In this article, I explore narratives of vocal transmission among threads of diasporic relationality-gathering, musical participation, and kinship-woven into my interlocutors' stories about musical learning. Such narratives of transmission, I argue, are nuanced by divergent life histories among Cabo Verdean / Americans, which vary according to generation, island origin, and racial identification. Drawing on two ethnographic case studies, I theorize that diasporic actors perform not merely the semiotics of genre but indeed the traces of transmission as a means of claiming belonging within and cohering community across intradiasporic difference. This article brings voice and diaspora studies into dialogue, demonstrating how a fundamentally relational and diverse vision of diaspora might be performed through the cultivation of vocal gesture. Most crucially, the article insists that vocal transmission is in and of itself a complex cultural and aesthetic conciliation, rather than a mere pursuit of musical competency.
This article probes the relationship between hearing and knowledge making in Sinophone thought by examining linguistic, iconographic, and ethnographic representations of aurality. Hearing emerges not only as a privileged epistemic pathway but also as part of a larger sensory complex in which hearing, smelling, and tasting are coextensive sensations. I further argue that this hearingsmelling-tasting sensory complex activates a pronounced attunement to things that are changing and porous-qualities that also animate the thinking of generations of Sinophone literati in their quest to theorize the order of the cosmos. This meditation on Sinitic aurality leads, in the second part of the article, to a more general argument: that to sense the world is already to have taken position on how best to make sense of-and to know-the world. Building on sensory scholarship, I develop the view that the way we make our way around the world is filtered through a socially constructed alignment between sensorial and epistemic orientations, or "sensibility." The final part of the article contends with how the meaning and priorities of music analysis, as an activity contingent on multitudinous definitions of "hearing," must open up in order to reflect a global landscape of sensibilities.
Aline Sitoe Diatta (1920-1944) was a leader in the indigenous religion of the Jola people based in the Casamance region of Senegal. In 1942, a time of drought and intensified colonial extraction, she founded a new shrine that brought sorely needed rains. She also advocated for religious reforms to counter the influence of Christianity, recenter human relationships with the Jola creator Emite, and promote sustenance rice-farming in place of French-imposed cash-cropping. Music was central to Diatta's revivalist movement, and she composed songs to perform during her shrine rituals, but these were never recorded. Inspired by Nannyonga-Tamusuza and Weintraub's notion of sound repatriation for an "audible future"-yet vexed by an inaudible past for Diatta's songs-I worked with Jola musician Joel Bassene over the course of three years to create new translations and compositions for a collection of lyrics attributed to Diatta published in 1969. We recorded these new settings with a community chorus in Elubalir (an island village that maintains one of Diatta's shrines) and returned three times for playback-feedback sessions. This essay shares perspectives on Diatta's musical life stemming from this collaborative project, including the role of music in (1) enacting human-spiritual-environmental relationships; (2) creating local agency in global political and climatic crises; and (3) transmitting a critical discourse on religion, colonialism, agriculture, and the environment from a Jola perspective. In addition to these conclusions, this project is a case study in collaborative musicking as an experimental methodology to stimulate communal historical and cultural reflection.
This article traces the circulation of "Dayung Sampan" across East and Southeast Asia and examines the tune's adaptations into different musical genres along the way. Initially performed and recorded in the Indonesian kroncong style, it gained wider regional appeal when adapted as the Mandarin pop "Tian Mimi"in 1979. I explore how these "network traces" inIsland, which reinterprets the tune within Singapore's multicultural context. This hybridization underscores the complex circulation of musical and cultural ideas, challenging essentialist frameworks that rigidly associate genres with fixed ethnic identities. Sunny Island also exemplifies how the concert band can serve as a medium of semantic layering-where accumulated network traces are signified through individual subjectivity to reimagine national identity and cultural memory.
