From the Editor

Abstract

From the Editor Ricardo D. Trimillos Aloha kākou! The lead article for issue 54(1) is the print version of Daniel M. Neuman’s keynote address presented at the 2022 meeting of the Society for Asian Music. His homage, “Remembering My Teachers—Bruno Nettl and Sabri Khan,” celebrates the importance of individuals, their agency, and their personae in shaping a music culture; the individual actor is the leitmotif of this issue. Although ethnomusicology has generally been a project of understanding music in broad, culturally defined strokes, studies of individuals have become more frequent, a development that narrows the putative methodological divide between ethnomusicology and historical musicology (the latter is often characterized as giving greater attention to individual composers, performers, and works). The set of essays found here displays an array of modalities for locating artists within the respective genre each inhabits and examines such ancillary themes as copyright, ownership, organology, spirituality, and gender. Neuman’s keynote is a narrative documenting the intersections and inter-penetrations of the personal and the professional in the life of one individual. Neuman is recognized as a leader and pivotal figure in our field, and the experiences he recounts will no doubt resonate with many readers. His engaging, personal account spans six decades; it comprises idiosyncratic histories of ethno musicology and of global Indian classical music populated by prominent personalities from both worlds. Informal in delivery, it nevertheless references important concerns in the field, including processes of continuity, dynamics of globalization, and valorization of those we work with.1 The next contribution provides dramatic contrast: a single performer is the central figure in a contentious legal and public debate concerning ownership and control. The article by Dave Fossum, “Neşet Ertaş and the Ontologies of Turkey’s Folk Music,” examines the rerelease of a recorded song that pits the rights of the composer against those of the performer. In this conflict, modern institutions of copyright, commercialization, and mediatization decenter indigenous notions of ownership, control, and entitlement. Fossum documents ways that the performer Ertaş negotiates and strategizes a pathway through disparate, competing perceptions of folk song and considers how these actions construct a “reality” of the single composition in question. Although the author directs our attention to the performer Ertaş as protagonist, [End Page 1] the figure of the composer Özkan as antagonist occupies a continuous, albeit backgrounded, presence. Elements including the rural-urban divide, regional identity, commercialization, and sonic features inform the multiple ontologies of the title. The lute gambus is part of instrumental-vocal music popular in Malaysia and provides a historical link for Southeast Asia to West and Central Asia. “The Exceptional Fauziah Gambus: Negotiating Novelty, Piety, and Self-Promotion in an Androcentric Malaysian Musical Scene” by Joe Kinzer problematizes notions of gender, religious piety, and consumerism in a contemporary island nation. Like Fossum, Kinzer portrays the performer—a female—as an individual successfully negotiating and rationalizing multiple ontologies that revolve around cultural practices rather than legal institutions. Gender is only one feature of her exceptionalism; her acknowledged mastery of genres within Malay traditional music and “Arab” music further reinforces this status. Her agency employs various strategies to create and maintain an image that is simultaneously diva, pious woman, and national citizen. Kinzer addresses other themes shared in this issue—the rural-urban divide (here, province and metropole), mediatization, and globalization. In the preceding articles the focus is on the performer as the individual of interest. “Staging Noh Performance in Contemporary Opera: The Dance of the Shite in Toshio Hosokawa’s The Maiden from the Sea (2017)” by Paulo Brito foregrounds the composer. In contrast to Kinzer’s study, Brito’s treatment of gender is implicit rather than explicit—the noh creative collaborator for the project is a female practitioner. His attention to intercultural opera reinforces an ongoing construction of a Japanese identity that is self-conscious and global. The historical and the traditional are consciously juxtaposed with the contemporary and the creative. Performance scholarship often emphasizes the inseparability of music and dance—sound and movement—among Asian traditions. Brito meets this truism head-on by using a dance sequence to compare sonic and movement features between the original noh play and...