Ethnomusicological Work Research Articles

Studies on a Global History of Music: A Balzan Musicology Project

Studies on a Global History of Music: A Balzan Musicology Project

Ethnomusicology of Ukraine at The Turn of XX–XXI Centuries (1991–2021):Centers, Pedagogy, Documentation

The restoration of Ukraine’s independence in 1991 created favorable conditions for the powerful development of domestic ethnomusicology. Ukrainian musical folklore research has a long tradition, but for a hundred years the research has been conducted in difficult historical and political realities. This did not contribute to the proper development of folk music research, especially in the Soviet period. The period 1991–2021 is quite interesting, although difficult and ambiguous. The revival of Ukrainian ethnomusicology began in the early 1990s. Unfortunately, not all initiatives have been continued. Many initiatives had to be stopped due to financial difficulties, political circumstances, lack of sufficient specialists and so on.
 This article was inspired by the need to summarize everything that has been done in Ukrainian musical folklore over the past 30 years, to consider the achievements of Ukrainian ethnomusicology in 1991–2021. Previously, there was no general research on this topic, because various Ukrainian scientists have written about certain aspects of ethnomusicological work and about different time periods in the history of musical folkloristics of the period of independence. The research will be published in two parts: in this issue of the yearbook the main Ukrainian ethnomusicological centers will be presented, the state of domestic ethno-pedagogy will be discussed, documentation (field and archival) of folk music will be considered. The next issue will analyze the scientific, publishing, conference, promotional activities of Ukrainian researchers of folk music.
 Kyiv and Lviv have been the main Ukrainian centers for the study of folk music since the early twentieth century. The same is true today: the basic Ukrainian ethnomusical centers are the Rylsky Institute of Art Studies, Folklore and Ethnology (IAFE) of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, the Tchaikovsky National Academy of Music of Ukraine and the Lysenko Lviv National Academy of Music. Research Scientific Laboratory of Music Ethnology and Departments of musical folklore were opened in both Academies in the early 1990s. Well-known scientists, doctors of science and PhD, and their junior colleagues work in these centers. Publishing activity is developing: encyclopedias, monographs, folklore collections, collections of articles, periodicals are published. Kyiv and Lviv higher music institutions publish the only in Ukraine purely ethnomusicological yearbooks of scientific articles and materials – «Problems of music ethnology» and «Ethnomusic». Regional ethnomusicological centers operate in many cities of Ukraine – Kharkiv, Odessa, Dnipro, Sumy, Rivne, Uzhgorod, etc.
 During the period of Independence, ethnomusicological education was actively developing. The two main areas are the education of ethnomusicologists-theorists and ethnomusicologists-practitioners, leaders of folklore ensembles. The first ones are prepared mainly by Kyiv and Lviv Music academies, where various specialized disciplines are taught. The second is taught in higher educational institutions of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Rivne, Sumy.
 An important area of activity of almost all Ukrainian ethnomusicological centers in the period of Independence was the documentation of folk music: the collection of musical folklore, transcription and archiving. Folk music was most actively collected in the early 1990s, but over time this work has slowed down, in part because authentic tradition is dying out and living in the passive memory of performers. Today the largest archives of folk music are in IAFE and Kyiv and Lviv Music academies. Archival collections are actively digitized, some materials can be found on the Internet – both on special sites-archives of folk music, and YouTube channels, which usually refer to the different ethnomusical centers. The main prospect of Ukrainian archivists engaged in musical folklore is the creation of the Central Electronic Archive of Ukrainian Folklore

‘I thought it was a song but it turned out to be a siren’: civilian listening during wartime in Israel