This article employs the notions of density and scale to discuss how musical performances achieve their communicative effects. Describing a dispute over props used for the kulakul, an `amis (Taiwanese Indigenous) dance that functions as sovereign assertion, I show how the choice of umbrellas versus spears organized the dense set of contexts that the dance indexed in intercultural settings. These contexts, in turn, established the scale at which performances functioned, producing (or failing to produce) sovereign sensibility. Reflecting on how the dispute reveals the stakes in a seemingly aesthetic choice, I argue that musical practices, such as dance, afford a means to negotiate competing facets of sovereignty. Finally, the article suggests that attention to scale could be a useful addition to ethnomusicological toolkits.
In this article, I narrate the experience of doing queer diasporic ethnography on Cuban drag and consider how this methodological approach intervenes in ongoing conversations in ethnomusicology. I locate queer diasporic ethnography within a history of writing by Black and Latinx feminist and queer anthropologists, and I discuss how queer diasporic ethnography might engage ethnomusicologists' understandings of power and positionality, gender and sexuality, and trans/queer vernacular performance. I then recount my own experiences researching Cuban diasporic drag performers in 1980s New York City and contemporary Miami. Overall, I suggest that queer diasporic ethnography might help us as ethnomusicologists to meet the social and political exigencies of our current moment.
Through ethnography, this article studies the different ways in which two immigrant Chinese women listened to everyday sounds (blender growl, bone cutter shrieks, cleaver thuds) in relation to their environments (mall, supermarket, and kitchen) and to each other. I situate their frictions within dominant tropes of immigration, ethnicity, race, and gender under Canadian multiculturalism, in Chinese history, and through gendered Asian racialization in North America. Following anthropologist Veena Das's formulation of the everyday as sedimented histories in practice, I argue that everyday sounds are abuzz as the messy underside to musical identity articulations and as such may productively unsettle ethnomusicology's own intellectual habitus.
This article challenges a prevailing idea among many scholars in the field of diaspora studies and other disciplines that Palestinians who were dispersed throughout the Arab world do not constitute a real diaspora, since they share the same culture and religion of other Arab populations. Focusing on the individual experiences of Palestinian musicians displaced after al-Nakba in 1948, I suggest the term "fluid diaspora" to describe the elastic and continuous formation of exiled communities. Based on archival materials and interviews with students and family members of the two composers presented in this article, Rawhi al-Khammash and Riyad al-Bandak, I argue that the diasporic behaviors and the coping strategies they adopted in their Arab environment forced them to constantly adapt according to changing conditions. Fluid diaspora is reflected in both the professional and personal practices of al-Khammash and al-Bandak.
The aesthetic practices of the Samburu community have long been intertwined with pastoral mobility, with songs and performances traditionally circulating alongside livestock movements. Musical composition and performance continue to play a central institutional role, allowing individuals to engage with the dynamics of the age class social system-between the renewal of generational repertoires linked to age sets and the perceived immutability of songs and dances associated with men's age grades and women's life stages. This interplay between innovation and preservation in aesthetic production is closely tied to the reproduction and functioning of the age-based institutions that structure Samburu society. Learning to balance these forces is a key aspect of social and political maturation for both men and women. For school-educated and urban Samburu, however, musical activity has long underscored their marginal position within the hierarchies of the age class system through their historic exclusion-or self-exclusion-from local processes of aesthetic creation and performance. In the early 2010s, songs in English and Swahili, promoting Christianity as a way to articulate aspirations of "modernity" and to critique local traditions, began emerging from this sector of Samburu society. Yet limited opportunities for socioeconomic mobility through formal education, combined with the decentralization of power under Kenya's 2010 constitutional reform, have prompted many to reclaim traditional roles within the pastoral institutional system. Rural identities have increasingly become strategic resources for asserting political influence and accessing new forms of economic opportunity. By the mid-2010s, a new generation of urban Samburu artists had developed a musical genre combining African and international popular music with local repertoires tied to age sets and age grades. Bolstered by the widespread diffusion of mobile phones among Kenya's pastoralists, this repertoire has allowed school-educated Samburu to establish a presence within the ritual, social, and political life of their communities. Its growing presence in ceremonial events-such as weddings and circumcisions-has contributed to legitimizing their participation in the ritual sphere and reinforced their recognition within customary forms of authority. The audio examples are available here: https://files.press.uillinois.edu/ journals/supplemental/ethno/performing_change_and_preservation/.
