This edited conversation examines the role of music in the Jewish-Arab peace initiative Standing Together Vienna, which was founded in October 2023 in response to the Hamas massacre on October 7 and the unfolding genocide in Gaza. The initiative organized vigils to mourn all Palestinian and Israeli victims, as well as protests demanding a ceasefire and just peace in Israel-Palestine. In Austria’s polarized political climate these events opened an alternative space that named the structural imbalance of occupation and refused ethnonationalism and racism in every form. The conversation brings together four Vienna-based musicians, Marwan Abado, Natalie Adler-Oppenheim, Golnar Shahyar, and Sakina Teyna, who reflect on their participation and musical performances at the movement’s first vigils in the fall of 2023. They discuss their motivations for participating in the movement, their considerations in choosing repertoire, and their experiences of navigating Austria’s repressive environment regarding discourse on Israel-Palestine, while also confronting pressures from within their own communities due to their participation in a joint initiative. The conversation contributes to ethnomusicological minority studies by exploring how diaspora musicians balance individual political articulation with community belonging in times of authoritarianism, war, and genocide. It illustrates how musical activism can contribute to peace work beyond romanticized notions of music as a unifier, by creating spaces of encounter where alternative futures can be imagined without flattening differences or power imbalances.
Since the mid-2010s, gangsterrap – a new Swedish DIY scene rooted in the international gangsta rap subgenre – has gained massive commercial success, while also being highly problematised in the public debate in the Nordic countries. This article provides an empirical case of popular music’s intersection with the rise of gun violence and urban marginality within a Nordic welfare state, emphasising how the music and the artist can be understood in terms of taking part in communities of belonging beyond national borders. More specifically, the material analysed here includes interviews with, and songs by, Swedish rap artist Yasin. The concept of digital diaspora (Ponzanesi 2020, 2021) enables a focus on how spatiality, belonging, and self-identification are created, and it can be seen as articulating new possibilities for affective, social, and political connections and rupture. Also, digital diaspora is understood as being constituted through practices reflective of intersecting power relations (Candidatu, Leurs, and Ponzanesi 2019: 34). By focusing on narratives of (non)belonging(s) and home, in this article we examine how practices of (non)belonging(s) create connections between past and present popular culture and can be perceived as a restorative and unifying tool among Somali diaspora youth, but also their parents. As a result, this article presents different sensibilities about the changing perceptions of closeness, home, and belonging in Sweden, a Nordic welfare state.
Against the backdrop of the contemporary period, which is increasingly defined by exclusionary conceptions of the nation and citizenship, this article (re-)examines the concept of political community through the prism of music and migration. By considering how post-migrant musicians in postcolonial societies such as France throw into sharp relief the contemporary dynamics of far-right populism, racism, and exclusionary statecraft, this article offers a critical reflection on what alternatives to hostile national political communities might entail and how they might come about. Given the growth of migration-related anxiety in contemporary Europe, I claim that migration studies research must not only concern itself with the genealogical study of key political concepts that frame our public institutions and cultural worlds. Rather, I argue that it should also entail a process of re-imagining what those key political concepts and institutions could become in the future. This article therefore explores not only what a post-national political community might look like, but what it might sound like. I consider how post-migrant creative practices and music, in particular, can make the limitations of political concepts such as the nation and national political community more visible and more audible. I argue that the Paris Olympic Games of 2024 offers a valuable case-study as these became the locus of a series of polarized public debates about how to represent the French nation, due to the controversy that erupted around the commissioning of a French-Malian musician, Aya Nakamura, to perform at the Opening Ceremony.
The term and concept of belonging have gained considerable traction in ethnomusicological scholarship over the past decade, particularly within research on migration. This introductory editorial examines the relevance and analytical potential of belonging as a conceptual framework for ethnomusicological research. Drawing on theoretical contributions from gender studies, anthropology, sociology, and geography, I discuss belonging as inherently non-essentialist and as a continuous – though not arbitrary – process of transformation and negotiation. I argue that adopting belonging as an explicit theoretical perspective encourages music researchers to foreground relational dynamics rather than fixed characteristics, thereby enabling a more nuanced understanding of the dynamic and processual nature of the complex frameworks and practices of music-making in migratory contexts. The present special collection of articles is dedicated to exploring the broader theoretical debates on belonging, music, and migration. Throughout this editorial, the respective contributions are situated within this framework, with each article foregrounding specific dimensions through its respective ethnographic inquiry. Both this introductory editorial and the articles in this collection engage with current strands of thought in critical migration studies and with theories of postmigration, with the latter strongly emphasising processual and dynamic understandings of belonging.
