ABSTRACT This article explores the nexus between self-making and genre-making in African popular music through the lens of Fújì music, an urban Yoruba popular music from Nigeria. The story of social agents in postcolonial African popular music is at the heart of this genre-making process. Drawing from interviews, archives, and participant observations, I explore the development of Fújì through the agency of Sikiru Ayinde Barrister, the acclaimed pioneer of the genre. Through his continuous search for ‘newness’, Ayinde Barrister launched Fújì as a prestige genre, a type of modernity from below, within the 1970s Lagos social and economic scenes. Ultimately, the interlocking story of Ayinde Barrister and Fújì provides insights into how genre-making in African popular music intertwines processes of self-making in postcolonial Africa.

ABSTRACT Despite the challenges musicians face in different music cultures, the question of how musicians sustain their careers is often not highlighted in music and sustainability studies. This article focuses on the strategies adopted by Okyeame Kwame (OK), one of the pioneers of hiplife music, to sustain his career in the Ghanaian music industry. From an ecology of music viewpoint and twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in Ghana, this article explores the factors influencing hiplife and musicians within the Ghanaian music industry to enable music career sustenance. This article argues that sustainable music careers are linked to and necessary for the sustainability of music cultures. It also contributes to the ongoing discourse on music and sustainability, particularly about music careers. Overall, the article offers lessons to help musicians and ethnomusicologists explore career sustainability strategies in various contexts and work towards a theory and practice of music career sustainability.

ABSTRACT Relatively little has been published in English about dontri Thai (Thai classical music) and due to the absence of Thai scholars from English language musicological scholarship, most of what has been published was written by non-Thai scholars who have relied upon terms and concepts developed for explaining music with roots in the European tradition. The importation of extrinsic categories conceals indigenous explanatory models and blocks paths connecting Thai musical performance and thought to other areas of Thai culture and social life. This article frames the silence of Thai voices and their ways of knowing as the epistemological dimension of the colonising enterprise, the effects of which have made their way into Thai universities where they have transformed intellectual life and dontri Thai pedagogy. The disciplinary reorientation suggested here aims towards a pluralist model of musicological thought and method. This will open a space for different ways of musical knowing, creating, and theorising to enter from where they may decentre and reshape Western musicological discourse and practice. A rethink of musicology will help align its disciplinary goals with the aims of addressing equality of representation and allow unheard Thai voices to explain their own music in their own terms.

ABSTRACT Since the 1990s, the world has seen an incredible surge of Chinese performers in Western classical music. Unknown to most outside of Chinese musical networks, these musicians often began their training as young children, learning from parents who lost musical ambitions during the Cultural Revolution and who hoped to realise them through their only child. However, as children rapidly developed musical skills and entered conservatories, other career paths became eliminated. Drawing from anthropologist Aihwa Ong’s work on ‘flexible citizenship’ and ethnographic fieldwork in Mainland China, Canada, and the United States, I theorise the ‘strategic citizenship’ of these students and their families. I do so to argue that the strong presence of Chinese instrumentalists in Western classical music has resulted from a desire, even a desperation, amongst many families to negotiate intergenerational traumas and acquire socio-economic stability in the neoliberal age. In this process, transnational Chinese musicians must also contend with issues of precarity and Orientalisms abroad.

ABSTRACT Performances in the USA during the 1970s by three semi-professional groups – The Chieftains, the Siamsa Céilí Band, and Siamsa Tíre – present opportunities to understand developments in Irish traditional music during that period. These developments led to increased commercialisation of the music and tours by Irish performers to the USA in subsequent decades, providing access to a significantly larger market for the genre, within and beyond the diaspora. Underpinning the study is a critical consideration of audiences’ understanding of Irish identity and culture and the reception of Irish cultural performances in the USA at this time. These tours contributed to a reconceptualization of Irish traditional music that engaged new audiences in the USA and incorporated repertoire beyond what American audiences typically associated with Ireland at the time. Developing a professional approach, the groups presented repertoire from the dance music and harp music traditions, Irish language song, and traditional styles of dance. We examine the motivations for the tours, the itineraries and venues, and the material presented, as well as the impact of Northern Ireland politics on each of the groups and their performances.

"Sing and sing on. Sentinel musicians and the making of the Ethiopian American diaspora." Ethnomusicology Forum, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2