ABSTRACT From warning sirens to loud booms in the sky; from tweaked radio playlists to the silence of a military funeral, sound is central to the civilian experience of wartime in Israel. Drawing upon public discourse among Jewish-Israelis during periods of armed conflict with Hamas militants in Gaza during 2012 and 2014, this article explores practices of civilian listening and sounding during times of national emergency. More than just making the ears prick, wartime sounds are implicated in an assemblage of bodily action: stimulating the body to move, prompting vocal responses and serving as a focal point for conversation. Recent work in ethnomusicology has sought to theorise soundscapes and listening practices during wartime – yet most work to date has focused on combatants. Building on previous literature in sound studies and on civil preparedness, in this article I focus on wartime regimes of civilian listening, arguing that embodied listening and sounding practices index a reconfiguration of the relationship between the state and its citizens, characterised by mutually co-constructed vigilance, and articulating consensual models of disciplined citizenship that help to sustain collective resilience, yet which also reinforce ethnonational divisions in society and bolster neoliberal practices of securitisation.

‘You have to feel to sing!’: popular music classes and the transmission of ‘feel’ in contemporary India

ABSTRACT This article investigates the practice of teaching and learning to ‘feel’ through film songs within the shifting political economy of contemporary India. Drawing on ethnographic research in a Mumbai popular music institute, I examine how music teachers use Hindi film songs alongside discourses of ‘feel’ to effect simultaneous shifts in students’ performances and embodied subjectivity. Situating the musical transmission of ‘feel’ within a consumption-oriented affective public culture, I argue that ‘feel’ is a newly desirable commodity that is sought out through product consumption and through artistic training. Bridging recent ethnomusicological work on affective pedagogy and scholarship on the role of affect in late capitalism, this article demonstrates that the cultivation of ‘feel’ through popular song in this music pedagogical context functions as a mode of affective labour that is critically linked to the formation of new expressive subjectivities and consumerist publics in contemporary India.

The flexible performer in interactive theatre: developing The Last Great Hunt’s Pollyanna

This article considers the demands of immersive, participatory, and interactive theatre, and the type of performer and performance training required to facilitate these. It provides an account of the development and performance of an interactive work that was inspired by the mechanics of video gaming, and that sought to give its audience control over the narrative and the way it was revealed. By framing performers as ‘interfaces’ rather than actors, audience interactions with the environment, the (loosely plotted) narrative, other audience members, and the performers themselves were able to be facilitated and incorporated into the world of the production. This dramaturgy demanded of the performers specific skill-sets. This article outlines the performance-making process of The Last Great Hunt theatre company in developing their work Pollyanna to show how each performance emerged through interaction with and within the audience, and arguing for a contemporary performer training that equips performers with skills in what Tim Fitzpatrick – developing the pioneering ethnomusicological work of Parry and Lord – calls ‘flexible performance’.

The Italian jukebox

The paper gives a short historical survey of ethnomusicological sound archives in Italy and proposes a few remarks on the accessibility of music through them. It also deals with the role that has normally been given to sound archives and with the concept of source, questioning the common idea that the main purpose of a sound archive is the creation and preservation of good historical sources. Moreover, it addresses the concepts of patrimonialisation and intangible heritage, wondering if the heritage of sound archives is really intangible or not. Finally, it discusses the relationship between the activity of local sound archives and the ethnomusicological work, especially focusing on my experience at the Centro per il dialetto romagnolo, in Ravenna. This paper tries to understand whether in contemporary Italy sound archives may have a fruitful role inside local communities by allowing the access to a critical repository of recordings.

Soundscape research put into practice: The exploration of soundwalks in the city of Bern

This article discusses the possibilities and broader communal impact of applied ethnomusicological work related to soundscape research in a university-based context. Focusing on a seminar in which the findings of urban soundscape research in the city of Bern (Switzerland) were transformed into six different sound tours, the article analyses the different strategies and layers of impact within the broader community.

