In this article, I show how the Dialita women’s choir uses music to contest the ongoing denial of state-sponsored violence that followed the Indonesian tragedy of 1965–66, particularly as it impacted women. More specifically, Dialita uses their experiences and positionalities as women to perform an alternative collective memory for younger generations of Indonesians. Composed in prison, Dialita’s musical repertoire memorialises the affects and effects of imprisonment, exile, trauma, and survival. Due to government censure and public condemnation, the songs had been silenced by the Indonesian state and hidden underground from the public since the Indonesian tragedy. In the early 2000s, the women of Dialita formed a musical group and courageously began performing in public, collaborating with young musicians and recording the songs. I contend that women’s collective singing is an act of critical remembrance, opening a new front in struggles for truth and reconciliation, especially when juridical appeals and strategies have been rebuffed.

Insights into the knowledge, performance, and transmission of songs are pivotal in ensuring the survival of traditional Aboriginal songs. We present the first in-depth musical analysis of a Wapurtarli yawulyu song set sung by Warlpiri women from Yuendumu, Central Australia, recorded in December 2006 with a solo lead singer accompanied by a small group. Our musical analysis reveals that there are various interlocking parts of a song, and this can make it difficult for current generations to learn songs. The context of musical endangerment and the musical analyses presented in our study show that contemporary spaces for learning yawulyu must consider the complex components that come together for a song set to be properly performed.

Jinghu is the lead accompaniment instrument in the Peking opera ensemble. Qinshi are the accompanists who play jinghu. Traditionally, jinghu was regarded as a male instrument; female qinshi first appeared in educational institutions subsidised by the People’s Republic of China in the 1950s. Nevertheless, till now, the-all-male jinghu performance history and standards influenced by the virile ethos have deeply influenced contemporary female qinshi’s performances and recognition of their musicality and contributions to jinghu performance. In this article, I explore the rise of female qinshi, their challenges to jinghu performance conventions, and their contributions to contemporary jinghu performance.

In this article, I address collecting and re(p)(m)atriation as research orientations. I draw on examples from Métis music to situate the impact of collection-oriented research, to interrogate my own practice as a Métis-music scholar, and to point to possibilities for the future. In presenting a history of collecting alongside an overview of re(p)(m)atriation, I offer readers an opportunity to meditate on the pervasiveness of collection-oriented research and how we might create a new ethnomusicology—meditations encouraged through poetic expressions. I suggest that twenty-first century ethnomusicology needs to turn towards rematriation, not only as an act of returning artifacts, but also as a way of orienting our work as scholars.

This paper discusses how the activities during which people gather to create, perform, and transmit imbalu circumcision music and dance at Namasho Cultural Site (NCS) become a platform for the Bagisu of the Balutseshe clan to tutor boys about society’s gender ideology, social histories, and rituals of the sacred swamp, thus turning the place into a communal classroom for imparting this knowledge. Due to the changing context of contemporary Bagisu, I argue for efforts to archive these events to make them accessible by future generations in order to uphold imbalu performances as a mechanism of knowledge production and dissemination.