From the Editor

Abstract

From the Editor Ricardo D. Trimillos Aloha kākou! Issue 45(2) presents a variety of perspectives about the study of Asia and its musics, ranging from the highly personal to the “objectively” scientific and technological. It is in keeping with our intent to offer variety and diversity in each issue. Regarding geocultural diversity, the review sections discuss items from Central Asia, South Asia, and West Asia—Uzbekistan, India, and Israel, respectively. The four feature articles discuss East Asia (Japan), South Asia (India), and Southeast Asia (Vietnam and Burma). Further, they reflect diversities of theme and approach. We begin with a personal reflection on our field. Bonnie Wade’s contribution is a print version of the lively keynote address presented at the 2012 annual meeting in New Orleans. A departure from the author’s usual and established register of discourse, the essay provides an absorbing and very personal account of lifelong engagement with ethnomusicology. At the same time unwittingly (or perhaps wittingly!) she fashions an artful vehicle that encapsulates the field, spanning some six decades of American academe. I am delighted that the written form communicates some of the flavor and spirit of the oral presentation. For those who know the author primarily through publications, this narrative reveals an accomplishment-filled odyssey of a model exemplar. It reinforces the interconnections of scholarship, teaching, mentoring, and service to the field. For those who know the author personally, the account invokes and recalls shared people, places, and events, finding resonance with individual, personal, and lived experiences. Turning from subject positionality and performance, we next consider changes in meanings and ecologies for music making among Hmong youth in “Minorities Onstage: Cultural Tourism, Cosmopolitanism, and Social Harmony in Northwestern Vietnam” by Lonán Ó Briain. Already marked as an ethnic minority and geographically marginalized, the northwestern Hmong must contend with issues of identity and notions of culture within the reunified nation of Vietnam, with all its nascent economic and political trajectories. For the Hmong, issues of globalization and tourism loom large, for which Ó Briain documents, analyzes, and problematizes local responses. He reports a dialogue courtship song tradition, reframed for the tourist industry, incredibly, as “The Love Market”! Rather than present a perpetrator-victim [End Page 1] binary in terms of agency, the author suggests there is a tension among state bureaucrats, local economic stakeholders, and cosmopolitan Hmong youth in negotiating outcomes. The third piece also invites our consideration of performance change in the environment of a hegemonic Other—however, this time in the diaspora. Heather MacLachlan discusses the transplantation of the Karen, an ethnic minority from Burma, into an American Midwest mainstream—Fort Wayne, Indiana. Two iconic music-dance genres have undergone musical, choreographic, and social changes in this diaspora, including negotiations of Buddhist/Christian factionalism and the possibility of a more inclusive and secular identity as overseas Karen. MacLachlan marshals voices of elders and youths from the community to articulate issues, describe compromises, and express community goals related to this deliberate and proactive cultivation of heritage identity. We conclude with a highly technical study that is both challenging in its sophistication and exciting in what it portends for one of the “last bastions” of music analysis—timbre. By subjecting sound data from Japanese noh to very specific psychoacoustic protocols, collaborators Michael Gardiner and Joyce S. Lim provide us with a model for understanding timbre beyond such cantometric descriptors as “harsh” and “rich.” The chromatope offers a new tool for serious engagement of timbre as a domain of the musical-technical. Although at first glance primarily in the comfort zone of the psychoacoustician, the article is in fact broadly reader friendly; it illustrates how understandings won from chromatope microanalyses have implications and applications for intersense modalities, a totalized (rather than differentiated) soundscape, and a greater appreciation of noh theater writ large. “Chromatopes of Noh” evidences the dynamism and the ongoing growth of our field celebrated by Bonnie Wade in her opening essay. As such it provides a fitting end piece for this issue’s offerings. [End Page 2] Ricardo D. Trimillos University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Copyright © 2014 University of Texas Press