Improvisation as a Way of Knowing

This paper proposes a theory of improvisation as a way of knowing. Different musicians may know about similar musical structures in different ways; different ways of knowing facilitate particular kinds of perception and cognition that underlie different performance behaviors. Some of these ways of knowing can facilitate improvisatory performance practices. The details of these improvisatory ways of knowing can be characterized by psychological and neuroscientific experimental work that compares differences in perception and cognition between groups of musicians depending on their training methods and performance experiences. In particular, perception-action coupling is a promising place to begin making such comparisons. This approach provides an alternative operationalization of improvisation for scientific study that is not susceptible to the problems that arise when describing cognitive processes in culturally contingent and music-theoretically relative terms such as novelty, spontaneity, and freedom, as past experimental work has done. Its hypotheses are also more readily falsifiable. This perspective can also connect an understanding of musical improvisation to other domains of improvisation and to historical and ethnomusicological work, as well as square it with more general theories in cognitive science, such as perception-action coupling. Finally, such a formulation has productive implications for work on improvisation thatdoesengage with concepts like novelty, spontaneity, and freedom that are traditionally invoked in improvisation discourse.

Performing arts as cultural heritage in the Federated States of Micronesia

This article explores the performing arts as cultural heritage in the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) in the western Pacific. It examines policies for and ideas about the support, management and safeguarding of the performing arts, first through the colonial lens of historical preservation, then through intangible cultural heritage and finally from recent theorising in music ecology. In presenting an overview of cultural heritage policy in the FSM with regard to the performing arts, this paper discusses the relationship between heritage practices and colonialism, and it reviews the place of music and dance in the cultural management of Micronesia. Drawing on recent work in ethnomusicology, the article argues for considerations of the holistic space of the performing arts and the facilitation of participatory practices to address concerns of cultural demise and to reframe approaches to music and dance as cultural heritage in the Pacific.

Peircean Thought As Core Theory For A Phenomenological Ethnomusicology

AbstractIn this article I situate Peircean semiotics within Peirce’s larger phenomenological project. Because Peircean theory is directed at the analysis of specific instances of experience it provides a series of powerful conceptual tools for ethnomusicologists and scholars in other ethnographic disciplines. After revisiting the social potentials of Peirce’s primary sign types and their utility for ethnomusicological work, I explore the importance of Peirce’s three basic ontological categories-Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness-for understanding and analyzing musical experience. I suggest that these categories are useful for parsing out the whole range of musical states of mind-from trance and "deep listening" to the thoughtful planning of variations and contrasts during performance. Finally, I attempt to show the systematic nature of Peircean theory and why an understanding of different sign functions is necessary for comprehending the states of mind represented by the categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. I use my own performance of string band music as a case study.

Grondbesit in 'n postkoloniale plaasroman: Marlene van Niekerk se Agaat

Summary Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat (2004) can be read as a postcolonial farm novel which pays particular attention to the role of women, the representation of Coloured farm workers as well as issues relevant to landownership in South Africa. In Agaat the question of landownership is foregrounded when Agaat, a coloured woman, becomes the owner of the farm Grootmoedersdrift and when Jakkie, the only son of the white woman farmer Milla de Wet, returns to Canada to resume his work in ethnomusicology. Agaat presents a problematisation of the influence wielded by landownership on the identity of the farmer, as Milla, who dearly loves her farm, also claims the farm to achieve her emancipatory objectives as a woman. Furthermore, Jakkie's willing relinquishment of his claim to landownership contributes towards a problematisation of the identity formation of the Afrikaner farmer and his/her descendants in the farm novel. In contrast with the situation in the older farm novel, for Jakkie, landownership is no longer a defining identity marker. This article on landownership and, particularly, the relation between landownership and the identities of both Milla and Jakkie de Wet in Agaat, also assesses the contribution of Marlene van Niekerk's novel to the development of the Afrikaans farm novel within a postcolonial context.

A THOUSAND DISSONANCES

A THOUSAND DISSONANCES

The Canon of Ethnomusicology: Is There One?