In recent years, transcultural orchestras have increasingly emerged in Western Europe, initially in response to the arrival of refugees and later developing into a professional artistic field. Rooted in Western classical orchestral traditions, these ensembles incorporate diverse musical influences and reflect the cultural complexity of post-migrant societies as well as experiences of displacement and marginalisation (Sievers 2024). The negotiation of stylistic parameters in the musical practice in such orchestras can be seen as a reflection of the negotiation of multiple forms of belonging and identity construction among musicians (Präger 2024: 187). This article examines these dynamics through a case study of the Bridges Kammerorchester, a chamber orchestra based in Frankfurt am Main, whose members are socialised in diverse musical traditions. The ensemble emphasises participatory engagement in shaping its repertoire and brings together musicians with and without migration biographies. In the specific practice of composition, performance, and interaction within the ensemble, different layers of relevant belonging and a spectrum of identities – also constructed along ethnically and culturally marked categories – become visible, marked by an intrinsic ambivalence: the artistic premise of representing specific cultural markers in music meets the attempt to dissolve boundaries shaped by cultural heritage into a form of transculturality. Drawing on interviews with musicians from the orchestra and the analysis of three selected works from the ensemble’s repertoire, this paper discusses how the musicians of Bridges deal with their cultural heritage and their biographical and musical backgrounds in this transcultural community, how they position themselves in different affiliations, and how this is reflected in the ensemble’s musical repertoire. The paper argues that the orchestra’s artistic profile, involving a mixture of music traditions, has the potential to transcend existing boundaries between these traditions and the associated expectations, but still needs to draw and produce musical boundaries. The ambivalence of dissolving boundaries and performing ethnically or nationally marked music remains.
Since the mid-2010s, Brazilian immigrants have celebrated carnival festivities in the streets of Brazil’s ex-metropole, Lisbon, Portugal. As the events of the blocos (carnival ensembles) began relatively small, they initially paraded using the legal status of “demonstrations” with minimal fees. By 2020, when their events had grown to attracting crowds in the thousands, the police began to categorize them instead as “commercial events.” This new status required the blocos to pay exorbitant fees despite their celebrations in public space having no profit motive, which created many obstacles for the realization of the events. Brazilian immigrants have often interpreted the differential treatment of the carnival as a manifestation of the prejudicial xenophobia they often experience in Portugal. However, the City of Lisbon was careful not to stigmatize Brazilian cultural practices, claiming that Brazilians were treated no differently from others. I argue that Brazilian immigrants in Portugal have confronted structural xenophobia, a systemic form of immigrant exclusion manifested through bureaucratic obstacles that may or may not accompany prejudicial xenophobia. When event management systems do not structurally adapt towards the goals of equity and inclusion, they can exclude the festivities of these communities, which cannot take advantage of these systems as easily as actors of the host society. In 2023, the blocos launched a campaign to make the carnival viable through protests against and negotiations with the City. This article examines how the carnival community transformed into a social movement against structural xenophobia. In a promising development, Lisbon signed an agreement in 2025 officializing the carnival and providing a firmer footing for the festivity, which represented a victory following years of campaigning and negotiation. The article takes stock of the strategies the blocos deployed to ultimately achieve this status after years of combatting the structural xenophobia that had perennially left them in a precarious position.
This article investigates how Syrian political and protest songs contribute to enactments of insurgent, precarious, and transnational citizenship across the trajectories of the 2011 Syrian uprising, forced displacement, and resettlement in Europe. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research, combining online documentation of performances from the protests in Homs with hybrid fieldwork in refugee camps in Thessaloniki, Greece, and among Syrian diasporic communities in Vienna, Austria, it traces the heterochronic political life of three songs: “Jannah, Jannah, Jannah,” “Bi-ḥuzn wa-al-rīḥ taṣfar min warā al-bībān,” and “Ṣabāḥkun Ḥurriyyah – Roja û Azadî be.” Although each song emerges from a distinct political moment, their trajectories illuminate interconnected ways in which protest music mediates political agency across contexts of brutal repression, restrictive border regimes, and diasporic reconfiguration. By examining the discursive, sensorial, affective, and performative registers of these songs, and the multi-layered continuities that link them, this article shows how individuals who identify as Syrians sustain political agency and generate alternative imaginaries of political belonging and citizenship in response to the multiple forms of political exclusion they encounter. Finally, it calls for a politically attuned and ethically committed practice of listening, a politicizing mode of response that not only recognizes musical expressions by marginalized and disenfranchised individuals and groups as sites of political agency, but also positions ethnomusicologists as responsive agents rather than detached observers.
