For some years, members of the International Council for Traditional Music have critiqued what it is that we study. We have not yet reached a consensus, as the very continuation of our association’s name—which many feel has passed its sell-by date—demonstrates. Terms such as “folk” and “traditional,” but also “classical,” “art” or “popular,” are increasingly contested; there is also much soul-searching about how to define musicology/ethnomusicology and dance anthropology/ethnochoreology, and whether we should consider these academic approaches as they are currently constituted or as what they should become. Clearly, if the ICTM is a truly international body, it must balance theories and definitions emanating from Western European and North American academia with the knowledge and expertise of those who have grown up and made their careers in other parts of the world. Decolonising the curriculum and respecting difference requires us to allow multiple voices from South and North to be heard, but this necessitates recognising many different musicologies/ethnomusicologies and dance anthropologies/ethnochoreologies which are either contained within these overarching disciplinary markers or framed using other terms. While many of our universities require us to publish in “international” journals which are ranked and positioned within one or more of the established peer-reviewed databases, this requirement makes establishing an equitable academia more challenging: the Yearbook must position itself to be internationally recognised, but to do so demands that we operate a robust peer review process, when this runs the very real risk of limiting what we publish.
Meeting the many challenges we face is very much a work-in-progress. For many decades, our default position has all too readily been bounded by place—the locality in which a music or dance is made and experienced, and how music and dance is used to interpret relationships with ecologies and environments, with spiritualities and communities, and with states and unions. There is nothing wrong with this approach, not least because many ICTM colleagues focus on ethnography in their research. But, at conferences, the result can be that we often gravitate towards panels that match our personal interests in place—panels that, for example, bring together sets of papers on the music and dance of a particular region of Africa, East Asia, or South Asia. This same situation pervades our publications, and we note that the titles authors have chosen for each paper in this Yearbook refer to music or dance emanating from specific places or geographical regions: Nigeria; Unama’ki (also known as Cape Breton Island); Sindh (Pakistan); Galilee (Israel); Japan/Hawai‘i; Mexico/Los Angeles; Gjirokastër (Albania); Uttarakhand (India); Chile. Some of these places are contested, politically or culturally. The focus on place is not surprising, given scholars’ personal identities, backgrounds, and heritage, not to mention a lingering distrust among many of us for the more grandiose theorising that some of our forebears engaged in. Arguably, too, those of us from outside a culture and community that we choose to study become heavily invested through the time we spend learning new languages and cultural norms (matters that are less necessary for those of us who study the music and dance of a culture we have grown up in). Certainly, at conferences and in many study groups a focus on place is valuable: as we mix with our peers who cross-cut what theorists might define as emic and etic, or insider and outsider perspectives, we mediate how we utilise discrete yardsticks of familiarity and Otherness.
Still, does our focus on place potentially narrow our concerns and create borders between us as an international community of researchers and practitioners? When we read the Yearbook, and as we attend conferences, do we skip the papers that don’t relate to our interests in place? Again, some of us prefer to align ourselves with colleagues who work on particular genres. To do so can reinforce notions of place, but can also transcend locality, as is seen in many of the ICTM study groups which focus on, for example, applied ethnomusicology, inclusion, history, organology (and so on). Study groups bring together colleagues with specific interests, but the Yearbook, and the ICTM World Conferences, must embrace our different interests and our differing approaches and methodologies. With this necessity in mind, look at the running heads of the papers in this Yearbook, where we have deliberately removed place/region indicators in order to suggest some of the themes that might function to bring our community together. Note that in referencing “themes,” we accept the fact that “theories” can be problematic to ICTM as an international body, because much theorising reinforces Western-centric approaches and methodologies. Broadly stated, the themes indicated here are the use of music and dance in respect to gender and ideology, collaborative research, subjectivities, local and regional issues, sustainability (and loss), networks, women and laments, trance and possession, and interdisciplinary approaches to scholarship. These themes are by no means exhaustive, but providing we do share thematic interests, they might go some way towards justifying the existence of the ICTM as an essential international body. It should come as no surprise that the editors of this Yearbook urge colleagues not to pre-judge the importance or relevance of a given paper on the basis of the place or genre that it discusses, but to read each paper as a way to explore issues and themes that, hopefully, resonate with their personal interests.
This Yearbook commemorates the 45th ICTM World Conference, held at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, from 11–17 July, 2019. Each World Conference is organised around a set of themes. The themes arise from suggestions made by the membership and the local arrangements committee, and are fleshed out by a programme committee. The themes for the Bangkok conference were trans-border flows and movements; music, dance, and sustainable development; the globalisation and localisation of ethnomusicology and ethnochoreology; music and dance as expressive communication; approaches to practice-based research and its applications; and new research. As colleagues who have organised conferences know all too well, setting themes does not guarantee that each will prove equally attractive; during the selection of papers for inclusion in a publication such as the Yearbook, the themes that began the process have a habit of moving around and sometimes disappearing completely, while additional areas of focus take on greater importance. (We note that while this Yearbook includes one article that uses arts-based research, including the making of a film, it has not been possible to include other accounts of practice-based research; we are, however, aware of forthcoming publications which develop papers presented at the conference within this thread.)