At first glance, the study of ethnomusicology would seem to be anti-canonical in its essence. As a field of study (if not as a discipline), it has certainly challenged the notion that only selected repertories--most usually the historic classical musics of Europe, but also classical musics in general--merit systematic and categorical inclusion in research and teaching programs. As programs in ethnomusicology have developed and the related matters of publication and curriculum become institutionalized, however, at least in North America, patterns have emerged that might be viewed as canonical. As patterns indicative of intellectual history, if not canonical obstinacy, these would seem to merit recognition and possibly critique. In the following pages, I will attempt to discuss what the current of ethnomusicology might be, how it has changed, what challenges the and what appears to be the (essential, if you will) bedrock of ethnomusicology. To get at these issues, it is useful to separate our awareness of the myriad musical cultures of the world from the discipline of ethnomusicology. In the increasingly interdisciplinary world of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, we see historians adopting typically ethnomusicological methodologies as ethnomusicologists add the techniques of historical research to their projects in such a way as to extract the methods from their subjects in very creative ways. (1) To the extent that ethnomusicology as a discipline has a canon, that is its engagement with social theory (perhaps most notably in the scholarly practices of North America). It proceeds from an anthropologically based theory of culture that is itself problematized but that takes as an important point of departure a definition written in 1871 by anthropologist Edward B. Tylor: ... that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capacities or habits acquired by man as a member of society. (2) Using various theoretical models, ethnomusicology probes the meaning of musical expression in societies and the relationship of sound structures to other social interactions thereby producing societies as it is experienced and observed. Ethnomusicology tends to be sensitive to power relations in a society and to the varying and multiple views of insiders and outsiders to a community. The table of contents for Ruth Stone's forthcoming book, Theory in Ethnomusicology, provides a good view of the disciplinary canon of ethnomusicology (see fig. 1). (3) Following an introductory chapter, Stone takes up the characteristics of more than twenty interpretive approaches that have gained currency in ethnomusicological research at one point or another. (She presents them roughly in the order of their emergence beginning in the late nineteenth century, which is commonly viewed as the beginning of the Western discipline of ethnomusicology as it is taught in Europe and North America.) At an entry level, Kay Kaufman Shelemay's recent textbook Soundscapes manifests canonical theory. (4) Using examples from all over the world, Shelemay invites beginners to look at ways in which musical sound constitutes social experience in familiar and unfamiliar settings from Boston to Bangkok. She draws attention to major themes in ethnomusicology that relate music to society: music and ritual, music and politics, music and social identity (see fig. 2). In an elegant address to the particular issues of the twenty-first-century global world, the book prompts students to observe and analyze the musical diversities and complexities of their own communities. Seen over the approximate 150 years of its existence as a field of inquiry, ethnomusicological work appears as part of what might be called the political economy of scholarship in Europe and North America, home to the dominant world powers during this period. In her compilation of reprinted articles, Ethnomusicological Theory and Method, Kay Shelemay provides a substantial sampling of ethnomusicological writing between 1910 and 1987 that exemplify this point. …

Béla Bartók and the development of the formal analysis of Serbian vocal folk melodies

Abstract Béla Bartók's and Albert Lord's capital work on folk songs of the Serbs and Croats (Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs, Texts and Transcriptions of 75 Folk Songs from the Milman Parry Collection and a Morphology of Serbo-Croatian Folk Melodies, New York: Columbia University Press, 1951) has been known for more than six decades to Serbian experts. Yet, in Serbia Bartók's contribution have remained insufficiently studied and valued by the time being, specially his methodology of formal analysis and precious conclusions about the principles of traditional melopoetic shaping, realized on that basis. The author of this paper presents Bartók's notions on the formal structure of Serbo-Croatian folk songs, and then highlights delayed and extremely negative reaction on Bartók's work, made by the cultural public in postwar Belgrade. Namely, on account of this book of Bartók, Stanislav Vinaver and Josip Slavenski, renowned representatives of the then expert public opinion, engaged in a fierce debate with the Hungarian writer József Debreceni in the Književne novine (literary magazine) during the 1950's, concerning Bartók's political pretensions to a part of the Yugoslav territory, which are supposedly distinguishable precisely from some of the conclusions from the said study. Today it transpires that in the delicate political climate of the time the great authorities of Vinaver and Slavenski had a direct bearing on the negative reception of the said Bartók's ethnomusicological work, which considerably slowed down the potential development of Serbian ethnomusicology, primarily its methodological bases.