This article examines the impact of the death of a research partner in long-term (ethnomusicological) fieldwork, exploring its effects on researchers and potential methodological consequences, transformations, and opportunities that arise regarding the research process. The loss of a research partner is a rarely discussed topic across ethnomusicology and related disciplines. I reflect on the challenges of navigating such a loss in qualitative fieldwork. I thereby acknowledge researchers in their emotional dimensions, dealing with grief and seeking ways to both personally process the loss and sustain the long-term research endeavor. Drawing on my work with the musical legacy of singer Ruža Nikolić-Lakatos (1945–2022), who was the long-term research partner of my superior, Ursula Hemetek, I use this case study to provide firsthand insights into the consequences of a research partner’s passing. I thereby identify four key areas of transformation following such a loss: (1) the reconfiguration of relationships with the deceased’s family and community, (2) the re-evaluation of archival materials, (3) the development of experimental methodologies to represent and honor the research partner’s legacy, and (4) the evolving role of the researcher, who may become a “spokesperson” or recognized expert on the deceased research partner’s work. By integrating personal reflections and engaging with scholarly literature on similar experiences, I challenge the perception of fieldwork as a predictable process. I argue that the loss of a long-term research partner is not merely a disruption but may in fact become an integral part of the research process, posing both emotional and methodological challenges. Rather than viewing a research partner’s death as only an unforeseen, often tragic endpoint, I propose that it can serve as a catalytic event, opening new possibilities for scholarly inquiry and engagement.
This editorial discusses selected aspects of Music & Minorities’ (M&M) policy on “Authorship, Contributorship, and Artificial Intelligence,” providing background on the rationale behind the policy and situating the discussion within the broader contexts of music and minority studies, ethnomusicology, related disciplines, such as social and cultural anthropology, and academic publishing. The focus is on authorship criteria. After explaining why authorship criteria are an important issue and deserve closer attention in music and minority studies and ethnomusicology in general, the editorial discusses the specific set of criteria issued by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). The ICMJE criteria are among the most widely used authorship criteria in academic publishing, if not the most widely used. Thanks to their adoption (or adaptation) by major publishing corporations, these criteria have spread to disciplines far beyond their original domain of medical publishing, including ethnomusicology. In line with this consensus, M&M’s authorship criteria are derived from the ICMJE criteria and adapted to suit the scholarly practices of the journal’s specific field. Based on the discussion of the standard ICMJE criteria, three aspects of M&M’s policy are addressed in more detail: the general authorship criteria, non-author contributorship, and the special provisions for co-authorship by non-academic research partners.
Sinti Estraixaria (“Austrians”) represent one of the minorities that make up the peculiar cultural landscape of Trentino-Alto Adige, in north-eastern Italy. In this border area – the last western offshoot of what was once the Austro-Hungarian Empire – Sinti families, characterised by a certain degree of mobility, have progressively settled over the last two centuries, while continuing in part to practice crafts of an itinerant nature. Among these, music has traditionally played a prominent role, consolidating itself as a knowledge that – handed down from father to son – has given rise to veritable “dynasties” of players. Between the Sixties and the Eighties of the 20th century, the ingenuity of certain family musical ensembles ensured that the “craft of the musician” took shape as a “profession” – with even fortunate results for certain periods – although then the world of Gage, with its “rules” and bureaucracy, presented these protagonists with challenges that were in some ways insurmountable. Today, music for young and old Sinti who in the meantime have become gardeners, waiters, iron pickers and mechanics, remains, rather than a profession, a heritage from the past. However, music contributes strongly to their own identity construction: although the moments of shared musical practice have become more sparse – more and more reserved for spectacular contexts in the sphere of a few events very often organised by the Sinti cultural associations themselves – a dialogical dimension nevertheless remains alive, which focuses on the evocation of an almost “mythical” past populated by exceptional musicians. Starting from the dialogue with some of these witnesses of ancient and modern times, a broader family and community history deeply linked to musical activity will be reconstructed; specifically, the present paper will focus on how the protagonists of said story, members of one of the most musically active families in the last sixty years, keep alive the memory of their musical past and constantly confront the latter with their present. At the same time, the paper aims to highlight how their musical competence matured within such a “community of practice” (see Wenger 1999), and the dialogical dimension that music is able to stimulate, come to configure themselves as key instruments also from the point of view of the analysis and interpretation of sound documents from the past, making ethnomusicological investigation itself a field of exchange, knowledge and collaboration.
