Contents

Introduction	2

Conference themes	3

Keynote speakers	4

Programme	6

Round table texts	13

Presenters and abstracts	30

Credits	57

Introduction

On behalf of the International Centre for Music Studies, I would like to extend the warmest of welcomes to all attending the British Forum for Ethnomusicology 2007 Annual Conference here at Newcastle University. With two keynote addresses, more than forty papers, about fifty presenters, and a round table with four leading international scholars, the conference promises to be both stimulating and  challenging.

I would like to thank: Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco and Philip V. Bohlman for their key contributions; the British Academy for the grant that has enabled our  keynote speakers to attend; Franco Fabbri, Bernard Lortat-Jacob, Richard Middleton and Suzel Ana Reily for their participation in the round table; the BFE Conference Committee for help and guidance; Alexander Press for their sponsorship; my colleagues at ICMuS, and in particular Ian Biddle, for their support; Catherine Todd for her wonderful work; Richard Elliott for the creation of the conference website; Vic Gammon, Stewart Hardy, Sandra Kerr, Desi Wilkinson and the students of the Folk and Traditional Music degree course for the co-ordination of the concert and their performances; Nanni Angeli for the photos of Paolo Angeli’s guitar; John Ayers, Sue Barnes, Francisco Bethencourt-Llobet, Olivia Cameron, Marilyn Grant, Jane Hagger, Thomas Hodgson, Mark Humprey, Sally Kat (The Sage Gateshead), Maria Martínez Gabaldon, Geneviève Wilkinson for their suggestions and contribution; you all, for being here.

Goffredo Plastino

During the final stage of the conference’s organisation, my colleague and friend Vanessa Knights, whose work on Latin American musics will be known to many of you, passed away. Her energy, support and committment are a large part of why this event is happening, and I and my colleagues in ICMuS will miss her terribly.

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Conference themes

BETWEEN FOLK AND POPULAR
THE LIMINAL SPACES OF THE VERNACULAR

If it is true that “the ethnographic Other is now fully plugged in, and the ethnomusicologist is no longer the only person in the field with high-tech equipment” (Lysloff and Gay, Jr.); that the differences between world and traditional folk musicians have collapsed, and for many of them “the local marketplace and the global market are at some level the same” (Bohlman); then it is probably time (again) to think to what extent, “on the level of scholarship – within cultural studies, subcultural theory, ethnic studies, and ethnomusicology – the music [still] features within grids of distinction and political position clearly indebted to older discourses in folkloristics, anthropology and Romantic Kulturkritik” (Middleton). In the light of this, how does ethnomusicology consider new vernacular and post-vernacular musics? Is the difference between folk and popular still valuable, or even necessary? It is probably  time (again) to question the extent to which ethnomusicological theory is now responding to the always changing process of the “stratification of [musical] codes, each one in a state of constant change and adaptation, each one recognized and owned by several communities (or sub-communities) with different degrees of competence, and sometimes in conflict with each other” (Fabbri).

There will be papers and panels on the following themes: 

- Ethnomusicological theories and processes of categorization
- Folk music and popular music revisited: distinctions, overlaps and convergences
- Ethnomusicology of new vernacular and post-vernacular musics
- Folk music performance on the contemporary stage
- Tradition and new authenticities
- ‘World Music’, global and local
- Different histories of/in ethnomusicology
- Genre and/or style studies

Keynote speakers

Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco

The politics of music categorization: Discourses, performance and research

Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco is Professor of Ethnomusicology and Director of the Instituto de Etnomusicologia at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Portugal). She has carried out field research in Egypt, Portugal and Oman, resulting in publications on: cultural politics, revival, identity, music media, modernity, and transculturation. Recent publications include: Voix du Portugal, (Cité de la Musique/Actes Sud, 1997);Vozes do Povo: A Folclorização em Portugal (editor and co-author with Jorge Freitas Branco, Celta Editora, 2003); “Politics and Aesthetics of Diaphonic Singing in Southern Europe”, [in Ardian Ahmedaja (ed.), European Voices: Polyphonic Singing in the Balkans and the Mediterranean, The University of Music and the Performing Arts, forthcoming]; (as editor), Enciclopédia da Música em Portugal no Século XX (3 volumes, Círculo de Leitores, forthcoming).