Opening Address

On the occasion of Béla Bartók's 125th birthday a meeting of Bartók scholars from all over the world in the Budapest Bartók Archives is an exclusive event. Bartók's name in a way serves as a world passport, it demonstrates the great achievements of a small nation, a phenomenon that politicians abuse. Bartók was an exceptional man whose spirit radiates for those who come in contact with his art and life, with legacy, the manuscripts of his compositions and his ethnomusicological work. The international conferences dedicated to Béla Bartók's oeuvre and world do influence Bartók studies considerably. The Hungarian Academy of Sciences or directly the Bartók Archives have organized several conferences in the past forty-five years. For the 125th anniversary a call for papers on the internet was enough to set dozens of musicologists, including many ambitious young scholars form twenty countries in motion. This is a surprising experience even if if we acknowledge that the perspectives and the rank of Bartók studies considerably improved in the past decade.

Cuban Music: A Review Essay

CUBAN MUSIC: A REVIEW ESSAY Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo. By Ned Sublette. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2004. [xv, 672 p. ISBN 1-55652-516-8. $36.00.] Illustrations, index, bibliography. Cuban Music from A to Z. By Helio Orovio. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. [xi, 235 p. ISBN 0-8223-3212-4. $24.95.] Illustrations, appendices, bibliography. Cubano Be, Cubano Bop: One Hundred Years of Jazz in Cuba. By Leonardo Acosta. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2003. [xvi, 288 p. ISBN 158834147X. $29.95.] Index. Divine Utterances: The Performance of Afro-Cuban Santeria. By Katherine J. Hagedorn. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001. [xvi, 296 p. ISBN 1-56098-947-5. $24.95.] Illustrations, index, bibliography, discography, glossary, compact disc. The Buena Vista Social Club phenomenon, which continues to thrive with every new solo release, has marked the latest Cuban music craze in the United States and internationally. In fact, for well over a century now Cuban music has continued to attain widespread dissemination and popularity, first through sheet music in the nineteenth century and then touring musicians and recordings beginning in the early twentieth century. The genres and styles that Cubans and others have popularized internationally have included the habanera (mid-nineteenth century), son (beginning in the 1920s), mambo (late 1940s through the 1950s), cha cha cha (1950s), charanga-based son music (1950s through the 1960s), and timba (1990s). These repertories, while firmly rooted in Cuba's musical landscape, also became transnational musics, contributing significantly to the formation of related musical styles such as salsa, soukous, and mbalax in other parts of the world. Given the tremendous impact that Cuban music has had internationally and, in particular, on popular music of the United States (e.g., Latin jazz), it is important to note that before the 1990s scholarly, let alone general books on Cuban popular music, were not readily available in English. Cuban historians, anthropologists, and others, of course, wrote extensively on Cuban music throughout the twentieth century. Alejo Carpentier's La musica en Cuba (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Economica), originally published in 1946, continues to be an important historical source for mostly pre-twentieth-century Cuban popular and art music. It was translated into English by Alan West-Duran and published as Music in Cuba in 2001 by the University of Minnesota Press. Cuban ethnologist and anthropologist Fernando Ortiz produced numerous works on Afro-Cuban music and culture throughout the first half of the twentieth century, yet his extremely important works remain untranslated. It was not until the early 1990s that North American ethnomusicologists and anthropologists began to research and publish critical and scholarly work on Cuban popular and folkloric music and dance. Peter Manuel's Essays on Cuban Music: North American and Cuban Perspectives (Lanham: University Press of America, 1991) is particularly notable for bringing together the work and theoretical perspectives of Cuban and North American musicologists and ethnomusicologists. Robin Moore's Nationalizing Blackness: Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Havana, 1920-1940 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997) studies issues of race, national identity, music, and the arts in pre-Revolutionary Cuba, while Yvonne Daniel's Rumba: Dance and Social Change in Contemporary Cuba (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995) traces the development and social transformations of rumba music and dance in Cuba. In the last four years several more books on Cuban music have been published for scholarly and general audiences. Accordingly, the four works reviewed in this essay represent an increasing interest among North American publishers in providing translated editions of previously published Cuban books as well as historical and ethnomusicological work by North American writers. …