After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the communist regime announced the existence of 56 ethnic groups, comprising the Han people and 55 ethnic minorities. Since then, statements like “China has 56 ethnic groups” or “There are 56 officially recognized ethnicities” have been appearing as a description of an objective fact or commonsensical knowledge in scholarly and media discussions of Chinese music and culture. At the same time, anthropologists point out that members of the same Chinese ethnic minority may have language traits, customs, habits, and traditions that largely vary from one place to another. I contribute to this existing body of literature by examining the role of music in shaping ethnic identities, both in terms of internal cohesion and external conceptions. This article provides a case study of the Zhuang ethnic group, the largest ethnic minority in China, whose members lacked a shared set of cultural attributes or a common sense of self-identification before the 1950s. I will focus on how a Liu Sanjie-themed musical theater production was created and spread to lead registered members of the Zhuang embrace a fictional collective past, to construct shared cultural traditions among them, and to shape their sense of identity. Drawing upon both historical and ethnographic data, this article also investigates how the nationwide promotion of Liu Sanjie-themed theater has been leading Chinese citizens, who may never meet or talk to a Zhuang member, to imagine the time-honored existence, life, and thoughts of this constructed ethnic minority.
In this article, we investigate Romani musicians and Romani religious musicking, a previously under-researched facet of Roma musicking. We detail the emergence of Romani religious music and its distinctive features, explore its evolution over the past fifty years, and identify the earliest Roma religious musicians in Hungary. Furthermore, this study will highlight the significance of Romani religious music in the process of Romani conversion, the emergence of a Christian Romani collective identity, and the development of Romani relations and inculturation. In addition to historical sources and literature, our study draws on personal field experiences and interviews with Roma believers in Baptist, Catholic, Pentecostal-Charismatic, and Free Christian congregations in Békés, Budapest, Szeged, Szendrőlád, Csatka, and Uszka.
Since 2004, when Latvia joined the European Union, nearly half of the Latvian Roma have moved abroad, mainly to the UK. This fact has influenced the research on Latvian Roma music. The article self-reflexively explores migration as “losing” a fieldwork community and coping with the loss. A digital action for re-connecting with the Roma community was establishing a Facebook group, “Latvijas romu vēsture un kultūra” (“History and Culture of Latvian Roma”), in the summer of 2019. Initially, the group was defined as a one-way commitment to share historical sources with Roma and people interested in Roma history and culture. Gradually, the group shifted from being primarily a science communication tool to digital participative ethnography. A part of it was exploring Roma’s engagement with music-related content. Another chapter is based on recent fieldwork with Latvian Roma in England. The fieldwork took place among born-again Christian Roma and their established churches and reflected on the traditional Romani values and behavior in this context. The author identifies a triple mobility – physical, social and spiritual – which necessitates a redefinition of the existing framework for researching the Latvian Roma. The article concludes with a reflection on a field-centric, community-centric approach as an interdisciplinary-oriented research practice.
The implicit and explicit silencing of Romani and Traveller voices in museum and archive collections, and in the wider narrative of British history, has been increasingly recognised over the last decade (Matthews 2015). In the pursuit of decolonising museums and archives, however, institutional recognition of the significant contributions of Romani and Traveller peoples to the traditional music heritage of the UK and Ireland has largely been absent. Throughout the 20th century and increasingly since the 1960s, folk song collectors around the British Isles have turned to Romani Gypsies and Travellers in search of traditional songs and music. Hamish Henderson, Ewan MacColl, and Peggy Seeger, amongst others, admired Romani and Traveller singers for preserving what collectors perceived to be native song traditions. Recordings of Romani Gypsies and Travellers, held in national and regional sound archives, have had a lasting impact on folk repertoires in the UK and Ireland. However, the incorporation of such recordings into specialist collections has tended to erase Romani and Traveller identities. As the cultural and ethnic backgrounds of the singers are rarely acknowledged in the catalogues, and are searchable only with specialist knowledge, their songs are implicitly added to the canon of English, Scottish or Irish folk music. The songs are thus co-opted, not to tell Romani Gypsy and Traveller stories and history, but those of a majority population. This article addresses specific issues pertaining to an English archive collection held at the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library in Cecil Sharp House, London. Recognising the precariousness of funding that many specialist collections face, we do not simply critique a lack of progress regarding representation. Instead, we outline how Romani and Traveller communities might collaborate with archivists, cultural events organisers, and universities, to connect archival collections with various publics in England today.