Philip V. Bohlman

Liebestod: Music's vernacular moment between eschatology and soteriology

Philip V. Bohlman is the Mary Werkman Professor of the Humanities and of Music, and Chair of Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago. His interests cover a broad range: music and modernity, folk and popular music in North America and Europe, Jewish music, music of the Middle East and South Asia, music and religion, and music at the encounter with racism and colonialism. A pianist, he is also the Artistic Director of the “New Budapest Orpheum Society”, a Jewish cabaret ensemble in Chicago. He has written and published extensively, and among his most recent publications are World Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2002), The Music of European Nationalism (ABC-CLIO, 2004), “Jüdische Musik” - eine mitteleuropäische Geistesgeschichte (Böhlau, 2005), and Jewish Music and Modernity (AMS Studies in Music, forthcoming). The New Budapest Orpheum Society has released a double-CD, Dancing on the Edge of the Volcano (Cedille Records, 2002). Current projects include books on music drama in the Holocaust and a translation of Johann Gottfried Herder's writings on music and nationalism. Philip Bohlman was awarded the Edward Dent Medal by the Royal Music Association in 1997 and the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin in 2003. In 2006-2007 he held the Royal Holloway-British Library Lectures in Musicology.

Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco  > Session 7
Philip V. Bohlman  > Sessions 6, 13

Programme

Wednesday 18 April
ICMuS

10:00	onwards  > Registration  > Music Common Room

12:30	Welcome  > Ian Biddle, Head of ICMuS  > Robert Boyle Lecture Theatre

13:00	Lunch  > Recital Room

14:00	Session 1A  > Processes of musical change in the Iberian Peninsula
	Lecture Room 2  > Chair: Ian Biddle
Susana Sardo & Jorge Castro Ribeiro
Village with Traditions: Searching, learning and training for authenticity in contemporary Portugal
Roshan Samtani 
Contemporary flamenco guitar performance: A case study in musical change
Francisco Bethencourt-Llobet
	Contemporary flamenco: Lost in translation between folk and popular music

	Session 1B  > ‘Folk’ music performance on the contemporary stage
	CETL Seminar Room  > Chair: Vic Gammon
	Pete Wilby
	Regulating the amateur: traditional music and cultural control
	Simon Keegan-Phipps
	The collision of worlds in Hall 2: ‘Arlo’ by Tom Oakes

15:30	Tea/coffee  > Recital Room

16:00	Session 2A  > Different histories
	Lecture Room 2  > Chair: Richard Elliott
Kristin McGee
Swinging the classics, Hazel Scott and Hollywood’s racial-musical matrix
Christian Spencer Espinoza
Ubiquitous, representative, national and transgressive: The folk-popular zamacueca in Chile in the middle XIXth century
Eoghan Neff
	Banish Misfortune: Edward Cronin and post-famine fiddling of Ireland

	Session 2B  > Processes of musical change in Scotland
CETL Seminar Room  > Chair: Ian Russell
Cheryl A. Tobler
Musical codes in Scottish Traveller ballads: Maintenance and survival of a musical tradition
Frances Wilkins
Let the Lower Lights be Burning: The development of gospel singing in the fishing communities of North-East Scotland
Simon McKerrell
	Modern Scottish bands (1970-1990): ‘Cash as authenticity’

17:30	Tea/Coffee  > Recital Room

Thursday 19 April
ICMuS

09:00	Session 3A  > Devotional musics and new authenticities
	Lecture Room 2  > Chair: Tony Langlois
	Jaime Jones
	Making little great: The musical mobility of an Indian devotional
	vernacular
	Hwee-San Tan
	Sounds of the Human World: The new authentic sounds of global Buddhist
	liturgy?

	Session 3B  > Global and local world musics
CETL Seminar Room  > Chair: Goffredo Plastino
Britta Sweers
The different layers of global perception: World music and the music of the Baltics and Tatarstan
Richard Elliott
Tudo isto ainda é fado? Fado as local and global practice

10:30	Tea/Coffee  > Recital Room

11:00	Session 4A  > Folk/Pop: some distinctions, overlaps and convergences
Lecture Room 2  > Chair: Hwee-San Tan
Jochen Eisentraut
Folk in time, pop in space: Individualisation and notions of vernacular authenticity
Irena Miholić
Where does folk music end and popular begin? Issues from field research in Croatia
Héctor Fouce & José Antonio González Serena
The construction of Spanish popular music: Tradition, modernity and globalization