The first three papers in this Yearbook focus on the agency of performers as they negotiate power structures, ideologies, and everyday inequalities shaped by gender, race, and intolerance. The first, by Debra L. Klein, shows how contemporary Muslim women artists in a time of religious fundamentalism and violence attempt to narrow the gap between the allegory of unity integral to syncretic musical forms and their daily struggles with gender and political inequity. The two genres discussed—fújì and Islamic—originated within Nigerian Yorùbá Muslim communities. The second paper reports on a project for community engagement and artistic animation that aims to foster reconciliation by recovering and honouring local indigenous histories. The paper outlines how academics can be part of a collaborative venture that generates transformation. Marcia Ostashewski collaborated and co-authored the paper with Clifford Paul, Shaylene Johnson, and Graham Marshall, Mi’kmaw or L’nu researchers based in the Membertou First Nation in Unama’ki (also known as Cape Breton Island). Using indigenous narratives in the text, the co-authors propose a research model for practice-led indigenous knowledge production. The third paper, by Pei-ling Huang, focuses on the life of her teacher to delineate contemporary subject positions of devotees, performing artists, skilled artisans, and artists in a Sindh tradition of singing Sufi poetry. She emphasises that the different subject positions generated are consequences of the performers’ mediation with prevailing hegemonic forces such as Islamic and State ideologies.
The fourth, fifth, and sixth papers concern the processes and outcomes of the transborder circulation of music. First, Abigail Wood, Taiseer Elias, Loab Hammoud, and Jiryis Murkus Ballan discuss how transnational cosmopolitan music can cross, create, and re-inscribe borders, detailing the case of Palestinian Arab wedding musicians in northern Israel. Following this, Minako Waseda explores how a music genre was transplanted, flourished, and then disappeared. The genre functioned as a cultural bridge between a homeland and its diasporic community before succumbing to the impacts of international conflict during World War II. The case study is Naniwa-bushi, a Japanese musical story-telling genre in Hawai‘i. Next, Kristina F. Nielsen pairs fieldwork with historical analysis to explore how a cultural and musical restoration project in one country gained new significance among a diaspora, where it was used to combat the erasure of Indigenous identity. Her case study is “Aztec music” among Mexican-American musicians in the southwestern United States.
Seventh, in her study of intersecting gender, nationalism, and Balkan identity, Grijda Spiri explores how women have performed and preserved laments, transmitting them from mother to daughter, in her hometown of Gjirokastër in Southern Albania. Eighth, Andrew Alter describes how dance intersects with drumming to invoke possession states, using stylised choreography and gestures that indicate the supernatural, in Mahābhārata performances in the Himalayan region of Garhwal in the Indian state of Uttarakhand. The ninth paper, by Christian Spencer-Espinosa, provides a historical overview of studies of “traditional” music, exploring how approaches have shifted over time and how the concept and idea of folklore has been applied. The place is Chile, and the article begins with the establishment of the Chilean Folk Society in 1909, tracing scholarship through to the present.
No Yearbook can include a representative sample of the vast variety of papers, supplemented by numerous roundtable discussions, workshops, and performances, that are part of the World Conference. The call for papers for the 45th World Conference elicited 641 single and 80 group abstract submissions—dividing the group proposals into thirty-minute slots equated to 961 individual presentations. After the review and registration processes had been completed, 628 presenters from 76 countries participated, and the book containing their abstracts ran to more than 450 pages. We note that 2019 marked the first ICTM World Conference to be held in Southeast Asia (and, of course, the first to be held in Bangkok). The programme committee consisted of Dan Bendrups, Susanne Fürniss, Made Mantle Hood, Irene Loutzaki, Deise Lucy Montardo, John Morgan O’Connell, Naoko Terauchi, and Ricardo Trimillos, to whom we express our grateful thanks for their sterling work in setting and elaborating the rubric for themes and reviewing the submitted abstracts. We, as the programme committee co-chairs, worked with the local arrangements committee to set up the programme, trying, as much as possible, to bring colleagues together to explore themes. As has been ICTM tradition for some years, we were then invited to co-edit this volume of the Yearbook, featuring some of the papers that were presented at the conference. We issued an invitation to all presenters to submit their papers for consideration and then undertook a two-stage peer-review process to determine which submissions would be published. We record our grateful thanks to the many (anonymous) reviewers who contributed to this process. What you have in front of you, hopefully, offers snapshots of a truly wonderful conference, but also showcases a variety of the approaches, some emergent, that ICTM members are employing in their research on music and dance.
