out line, they’ll put it in place and say, ‘Remember!’, because it’s a family.³⁹

The final line of Ripton’s statement displays the strong sense of mutuality that underpins the relationship between artists and organisers at WOMAD. Evidently, artists value the festivals as a dynamic platform where they can not only share their music, but also get many kinds of other voices of subjectivity and collectivity heard. This feeling of ownership amongst artists and the sense of responsibility on the part of organisers might indeed challenge, at least symbolically, who does really own WOMAD.

Concluding thoughts: beyond the ‘world music’ debate

In the ‘world music’ debate, the musicians, promoters, and audiences who engage with the industry have been excluded from the conversation. This conspicuous absence has left the abstract and generalising narratives that have dominated these polarised exchanges unchecked, cementing a critical deadlock which has pushed many scholars to simply discard the label and move on, even though the issues which lie behind it remain.

In light of this, I have suggested that an ethnographic approach guided by the concept of envoicement can help to reveal the realities of ‘world music’ production and consumption and bring the voices of its participants into the discussion. Through ethnographic description, verbatim quotation, and critical analysis, I have conveyed fragments of musicians’ experiences at WOMAD to show how they perceive the festival as a platform for sharing their literal and metaphorical voices, while also highlighting the complexities such as imposed labelling and power inequalities that arise in this process. This nuances previous readings of the festival as simply a ‘constricted and restrained space’ of ‘cooption’ where organisers coerce musicians into ‘a betrayal of community and roots’ (Hutnyk 1998: 410, 420) or ‘a progressive intervention within Western culture’ that contributes to ‘the emergence of a form of global civil society’ (Jowers 1993: 64, 70), thus problematising the binary ‘anxious/celebratory’ narratives which underpin them.

Indeed, moments when narratives which claim to speak for musicians specifically clashed against their own perspectives, for example by making assumptions about their relationships with organisers, suggested that challenging past narratives is as much an ethical as an epistemological issue. Discussion of generalisations about forced dress and domestication to ‘Western practices’ highlighted the need to avoid patronising and exoticising assumptions about musicians from ‘other’ places, as performers in many contexts around the world are clearly not only ‘fully modernized’ (Erlmann 1996: 475) but fully cosmopolitan, begging the question of whether an ‘appeal to an unchanging temporally fixed past’ remains a preoccupation of ‘world music’ (Connell and Gibson 2004: 344) or instead the ‘world music’ debate itself. What is at stake here is whether abstract commentary on ‘world music’ as a discourse will remain the primary focus over the realities of ‘world music’ as experienced by its participants, highlighting the importance of always putting theoretical discourses into dialogue through specific micro assessments. Abstraction makes individuals disappear and robs them of their agency, so it is vital that knowledge of ‘world music’ — like other topics in ethnomusicology — is always built on people making music. As Durán (2014: 6) highlights:

Ethnomusicologists go to great lengths to record the music and discourse of people in remote locations, but don’t seem to feel it’s necessary to do the same when writing about music producers on home ground.

It is important to remember that ‘world music’ is not simply an abstract label, it becomes the lived experiences of real people through festivals like WOMAD. This discussion of the potential of envoicement in the study of ‘world music’ is by no means exhaustive, but my hope is that this might stimulate readers to ask further questions, explore other subjects and, above all, continue to add voices to this conversation so that we can move beyond the critical deadlock of the ‘world music’ debate and develop new, more nuanced understandings of the ‘world music’ industry.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to all the musicians, organisers, and festivalgoers who collaborated in this research on WOMAD and the ‘world music’ industry. Each act of participation contributed to the findings of the project and the intervention offered by this article. I would also like to thank all the reviewers for their constructive input while preparing this manuscript for publication.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a PhD Studentship Award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership and a President’s Doctoral Scholar Award from the University of Manchester.

Notes on contributors

James Nissen

James Nissen holds a PhD from the University of Manchester and his research focuses on the world music industry, music festivals, music and migration, music education, and music and gender. He is a founding and executive member of the ICTM Study Group on Music, Education, and Social Inclusion, and has collaborated with arts and media organisations including the BBC, Band on the Wall, Music Action International and Olympias Music Foundation.

Notes

1 See Ian Anderson, ‘World Music History’, fRoots, March 2000, https://frootsmag.com/world-music-history (accessed 6 March 2021).

2 The terms ‘anxious’ and ‘celebratory’ are borrowed from Steven Feld’s ‘A Sweet Lullaby for World Music’ (2000), which was one of the first articles to outline the development of the ‘world music’ debate and highlight the connection between its competing ‘narrative positions’ and ‘globalization discourse more generally’ (151–54).