	Session 4B  > Folk music, popular music and identities in the Mediterranean
CETL Seminar Room  > Chair: Britta Sweers
Shayna Silverstein
“New wave” dabke: Popular music and media in Lebanon and Syria
Nicoletta Demetriou
‘Traditionalists’ vs. ‘modernists’: Folk music performers in contemporary Cyprus
Toni Langlois & Desi Wilkinson
The musical negotiation of identities in Algeria

13:00	Lunch  > Recital Room

14:00	Session 5A  > New vernacular / post-vernacular musics (1)
Lecture Room 2  > Chair: Simon Keegan-Phipps
Natalie Kirschstein
The Uruguayan murga as “the voice of the people”: Song, metaphor and the language of political agency
Aspasia Theodosiou
“Initiatives with a difference”: Music festivals, ‘authenticity’ and plasticity on the Greek-Albanian border
	Sílvia Martínez Garcia
	Bollywood music experiences and peripheral diasporas

	Session 5B  > New vernacular / post-vernacular musics (2)
CETL Seminar Room  > Chair: Desi Wilkinson
Ian Russell
Between the sacred and the secular: Vernacular performance in North- East Scottish coastal communities
Marie Jorritsma
Syncretic authenticities:  The sonic spaces of sacred song in Graaff-Reinet, South Africa
Shzr Ee Tan
Singing the other exotic: Taiwanese aborigines ‘take’ China, Japan and America

15:30	Tea/Coffee  > Recital Room

16:00	Session 6  > English Folk Songs: Some Conclusions: 100 years of Cecil Sharp's ideas and influence
Robert Boyle Lecture Theatre  > Chair: Vic Gammon
	with:
	Philip V. Bohlman
	Vic Gammon
	Ian Russell

17:30	Tea/Coffee  > Recital Room

18:00	Session 7  > Keynote Address
	King’s Hall  > Chair: Goffredo Plastino
	Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco
	The politics of music categorization: Discourses, performance and research

19:30	Dinner > Recital Room

20:30	Concert > Folk music from these Islands 〜 and beyond
	Students of the Folk and Traditional Music degree course, with Vic Gammon, Sandra Kerr and Desi Wilkinson
King’s Hall

Friday 20 April
Northern Rock Foundation Hall
The Sage Gateshead

09:30	Session 8  > Rock, authenticities, identities
Chair: Franco Fabbri
Fabian Holt
Polarized vernaculars: Anti-fascist rock concerts in contemporary Germany
Pete Dale
Punk as folk: The problem of subjectivity in the idealised realm of collective practice
Laudan Nooshin
	“We have to become universal”: Internationalist discourses and language choice in contemporary Iranian rock music

11:00	Tea/Coffee

11:30	Session 9  > Folk songs, world music and genre issues
Chair: Laudan Nooshin
David W. Hughes
“There are no real folk songs anymore”: Japanese folk song from village to stage to the world
David Clarke
Late Junction: World music, cultural pluralism, and genre drift

13:00	Lunch

14:00	Screening
SLAM. Algerian Andalous music in performance
	(by Tony Langlois, 2007, 15', col.)

14:30	Session 10  > Revisiting the folk
Chair: Caroline Bithell
Elizabeth Travassos
Vocal styles and social processes
John Morgan O’Connell
Old West, new East: Europe in ethnomusicology and ethnomusicology in Europe
Claire Levy
	(Neo)Folk on club stage: Towards a post-ethnic perspective?

16:00	Tea/Coffee

16:30	Session 11  > Round table: Between folk and popular
Chair: Goffredo Plastino
	Franco Fabbri
	The king is naked: The musicological unified field and its articulation
	Bernard Lortat-Jacob
	What constitutes a rich field of study for ethnomusicology?
	Richard Middleton
	Back to the Future: Folk, People, (Who)Man
	Suzel Ana Reily
	Folk music, art music, popular music: What do these categories mean today?

