Hugh Tracey’s classification and codification strategies have laid the foundation for enhanced access to archived living heritage in the International Library of African Music (ILAM). This article considers how Tracey’s episteme in developing these organizing principles, introduced as epistemologies of access, enables stakeholders access to accurate information with fidelity to its context of origin. The ethical dimensions of enhanced access are contextualized within South Africa’s transition to a constitutional democracy. Translating catalogue entries into source languages and, in turn, translating the metadata, which is derived from those catalogue entries, into source languages and making it accessible online is suggested as an ethically responsible action and a practical measure toward enhancing access for stakeholders.
This article examines the mobile and participatory aspects of rot hae รถ แห่, a musical performance on a moving vehicle, such as a truck or a cart. Despite its popularity, rot hae is criticized for instigating alcohol consumption and sexually provocative dance moves in public, particularly during Buddhist ordination parades. I argue that the mobility and participatory nature of rot hae performances allows it to challenge the established social order and their participants to seek otherwise prohibited sensual pleasures. Such encounters reveal the vernacular practices of Buddhism that cannot be easily mapped onto the sacred-secular dichotomy.
This article examines the Daymbalipu Mununggurr Collection of Yolngu music, made in northern Australia in the late 1970s and early 1980s and lodged at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), as an example of the intersection of partially incommensurable systems of knowledge. When Indigenous recordists and collectors do not share with archives and archivists fundamental premises about the nature of sound recordings and their associated management practices, this can result in diminished or problematic access to their collections but also can suggest new possibilities for archive-community co-management.
This article describes the musical reinterpretation of Arab music, originally recorded one hundred years ago for a transnational industry of Arab, Arab American, and international record labels and recently released into the public domain. Inspired by colleagues at the Loeb Library at Harvard University, who highlight the recent American Music Modernization Act, the writers are university-based directors of Arab music ensembles who delve into this musical public domain to research, transcribe, study, practise and perform covers of these “golden oldies.” This article narrates the process and evaluates the work of re/animating musical archives.
What remains in the archive when its material objects are constructed with the aim of destruction? Scholarly approaches to the “self-destructive archive” have emphasized ways to manipulate the archive to circumvent its inevitable drive toward loss. The Falles Festival of València, Spain, offers a different perspective: through the burning of the monumental artworks that give the festival its name, an “intangible archive” of behaviours, feelings, and beliefs comes into being, one that structures and is structured by social life during and beyond the festival. This archive affords ethnomusicologists a means to reconceptualize the material nature of ephemeral phenomena like sound.
This article examines the influence of power and positionality in music research. I use key ethnographic moments of music making in Jamaican Maroon communities, the insights of a range of scholars, and my intersecting perspectives to investigate the following questions: How is access to cultural knowledge predicated on who we are, and who we are not? What does power sound like, and with whom and in what contexts does it reside? In what ways do histories of colonial domination and legacies of resistance reverberate through music and performance traditions, and how are those histories felt and heard in the present day?
As governments and funding agencies increasingly embrace Open Science and FAIR data principles, both qualitative and quantitative researchers are encouraged to deposit and share their data via institutional repositories. How suitable are repositories and data sharing for ethnomusicologists? This article chronicles a pilot project using the Canadian institutional data repository Borealis focused on digital ethnomusicological research data related to the defunct Toronto punk and metal venue Coalition TO. The article includes recommendations relating to digital ethnomusicological research data management and considerations for those contemplating storing and sharing their digital research data collections, whether via institutional repositories or other means.
The Cultures of Sound Network is an international alliance of cultural institutions that develops public engagement projects around music and sound. Since its inception in 2018, the network has used collaborative inquiry to mobilize music and sound knowledge across North America and beyond, serve diverse communities, including Indigenous ones, and bridge divides between museums, universities, cultural organizations, and publics. This article discusses examples of the network’s modus operandi and examines the value, significance, and prospects for sound initiatives of this kind in the 2020s.
Since 2009–2010, practioner-custodians from Wanjina-Wunggurr First Nations in the Kimberley region of northwestern Australia have drawn upon archival materials relating to the multimodal performance-storytelling form Junba to renourish the practice and strengthen social and emotional well-being of young people in their communities. Numerous dance-songs that have not been performed for many years, some as long ago as the 1930s, others the 1960s, have re-entered the local canon. What has unfolded is a process of rematriating Junba (a process of reclaiming authority and agency over how Junba is held) from the archives of collecting institutions to the dynamic archives of knowledge in people and Country: dirna arrun (in Ungarinyin, “we hold it”). This article provides a written version of a lecture-recital presented and prepared by practitioner-custodians of Junba, O’Connor, Divilli, and Charles, together with collaborating ethnomusicologist, Treloyn, who are collectively engaged in this process of rematriation.
In this article, we outline an emergent community-engaged research-creation (CE-RC) methodology that builds on principles from performative ethnography, community engagement, and care-full improvisation. CE-RC was developed through the Resonance Project (2020-23), in which we tested, reflected on, and refined our ideas in collaboration with musicians from marginalized communities. Drawing on both ethnographic data and analysis of collaborative artistic creations, we argue that CE-RC has high potential as a participatory applied methodology through which researchers and community collaborators together can advocate for positive social change.