(Left Out in ) Left (the Field ): The Effects of Post-Postmodern Scholarship on Feminist and Gender Studies in Musicology and Ethnomusicology, 1990-2000

Since the publication of womenand Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective in 1987 I have watched the steady growth of feminist and, more recently, genderist studies in musicology and ethnomusicology.1 Heavily influenced by postmodern theories derived from history, literary criticism, anthropology, cultural studies, queer theory, and the many "posts" (e.g., postcolonialism, poststructuralism, postfeminism), it is clear that recent postmodern studies have contributed much to our understandings of how both music sound and sociomusical activities are gendered. What has been less clear, however, are the reasons behind a growing separation between the two fields of musicology and ethnomusicology with respect to this research: after a brief spurt in the late 1980s and into the 1990s, work in feminist and genderist ethnomusicology seemed to slow in relation to that of musicology. Yes, certain recent works stand out, Beverly Diamond and Pirkko Moisala's Music and Gender and Tulia Magrini's Music and Gender: Perspectives from the Mediterranean, among others.2 Yet, compared to studies in musicology and especially in popular music studies, there seemed to be comparatively few. I began to question, first, if this were actually the case and, second, what could explain this disparity, if it did indeed exist. To find some answers [End Page 90] I conducted a quick, informal search, scanning the titles of over fifteen hundred books and articles written since 1990 on the subject of women and music, feminist theory and music, gender and music, and, most recently, men and music to see if my perceptions were correct. The book titles were culled from the Voyager Catalog on the University of Rochester's library system, and articles were taken from three prominent journals: the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Ethnomusicology, and Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture. Click for larger view Table 1 DISTRIBUTION OF ARTICLES ON WOMEN, GENDER, AND MUSIC TAKEN FROM WOMEN AND MUSIC: A JOURNAL OF GENDER AND CULTURE I KNEW FROM PREVIOUS SEARCHES THAT AT LEAST HALF OF THE WORKS WOULD NOT BE SCHOLARLY BUT, RATHER, TRADE BOOKS (MORE OR LESS) CHRONICLING THE LIVES OF FAMOUS FEMALE JAZZ SINGERS OR ROCK GROUPS. THE REMAINING 750 OR SO, THAT IS, THOSE ATTEMPTING TO THEORIZE WOMEN, MEN, GENDER, AND MUSIC IN SOME WAY, COULD BE ROUGHLY DIVIDED AS FOLLOWS: MUSICOLOGY, INCLUDING WESTERN CLASSICAL AND POPULAR MUSIC, ABOUT 90 PERCENT; ETHNOMUSICOLOGY, MEANING EVERYTHING ELSE, INCLUDING NON-WESTERN POPULAR AND CLASSICAL MUSIC, ABOUT 10 PERCENT. I DECIDED TO SEPARATE MUSICOLOGICAL FROM ETHNOMUSICOLOGICAL WORK ON THE BASIS OF METHOD: WAS THE WORK UNDER QUESTION DERIVED FROM TEXTWORK OR FROM FIELDWORK? WOMEN AND MUSIC: A JOURNAL OF GENDER AND CULTURE, THE ONLY MUSIC JOURNAL TOTALLY DEDICATED TO PUBLICATIONS ON WOMEN, GENDER, AND MUSIC, HAD A SLIGHTLY HIGHER PERCENTAGE FOR ETHNOMUSICOLOGICAL PUBLICATIONS (CA. 17 PERCENT). TABLE 1 SHOWS THE DISTRIBUTION OF ARTICLES FROM THE INITIAL ISSUE IN 1997 TO 2004. WE COULD PARTIALLY EXPLAIN THESE STATISTICS AS EVIDENCE FOR THE RELATIVE NUMBERS OF MUSICOLOGISTS AND ETHNOMUSICOLOGISTS IN THE FIELD TODAY. ACCORDING TO THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGY SOCIETY AND THE SOCIETY FOR ETHNOMUSICOLOGY WEBSITES, ABOUT 3,300 PEOPLE ARE MEMBERS OF THE AMS, and about 1,200 belong to the SEM. Of course, some of these are the same people, but if we accept these numbers at face value, then indeed there are almost three times the number of musicologists than ethnomusicologists out there. It is easy to see why there are comparatively fewer published works in feminist and genderist ethnomusicology. However, this is not the complete story. I linked Western popular music studies with musicology, not ethnomusicology, although, until recently, all music outside the Western art canon was considered the province of ethnomusicology. Western popular music studies, influenced by the newly burgeoning theories of cultural studies, brought the...