3 See Ammar Kalia, ‘“So Flawed and Problematic”: Why the Term “World Music” Is Dead’, The Guardian, 24 July 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/jul/24/guardian-world-music-outdated-global (accessed 6 March 2021); and Evan Minsker, ‘Grammys Rename World Music Category Over “Connotations of Colonialism”’, Pitchfork, 2 November 2020, https://pitchfork.com/news/grammys-rename-world-music-category-over-connotations-of-colonialism (accessed 6 March 2021).

4 Examples of passing references to WOMAD include Bithell (2014: 258), Erlmann (1993: 8), Feld (2000: 150), Frith (2000: 306–7), Howard (2008: 13–14), Klyton (2016: 117), Pacini Hernandez (1993: 53), Taylor (2017: 120), and White (2012: 3).

5 Interviews were semi-structured, with most involving a great deal of personal discussion that transcended the scope of the set questions which were necessarily designed to gather information about WOMAD, music festivals, and the ‘world music’ industry. I selected research collaborators through a combination of purposive and random sampling. Availability was often a deciding factor, but I did make a conscious effort to ensure a diverse population in terms of age, gender, nationality, race, ethnicity, etc. I conducted more than 100 interviews with organisers and musicians from over 40 countries and more than 300 festivalgoers took part in interviews or completed qualitative questionnaires.

6 One example is the ‘Mapping Migrant Voices’ project (2020–present), which was designed to challenge the exclusion of migrant/minority musicians from official narratives of ‘music in Manchester’ and encourage the participation of underrepresented groups in musical performance and education in the city. Working on this project as an administrator and musician, I invited several artists I interviewed at WOMAD to participate. So far, the project has included creating a web app of musicians in Manchester and organising a week-long artists’ residency involving more than 30 musicians creating and performing new music together. This gives one indication of how I made connections between ‘scholarship, the field and life’ to ‘experience people’ in different settings across my research and integrate the field as ‘an intrinsic element’ in my ‘home’ life (Hellier-Tinoco 2003: 32).

7 For some recent discussions of the benefits and challenges of ‘ethnomusicology at home’, see Greve (2016), Grant (2018) and Ceribašić (2019).

8 While the UK festival always remained its flagship event, WOMAD has also hosted annual festivals in Australia and Spain since 1992 and major events in other countries including Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sweden, UAE, and the USA.

9 WOMAD Festival Programme 1982.

10 WOMAD is a ‘destination’ music festival, meaning its attendees, organisers, and even some performing artists camp onsite for the duration of the event. This ritual has a number of functions, including creating a sense of community amongst festivalgoers, framing the festival as a ‘liminal’ place that sits beyond the boundaries of social reality, and conjuring a creative, quasi-spiritual collective atmosphere through associations with ‘journey’, ‘pilgrimage’, ‘escape’, and ‘utopia’ (Luckman 2014: 189, 200–203).

11 For example, writer and film-maker Mark Kidel described WOMAD as ‘the most ambitious festival of “world music” ever organised in Britain’ (Kidel, ‘Burundi, Bath & West’, The Observer, 25 July 1982; my emphasis). In WOMAD’s 1982 festival programme, the organisers expressed thanks to all the ethnomusicologists, record shop specialists, and organisations such as the Commonwealth Institute and Commission for Racial Equality who had supported the festival. The programme also shows that ethnomusicologists including John Baily, John Miller Chernoff, Veronica Doubleday, and Gordon Jones took part in the workshop programme. Simon Frith, who covered WOMAD for the Observer during its early years, mentions during his article on ‘the discourse of world music’ that WOMAD drew on ‘ethnomusicological knowledge’ for the deep ‘explanations and descriptions of particular musical forms’ and ‘well-researched biographies’ of artists in its festival programmes and workshops (2000: 307). Since 1985, WOMAD has also worked with ethnomusicologists at the British Library to record and archive festival performances. Ethnomusicologists still work with WOMAD today, including Lucy Durán, who promotes connections with SOAS at the festival and frequently MCs the BBC Radio 3 Stage, and Janet Topp-Fargion, who maintains the partnership with the British Library Sound Archive, alongside others who are indirectly involved each year as agents or translators for performing artists.

12 Ian Anderson, ‘A World Music Meeting’, fRoots, 1987. See also: Anderson, ‘World Music History: Minutes and Press Releases’, fRoots, https://frootsmag.com/world-music-history-minutes-and-press-releases (accessed 6 March 2021).