Romani activism and political participation in Ukraine grew in earnest when the country declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Western-funded Romani non-governmental organizations guided the early years of political engagement. This first generation of Romani politicians heralded from musical and artistic families, leading to a Romani activism firmly focused on cultural rights. Following Ukraine’s 2014 Euromaidan and Revolution of Dignity, the Romani political narrative shifted from focusing solely on cultural rights to encompassing Romani citizenship rights. Since 2014, many Romani politicians have been elected to local governments. Their leadership has been especially evident since Russian forces invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022. This article provides an overview of Romani political responses to the war and shares how Roma in Ukraine have mobilized against Russian aggression. Specifically, this article draws on Romani-themed popular Ukrainian-language songs performed during the war. Such performances shared widely on social media have brought Ukrainian Roma into the center of Ukraine’s resistance narrative.
This article examines the social and economic situation of the music making Dom groups and the social stigmatization to which they are exposed. It argues that the changing sociocultural, political, and economic conditions in Syria have led in the course of the 20th century to a shift in the focus of the Dom’s musical activities to night club music and have thus made the stigmatization worse than ever. On the other hand, the article lists the most eminent features of the Dom’s music in Syria. Moreover, it highlights some Dom figures who were or still are active in the Syrian music scene.
This article examines the significance of music as a medium of memory in the broader context of Romani World War II remembrance and human rights activism of the last decade. It specifically focusses on the oratorio Symphonia Romani – Bari Duk by Adrian Gaspar and the documentary film Dui Rroma by Gaspar’s mother Iovanca Gaspar as memory media (Erll 2011a) of the Roma genocide during World War II. The composer based the libretto of the Symphonia Romani on a series of interviews conducted with the late survivor of the National Socialist genocide of Sinti and Roma, Hugo Höllenreiner, reflecting key moments of his memories of Auschwitz. In turn, the documentary Dui Rroma explores the relationship between the Sinto Höllenreiner and the Rom Gaspar and provides further information about Höllenreiner’s life and the Nazi persecution of Sinti and Roma during World War II as well as the genesis of Gaspar’s musical work until its premier in 2011. This article analyses the lyrical and musical contents of the oratorio (and the documentary as an extension of that work) with respect to their role in sounding traumatic memories. My findings are based on ethnographic fieldwork and multiple in-depth interviews with the composer and film director since 2017. I set these in dialogue with current key concepts from the field of memory studies, which consider memory as a cultural practice (Rigney 2015) that involves “movement” (Erll 2011b). Highlighting the different positionalities involved in sounding traumatic memories of Sinti and Roma to a largely non-minority audience, I emphasise the translations and transformations of memory in these processes. Central to this analysis are conceptualisations of the “witness” (Assmann 2016) and the transition from memory to postmemory (Hirsch 2012). This article argues from the standpoint of the emerging field of musical memory studies (Spinetti, Schoop, and Hofman 2021) and aims to bridge the gap between the fields of (ethno)-musicology, minority studies, and memory studies.
According to Jan Assmann (2011), storytelling about the past (including an imaginary past) represents one of the axes of collective identity. Given music’s place in the culture of Romani people in the Czech Republic, and given the stereotypical association of Romani people with music by the majority society, it is not surprising that music plays a significant role in their events of public remembering. The “Leperiben” presentation introduces the dynamics involved in the formation of such remembering during the last decade, from the spectacular Requiem (2012), dominantly organized by pro-Roma organizations (which also determined its form), to contemporary projects collecting songs about the Holocaust of the Roma (Porraimos) which have been designed and instigated by Romani activists. The collected material not only confirms several existing concepts about how collective memory works (e.g. the concept of “Archive versus Canon,” Aleida Assmann 2010), but also gives rise once again to the eternal questions in ethnomusicology, e.g., those about intervening in a field situation and the disbalance of power relations.