Bartók and Boosey & Hawkes: The American Years

By mid-1940 Bartók had decided to live in the United States. For how long and under what conditions, he did not really know. But, from his short tour of April and May 1940, he had come to believe that the prospects for his performing, compositional and ethnomusicological work werebrighter in New York than in Hungary, where a Nazi take-over seemed only a matter of time. The Bartóks' departure from their homeland was an unhappy affair, not just because of the myriad hassles of arranging visas and boxing up a lifetime's work, but also because of a lastminute quarrel with Kodály over unexpected directions which Bartók had taken in their joint project on Hungarian folk music. The two would, in fact, never again directly communicate.

Fanning the Celtic Flame: Music Patronage and Practice in Contemporary Ireland

In our attempts to address issues of definition and meaning in a forum, it seems helpful to conduct a searching look at the places and people for whom the category carries any kind of currency. As the boundaries of musical communities are more tightly drawn by the work of ethnomusicologists and others, broader categories such as become increasingly irrelevant. Work in ethnomusicology for example, is not overtly grounded in a long tradition of music studies. There are music scholars and Scottish music scholarswhose paths and interests certainly complement and cross one another'sbut I would hazard a guess that there are few if any self-designated scholars (musicians seem to transgress the boundaries more easily than scholars do in this regard). Perhaps a designation of this kind is not so much a relic of the past, however, as a possibility for the future. The acknowledgement or denial of the existence of Celtic music is an active dialogue that urges the study of the formation and meaning of this contentious category. If it is, as some propose, merely a marketing tool designed to attract as many consumers as possible by placing distinct musical practices and traditions into one userfriendly, world music grab-bag, then there is room for investigation of and debate about the motivations of music marketers and consumers. Similarly, if we are to consider dismissing out of hand a pseudo-image of something we believe to have meaningful substance (in this case, music and its practice), then I think we shall at least have given the side their say in the matter. An approach that utilizes the perspectives of both folklore and popular culture would be well-suited for exploring the Celtic music phenomenon. In this light, we could acknowledge the richness of both the individual musical traditions as well as the unity of meaning which these discrete traditions, taken together or creatively re-worked into something new, hold for others. has become a prominent categorical marker of both festivals and record bins. In one sense, the category as such functions to establish the immigrant ethnic communities of Celtic speaking areas, their cultures and histories as a larger whole with deeper, yet less tangible characteristics. This type of category formation is associated with a romanticization of a homeland by insiders and outsiders alike and is a common feature of immigrant cultures. The circumstances of immigration and exile are acknowledged as one of the common features of the cultures presented in North American settings, and festivals that feature predominantly music often embrace other traditions equally. In such instances Celtic has a currency in immigrant communities that it does not in, or that is expressed differently than that of the indigenous Celts. In previous work examining the construction of Celtic in music and festival contexts, I found that where it is constructed as an overt cultural or commercial strategy that it is often used interchangeably with, and/or is taken to mean, Irish.1 Although the research for my dissertation was not focused directly on the elaboration of Celtic music by music practitioners or industry personnel (although the topic is certainly ripe for inquiry), I often observed under what conditions the specter of was invoked in the particular local setting I was involved with; as well as in the larger context of contemporary culture. This essay attempts to give an indication of the relevance (or perhaps lack thereof) of as a meaningful category in the local discourse of music and commerce in contemporary Ireland, and to provide a critical perspective on local music and culture in a Celtic country. From this point I will undertake two tasks. First, I will briefly describe and discuss some examples of local production from a standpoint that views the idea of Irish as problematic in terms of the multiplicity of practices that constitute this category in contemporary usage. …