Saturday 21 April
ICMuS

	NEW PROGRAMME

09:00	Session 12A  > Ethnomusicology, traditions and education
	Lecture Room 2  > Chair: John Morgan O’ Connnell
Carolyn Landau
The responsibility and potential of ethnomusicology sound archives: Understanding and interacting with Moroccan communities in London
Anthony McCann
Questioning educational strategies: Challenges of radical pedagogy in discussions about ‘Irish traditional music’
Simone Krüger
	Listening to ethnomusicology: Student experiences of tradition and authenticity

	Session 12B  > ‘Traditions’ and changes
	CETL Seminar Room  > Chair: Claire Levy
Shino Arisawa
Changes within ‘tradition’: The case of Japanese jiuta-sôkyoku
Kathleen J. Noss Van Buren
	Tradition, change, and multiplicity in contemporary musical life in Nairobi, Kenya
Ruth Davis
Pop music or people’s music? Changing identities and forgotten histories in the Tunisian canon

	Session 12C  > Different histories
	Robert Boyle Lecture Theatre  > Chair: Richard Elliott
Kristin McGee
Swinging the classics, Hazel Scott and Hollywood’s racial-musical matrix
Christian Spencer Espinoza
Ubiquitous, representative, national and transgressive: The folk-popular zamacueca in Chile in the middle XIXth century
Eoghan Neff
	Banish Misfortune: Edward Cronin and post-famine fiddling of Ireland

10:30	Tea/Coffee > Recital Room

11:00	BFE AMG
Robert Boyle Lecture Theatre  > Chair: Tina K. Ramnarine

12:10	Closing remarks > King’s Hall

12:15	Session 13  > Keynote Address
King’s Hall  > Chair: Goffredo Plastino
	Philip V. Bohlman
	Liebestod: Music’s vernacular moment between eschatology and
	soteriology

13:30	Lunch > Recital Room

Round table texts

We have invited Franco Fabbri, Bernard Lortat-Jacob, Richard Middleton and Suzel Ana Reily to write a text on the main theme of the conference: the texts will be discussed during the round table on April 20 (Session 11). Here you can read them.

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Franco Fabbri
Università di Torino

The king is naked: The musicological unified field and its articulation

All music is folk music, all categories are folk categories. Leastways, one might add, I never heard of no horse making them. Categories, I mean. Zoömusicologists will probably find the famous statement by Louis Armstrong (or was it Big Bill Broonzy?) definitely anthropocentric, and neuroscientists may feel the same about my addition (or parody) about categories. But whatever we think about the horse’s mind, we have to acknowledge that categorizing is a human activity grounded in our bodies, in our perception of  – and relation with – our environment, including other humans, and in our memory of past experiences and projection towards the future. In short, categories are based on our bodily experience, on our relation with the community we live in, its history, its politics, its ideology. Music types, or genres, make no exception. In the West there has been in the last hundred years (and currently is) a wide consensus about the division of music (let’s forget for a minute what this word means) into three main kinds: ‘art music’, ‘folk music’, ‘popular music’. The fact that this taxonomy is widely accepted doesn’t mean that it really makes sense, even for those who seem to believe in it. First, even in the West, different names are used for the three categories in different languages, and to some respect linguistic differences account for taxonomic discrepancies (think of the usage of ‘música popular’, ‘musica popolare’ or ‘musique populaire’ in neo-latin languages). Second, even in the same language the three categories have different names, depending on the community and its ideology (‘art’, or ‘classical’, or ‘serious’ music? ‘Folk’ music or ‘traditional’ music?). Third, the taxonomy doesn’t seem to include all musics that belong to the experience of the heterogeneous community that seems to accept it. Is jazz ‘art’ music, ‘folk’ music or ‘popular’ music? Or is some jazz ‘art’, and some ‘pop’? Is blues ‘folk’? Are Indian or Arab classical musics ‘classical’, or ‘traditional’? What about ‘unpopular popular music’? What about ‘music without definitions and boundaries’ (or ‘musiques actuelles’), for which dozens of festivals exists in Europe and North America, often presenting the same musicians? This multiplicity, with its contradictions, is a gold mine for scholars willing to understand the material, social, political, ideological, historical conditions under which such taxonomies are created. Coarser (like the one we are now discussing) or finer taxonomies (like those at the base of genres and subgenres, or even at the level of a single artist’s repertoire) are equally interesting, though offering different perspectives.