13 Examples of these discourses in WOMAD’s early statements include ‘show[ing] the stupidity of racism’ and supporting ‘Britain’s cultural minorities’ (WOMAD Festival Programme 1982) and ‘promot[ing] recognition and understanding’ of ‘Britain [as] a multi-racial society’ (WOMAD Festival Programme 1986). Even during the campaign, the term ‘world music’ did not appear in its programmes. Instead, organisers maintained anti-racism discourses, for example extending ‘a special welcome to [their] friends and comrades from overseas’ who are ‘fighting against racist and oppressive regimes in their own countries’ in their 1990 festival programme.

14 See Brooman’s autobiography, My Festival Romance (2017: 242–45).

15 Many ‘world music’ artists have made their UK/European debut at WOMAD, particularly as its organisers have prioritised discovering new talent. Some festival artists subsequently secure other performances, tours, record deals, media interviews, industry awards, and other opportunities on this basis. An example of WOMAD’s significant influence on other UK events is its impact on Glastonbury Festival, which WOMAD inspired to create a ‘Jazz and World’ stage and introduce participatory workshops after hosting a ‘WOMAD stage’ at the event in 1987. Glastonbury is the UK’s largest and most influential music festival (McKay 2000), and thus WOMAD’s impact could also be understood to extend to the many events which have made similar moves using Glastonbury as their model.

16 I spoke with Paula and Mandy various times in the backstage areas at WOMAD and during a research trip to Real World Studios in February 2018. These quotations are taken from personal interviews I conducted with them individually on 4 January 2018 and 1–2 November 2017 respectively.

17 Between 1982 and 1989, WOMAD festivals travelled to various locations around the UK, including Shepton Mallett (1982), London (1983, 1987), Bristol (1984), Mersea Island (1985), Clevedon (1986), St Austell (1987, 1989), Bracknell (1988–1989), and Guernsey Island (1989). WOMAD then found more stable homes in Reading (1990–2006) and Morecambe Bay (1989–1996) and, subsequently, Malmesbury (2007–present). WOMAD has tended to hold its festivals within sites of natural beauty, such as greenfield land, botanical gardens, and public beaches, which support the practical and spiritual aspects of camping.

18 Workshop spaces also include the ‘Taste the World’ stage, where artists cook their favourite dish onstage while being interviewed and giving short performances.

19 This quotation is taken from my interview with Ian Brennan, 4 August 2017. Ian is a music producer and agent who represents a number of artists at WOMAD each year and I spoke with him several times while interviewing artists on his roster. Similar phrases were also used by other organisers. During our personal interviews, Paula Henderson described the festival as a ‘platform’ for ‘opening doors’ and Mandy Adams stated that the different stage formats at the festival were intended to ‘give as many different platforms as possible’ for artists.

20 This hairstyle and clothing have specific meanings in Baul culture. Traditionally, those following the Baul path are not supposed to cut their hair, so this long hairstyle is considered ‘divine hair’ and Parvathy has been growing hers for more than 20 years. The orange colour of her sari signifies fire, itself understood as a symbol for purity and truth as nothing can cross fire without burning. This represents the efforts of the Baul practitioner to ‘burn’ their ego and become one with the truth.

21 Interview by author, 3 August 2017.

22 Gangzi pointed out that they did adjust the comedic aspect of their performance, with a greater element of visual humour, as he was uncertain whether all their jokes would translate well into English. However, he emphasised that they sometimes adjust this aspect depending on the performance context within China too.

23 This quotation is taken from my interview with Gangzi in Beijing, 7 July 2018. I would like to thank Yang Shuo for her support as a translator.

24 Ibid.

25 Interview by author, 13 August 2017.

26 Ibid.

27 Gnawa is an Afro-Moroccan tradition that is thought to combine ancestral traditions from sub-Saharan Africa brought by the slaves transported to Morocco with Islamic, particularly Sufi, practices that praise the greatness of Allah. Traditionally, the maalem uses the songs and rhythms to induce a spiritual trance for healing purposes, although, even in Morocco itself, gnawa has now become an established music genre beyond this context.

28 Interview by author, 29 July 2018. I would like to thank Hicham El Kebbaj for his support as a translator.

29 Ibid.

30 Thomas Brooman, in Sue Steward, ‘The Festival That Put World Music on the Map’, The Telegraph, 6 July 2002, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/rockandjazzmusic/3579761/The-festival-that-put-world-music-on-the-map.html (accessed 6 March 2021).

31 Interview by author, 31 July 2016.

32 Interview by author, 30 July 2017.

33 Interview by author, 3 August 2017.

34 Interview by author, 13 August 2017.

35 Interview by author, 29 July 2018.

36 ‘African contemporary’ fashion refers to fashion trends set by contemporary African designers, as distinct from ‘ethnic’ dress or fashion trends set by Western companies (Gott and Loughran 2010).

37 Interview by author, 28 July 2018.

38 Interview by author, 28 July 2018.

39 Interview by author, 12 August 2017.