This article is a collection of six revised essays from the 2023 Society for Ethnomusicology President's Roundtable "Tell Me a Story" with an introduction and conclusion to contextualize the essays as vehicles for teaching storywork. At the roundtable, we asked: What stories do ethnomusicologists experience, learn, carry, create, embody, and (re)tell? What atypical labors do stories perform that other forms of speech and writing do not? Which stories are left out of our monographs and articles? Six ethnomusicologist storytellers grapple with these foundational questions by telling stories and then reflecting on the stories they tell. We invite readers to consider which stories they derive from their ethnographic experiences, and which stories they refrain from telling, and why.
This article examines the role of the Azerbaijani ashiq bard in Iranian Azerbaijani weddings, focusing on the interactions and agency of wedding musicians, hosts, and guests and the circulation of money between them. By engaging with practice theory and economic ethnomusicology, this article considers both musical and economic imperatives, analyzing how various forces and factors shape tradition at the levels of musicians’ and guests’ practices and larger structures. I argue that audience members’ requests (darkhâsts) and financial exchanges, while homogenizing the repertoire, also create opportunities for marginalized musical values and less-performed elements to reemerge, even as they are being downplayed in new methods of transmission.
This article examines fieldwork methodologies and musical ethnography using our respective experiences doing fieldwork on music in Sardinia, Italy. Taking inspiration from the collaborative processes that characterize Sardinian music of oral tradition, we show how our understanding of Sardinian musics and knowledge practices is enriched through our collaborative work, as insiders (Lutzu) and outsiders (Jacobsen) to Sardinia. Building on our training in cultural anthropology in the United States (Jacobsen) and ethnomusicology in Italy (Lutzu), we suggest that, just as musicians “craft” their performance practices, so too do ethnographers craft their situated knowledge practices and scholarly work. We call this approach “crafting.”
Self-recorded repertoires, much like historical memoirs, may serve as musical microhistories, bringing new perspectives to everyday life and challenging dominant historical accounts. The recordings of Rabbi Naftali Zvi Margolis Abulafia, a Palestinian Jew, document his personal repertory of songs and testify to the interconnectivity of musical communities in late Ottoman Palestine, a period for which the musical landscape remains largely unexplored. Recorded in New York in the 1950s with the help of ethnomusicologist Harry Smith, Rabbi Abulafia's repertoire included Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Arab music, including songs with Arabic lyrics and melodies from shared Jewish-Arab celebrations like those in Meron on Lag BaOmer. These recordings provide a rare glimpse into the interfaith and interethnic musical exchange in late Ottoman Safed and exemplify how music in late Ottoman Palestine transcended ethnic and religious boundaries. Given the complex geopolitical circumstances of Ottoman Palestine, this self-recorded repertory of an unusual individual, which was never released to the public, challenges accepted categories within Jewish communities and conventional notions regarding the relationships between ethnic and religious groups in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The musical documentation of an individual, especially one viewed as atypical of their ethnic or religious group, calls upon us to reevaluate many of our assumptions including those about the connectivity of various ethnic and religious groups. This reenforces the significance of exploring the musical activities of the individual and considering their musical microhistories for an understanding of culture in all its facets.
At the Gibbon Conservation Center—a nonprofit facility in Southern California dedicated to caring for endangered primates that produce complex and coordinated vocalizations—sound, as both a material and a metaphor, disciplines the conceptualization and implementation of a breeding program intended to stabilize the genetic diversity of the captive animal population. Understanding this program of compulsory reproductive biopolitics to be a project of “tuning species,” this article argues that gibbon conservation's constitutive elision of sonic and genetic processes results in an entirely new configuration of biopower derived from a theory of vitality based on the possibility of achieving perpetual replication rather than persisting against contamination or decay. A project of preservation that is nevertheless ontologically, socially, and sonically productive, the auditory labor of fixing a biological species in time and place implicates both gibbons and their human caretakers together in relations of intense vulnerability and multispecies intimacy that challenge the received terms of endangered species conservation.