But one thing is striking me. With the notable exception of a few recent conferences and round tables (including this one), and of individual essays, scholars do not seem to be interested in a critique of the dominating coarser taxonomy: not, at least, to the extent that this critique may undermine the foundations of the existing musicological disciplines, which are deeply related to that taxonomy.
It’s comprehensible, as academic power (on which the lives of individual scholars depend) is rooted in disciplinary divisions. If ethnomusicology is more a matter of method than of repertoire, why not study (recalling Blacking) the rituals of an operatic première, or the microsocial interactions in a symphony orchestra, or the role of oral transmission in ‘art’ music? Or Beethoven’s improvisations? Or Charlie Parker’s improvisations? Or the repertoires of ‘beach guitarists’? But would such an ethnomusicologist, or music anthropologist, make an academic career with similar interests, so different from the discipline’s traditional mainstream (the ambiguity of the adjective is intended)?
And would a popular music scholar acquire visibility in his or her own field (popular music studies) making research on the download of ‘classical’ music mp3 files, and discussing the ways the community of dowloaders copes with the pop-oriented tag structure currently in use? Or commenting how ‘serious’ music is broadcast on radio and tv? And would such research give him or her access to the community of historical or analytic musicologists?

I don’t need to complete the picture, for the sake of balance or political correctness, with similar examples about musicologists tout court. They are the majority, they have the academic power, most of them speak about universals and are convinced they are the people who determine which universals exist. The late nineteenth century canon removed improvisation from the practice (and study) of  ‘art’ music, so improvisation simply doesn’t exist, even if there are lots of documents (textual and musical) available for research. To the extent that repertoires other than the canon exist in written form, they can be studied: again, there aren’t great career expectations for young musicologists studying Frank Zappa’s scores (and if you want to be really marginal, just deal with operetta, zarzuela or musical comedy). So, even fundamental aspects of the ‘classical’ repertoire (just think of the role of improvisation in Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt) are not covered to pay respect to the existing taxonomy.

Of course we all know this: the king is naked. So, pretending not to see him, most of us prefer to behave schizophrenically. With one mind, we acknowledge that the boundaries of our disciplines are fuzzy, that walls are crumbling (there is even some theoretical evidence that they cannot exist!); with the other mind, we keep at safe distance from those non-existing walls. You never know: we might be injured by the crumbling!

As a few readers/listeners know, in my writings about genres and music categories I have always maintained that I was not interested in creating a new, ‘scientific’ taxonomy: the main purpose of my study has been to understand music taxonomies ‘as they are’, to see how communities organize their musical universe, and how the way it is articulated varies with the passing of time, according to the internal dialectics of communities and with changes in material and cultural conditions. I have been interested in music categories precisely as ‘folk categories’, even if some categories (or some of their aspects) may not be structured as folk categories proper (just think of genre rules articulated in laws or in aesthetic manifestoes). However, recent debates about disciplinary boundaries and their fuzziness (and the related schizophrenic attitude I described above) make me think that one possible solution – and maybe the only one – to the problems related with the historical division into three main ‘kinds of music’, and thus of music studies into three disciplines, is simply to throw it away.

My suggestion is, that it should be substituted with a much finer taxonomy of music facts or events (‘activities with or around sounds’, according to Gino Stefani: see also my definition of ‘genre’ in “A Theory of Music Genres: Two Applications”, http://www.tagg.org/others/ffabbri81a.html), covering (theoretically, and possibly) all music events on the planet. Each music event should be identifiable by a set of properties, and events with common properties could be associated into types. Musicology should be the discipline studying any of such events, though it is reasonable to assume that it should then be divided into sub-disciplines, studying certain types of events, or events that can be approached according to a specific method. So we wouldn’t throw away the baby of existing disciplines with the bath water of contradictory historical taxonomies, but we would probably discover how much of the existing musical universe was uncovered by those taxonomies/disciplines.

Of course, I’m talking about a ‘scientific’ taxonomy, based on the traditional/historical structure of property-based taxa, quite different from the way types and categories are built by the human mind in everyday life. Personally, I’m quite convinced that cognitive linguists are right when they describe the ways categories are created in our bodies and minds: I’m a devout reader of Mark Johnson’s and George Lakoff’s essays, I know that in real life we do not think of categories as slots where to put objects according to sets of properties. However, a profound understanding of how categorizing works in our minds doesn’t prohibit creating property-based taxonomies for specific purposes. The taxa of biology are still very useful in scientific study, and in actions to preserve our planet’s biodiversity, even if we have discovered that when we scream at the view of a possibly offending ‘insect’ we are not thinking in terms of arthropods and the distinct subordinate categories of insects and arachnids, but of the folk category of ‘insects’ (that apparently includes spiders).

