The nature of a keynote address is to reflect upon issues of concern to the gathered assembly—to kickstart and enrich debates and to stimulate new ideas and perspectives. This address, presented at the beginning of the 44th World Conference of the International Council of Traditional Music, held in Limerick, Ireland, 12–14 July 2017, is very much grounded in my own experiences across a number of domains. I offer it as a subjective view of the potential of music and dance to act as powerful forces of cultural mediation, redressing social—and musical—inequalities.

In Spring 2017, I designed and taught a filmmaking and service-learning course in the Indiana University (IU) Bloomington Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology called “Music and Memory: Studying Music & Alzheimer's Through Film.” This ongoing project is set in nursing homes, long-term care facilities, and adult day programmes for individuals with age-related neurocognitive disorder, commonly referred to as dementia. In the course, undergraduate students learn to make personalized iPod music playlists for older adults living with Alzheimer's and other related dementias, and to document their experiences through short films intended for online public circulation; At a time when dementia has been flagged as one of the fastest growing global health priorities, applied ethnomusicology courses about music and aging provide dynamic interdisciplinary spaces where college students can gain knowledge, experience, and skills to creatively address these challenges in their families, communities, and careers.

A faint early morning glow lit the horizon across the sea. Poised on the calm ocean waters, a dozen sails began their approach to shore (see Figure 1). It was just before dawn on Sunday, 22 May 2016, at Paseo de Susana Park in Hagåtña, the capital of the island of Guam (Guåhån). That morning I joined thousands of residents and international visitors for the dawn arrival of the canoes, an event that began the 12th Festival of Pacific Arts, held on the island. Some of the sea vessels were from Guam, while others had travelled north across the familiar ocean routes of the Caroline Islands from as far west as the islands of Palau and from the atoll islands of Lamotrek and Polowat (see Figure 2). The dawn event emphasized Indigenous movement, knowledge, and skill on the sea, but it also projected a means of belonging in and reconnecting to the maritime world, embodied through sounding voices and moving bodies. Cultural leader Leonard Iriarte, who holds the title of Master of Chamorro Chant, recited a welcome that was played over loudspeakers and emanated from the shore out across the incoming waves. As each sailing canoe approached the land, crewmembers sounded shell trumpets and broke out into spontaneous song and dance on the decks—rhythms that combined with those of the incoming swell below.

Masu Genjiro (1904-1995) and Kurosawa Takatomo (1895-1987) were two Japanese musicologists who were commissioned by the Government-General of Taiwan to form the Formosan Folk Music Investigation Team with Yamagata Takayasu, then recording engineer of Victor Company of Japan (hereafter Nippon Victor), to carry out a comprehensive survey and make recordings of Taiwanese music and musical life in the spring of 1943. The purpose of the survey was to establish a music cultural policy that adapted to the wartime needs of the people on the island, which became Japan's first colony in 1895, and could also be applied to Japan's newly acquired colonies in Southeast Asia and the Pacific after the outbreak of the Pacific War in December 1941. The team received full support from Taiwan's Government-General and was assisted by local experts, police officers in Aboriginal villages, and filming crews from both Japan and Taiwan. During its three-month stay in Taiwan, the team first conducted fieldwork around the island and then recorded and filmed Han Chinese and Aboriginal music and dance as well as rituals and ceremonies. They also collected data about Aboriginal musical instruments through questionnaires filled out by police officers in 155 Aboriginal villages.

In the 1980s, ethnomusicologists began developing a body of literature exploring the intersection between music and identity. By the early 2000s, identity had become one of the most commonly addressed themes in the discipline and ethnomusicologists were making important contributions to identity studies. As Timothy Rice writes in his article titled “Reflections on Music and Identity in Ethnomusicology,” ethnomusicologists have demonstrated that music “gives symbolic shape” to pre-existing and emerging identities; and that music allows communities who share an identity to “see themselves in action” and “to imagine others” with whom they share the music tradition (Rice 2007:34-35). Ethnomusicologists have furthermore argued that music may contribute an affective quality to identity and give identities a “positive valence” (ibid.:35).

Ékpè can be understood as a spirit-manifest or masquerade as well as a festival, and Ìrìráábú is a part of the music performed during the Ékpè dance festival. The Ékpè dance festival is part of my cultural heritage—I am part of this culture and have been an active participant-observer in this festival since my childhood.

In late 2009 and early 2010, a craze for a YouTube video titled “Niilin hanhet” (“The geese of Nile”; The Kassitus 2009) and its star, a Syrian Kurd singer who became known as Pensselisetä (“Uncle Paintbrush”), swept Finland. It was not the quality of the performance that made the video stand out from the plethora of YouTube productions, but its subtitling in Finnish. “Niilin hanhet” is an example of a practice known to YouTube users as “buffalaxing.” Named for the YouTube user who pioneered the practice, buffalaxing is a type of phonemic translation that results in rather silly, grammatically incorrect, and salacious phrases that generally—but by no means exclusively—are considered funny by the YouTube audience. In the case of “Niilin hanhet,” lines like “The geese of Nile of my own ass” and “I protect my ass with dusty trips” result from a deliberate mishearing of the Kurdish language as Finnish. More particularly, the outcome is a Finnish text that combines homoerotic imagery with allegedly comedic—and potentially xenophobic—content.

Square dancing forms a vibrant part of the traditional music scene in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. In addition to the weekly West Mabou square dance, monthly dances and occasional square dances can be found across the island year-round. The number of square dances balloons during the summer months. But quite unlike most other square dance traditions in North America, Cape Breton square dancing rarely features a caller, a person who calls out the movements so that dancers do not have to remember them and can focus instead on performing them, listening to the music, and socializing with other dancers. While callers are generally absent from Cape Breton's square dances today, they were once essential.

I walked into the Round-Up Saloon and stood transfixed by the scene out on the dance floor. Surrounded by a wooden corral, the sleek and shining floor was filled with couples taking wide, gracefully fluid steps. Clad in immaculate cowboy hats, crisp work shirts tucked into jeans, and of course boots, the men spinning together around the floor were to me an entirely new form of queer dance. The comfortable intimacy of their bodies was unlike the bump and grind of the dance I was used to encountering at urban American gay bars, and the DJ's musical selections kept well away from pop divas and electronic dance music. At urban gay bars like Dallas' Round-Up Saloon and at other non-bar venues, queer two-step and line dancing, and country music itself, offers space for a performative queerness that counterbalances not only mainstream perceptions of country music and dance as heterosexualized and antagonistic towards other sexualities, but expands understandings of queer dance practice as well. In this article, I draw on my fieldwork in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where I spent six months in 2016 and 2017 learning to two-step and line dancing with an LGBT country dance organization.