Zouk: world music in the West Indies

Jocelyne Guilbault, with Gage Averill, Edouard Benoit, and Gregory Rabess. Zouk: World Music in the West Indies. Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. xxv, 279 pp., compact disc included. ISBN 0-226-31041-8 (hardcover), ISBN 0-226-31042-6 (paperback). This publication covers lot of geographical, socio-cultural and intellectual territory. While it is at base historical and descriptive study of zouk - recently emergent popular originating in the French Caribbean - it is also tour de force in the presentation and representation of contemporary expressive cultures in their manifold complexities. The complexities in this case are many. The phenomenon Guilbault takes on is micro-evolutionarily innovative popular style traceable in large degree to the creativity of small cadre of professional musicians based in Martinique and Guadeloupe in the 1970s and 1980s. Their innovations were consolidated and polished in the recording studios of Paris and the resulting product has been well received not only in the source (French Caribbean) communities but in other world markets as well. The basic ingredients of this scenario echo tale familiar in the histories of numerous regional New World vernacular musics, to be sure-e.g., the rise and diffusion of Jamaican reggae, early New Orleans jazz, and so on. What most connects the success of zouk to the histories of other initially obscure regional styles which have achieved transnational prominence is the confluence of marketing savvy, artistic distinctiveness and favorable socio-cultural climate. When operating in sync, these factors make it possible for narrowly-practiced style to quickly become broadly significant. Guilbault's study is one of the most detailed and informed to date on this fascinating and multidisciplinarily important phenomenon. This work is in many ways model of to do popular studies in an academically fruitful way. Guilbault expertly combines the narrative engagement of the best of 'popular' popular writing with the analytic rigours of musicology and ethnomusicology - and she adds to the mix her knowledge of current methods and paradigms in cultural studies and the social sciences at large. Even cursory perusal of her bibliography reveals the wide range of intellectual stances that have informed her presentation of zouk. Like most publications about I admire and respect, Guilbault's study leads me inexorably to experience/re-experience the musical sounds themselves. I also appreciate its enthusiatic and advocatory stance, although this is sometimes perhaps excessive-as when zouk is described as a major contemporary force in the popular field helping to shape economic, political, and social change worldwide ... (xv). Not to dismiss the significance of zouk, this statement seems to me bit overblown in light of the evidence presented. Guilbault's introductory chapter lays out the scope, aims and theoretical underpinnings of the study in clear and concise manner. Paramount among her concerns is to explicate zouk from multiple perspectives to establish popular, mass-distributed has evolved and it has been received by four distinct populations [i.e., those of Dominica, St. Lucia, Martinique and Guadeloupe] (xvii). Her concern with how various cultures respond to the same music (xvii) is arefreshing slantrare in ethnomusicological work, albeit not so uncommon in historical musicology (viz., reception history). Guilbault also voices hope that her study will further the appreciation of world music (xxi). To this end she includes much that could lead receptive reader to an informed appreciation (and perhaps even an aficionado's connoisseurship) for zouk and related styles, beginning in chapter 2 which traces the rise of zouk and in particular its most renowned band to date, Kassav. Part II of the book (chapters 3-7) deals with a network of relations (48) connecting zouk to other musical styles and genres. …