What I envision is a (multidimensional, of course) layer of music types, that could be mapped to a separate entity, that is, the existing articulation of ‘folk categories’ or (in my terms) the way the musical universe is articulated by communities into genres. I don’t pretend that such a taxonomy (the multidimensional layer of music types) be devoid of ideology: but I believe that it would be a giant step forward to clarify and minimize the impact of ideology on disciplinary definitions.
I also think that the job can’t be accomplished by an individual, or even by a restricted group: this is a kind of genome project (nothing, or very little to do with the music enterprise with the same name) that can only be developed with the aid of the whole musicological community. Previous endeavours of creating ‘universal’ music taxonomies (see for example Charles Seeger’s “Toward a Unitary Field Theory for Musicology”, in Selected Reports, Volume 1, No. 3, Los Angeles: University of California, 1970) collapsed because of individual inclinations and tastes.

It may turn out to be a huge useless work. Or, as soon as the basic network of properties and types is laid down, we may discover that many new possibilities are open, and we may wonder how we could make without it. Yes, as Richard Middleton says, we only have to lose our (disciplinary) chains.

<  >

Bernard Lortat-Jacob
CNRS, Paris

What constitutes a rich field of study for ethnomusicology?

The question, which I ask, does not concern the limits/borderlines between what is viewed as ‘Traditional’ and what is called ‘Folklore’. Playing with such definitions does not really interest me. I think it more important to turn my attention to ‘the musical object for ethnomusicologists’. This has already been widely debated, but what I want to do here is to shed some new light on this debate.
The object of the study of ethnomusicology is “all the musics of the world”; it has often been said that ethnomusicology is more about method than object.
 
However, is it not illusory to aspire to study all the musics played by million of inhabitants living on the planet, who, in different ways, share in the happiness of performing music? Musics which moreover are constantly changing? A whole army of ethnomusicologists – if one could raise one – would have no chance of accomplishing this task. Hence the idea I am putting forward here: there now is an imperative to make choices and I would like to discuss these choices with you here. 
Some of you may think that the question asked above is a little ‘politically incorrect’. In fact I am not sure that this debate can take place peacefully on the other side of the Atlantic. But it’s for this very reason that I’m interested in such a question. A question too rarely asked, and often considered when it’s already too late. 
I emphasise, however, that I do not wish my position to be exaggerated. I do not want to be labelled as someone who is stating that “this musical culture is good and it must be studied” or conversely that “ this one is worth nothing, don’t go there!”.
The question I ask concerns scientific strategy. What should we study? How do we make choices? According to what criteria can we pragmatically orientate our choices? In other words: What constitutes a rich field of study for ethnomusicology?
The question is of course scientific but it is also practical: it is of interest to both academics and very young researchers – I meet them every year – who have to work on how to increase our knowledge in ethnomusicology. So, what shall we do and how shall we do it?

The question is also up to date. Should we study, as it has been suggested (Molino 2006), the music that housewives listen to in their kitchen? Or the whistling of painters while at work? This can be done as long as a cognitive approach is taken but, from the ethnomusicologist’s point of view,  these suggestions are not very interesting. 
Of course, that said, the responses which I bring to the table here reflect my own experiences  – and therefore my own choices. By now, I am quite familiar with three or four fields, which have ‘grown inside me’ during the last years of my research activities. At a certain time during my research (40 years already!!), I had to ‘choose’ between them. If these choices have been fruitful I owe it less to my own talent than to the people who guided me and trained my ears: I refer here to the rural, Mediterranean societies which welcomed me with great generosity. To those with whom I conceived and created some knowledge – the results have long since been published.
In order to define what I have identified as les beaux terrains (a rich field) - and I wish to apologize again for the reductive effect of this expression - I will talk about four criteria.

1. Ancestral cultures

I purposely do not use the term ‘traditional’: I consider this an overused term which has led to abuses - we are reminded of this issue by Pascal Boyer in Barricades mystérieuses. The concept of ‘tradition’ was first linked to the idea of the ‘action of transmitting’ (as is shown by the suffix –tion) but has now more or less become synonymous with ‘heritage’. This notion excludes the idea of action, as heritage is lifeless. For this reason ‘traditional’ music, when it exists, does not interest me. It interests me even less when it is ‘patrimonalised’ (cf. concept of patrimonalisation). 
To be precise the ‘ancestral cultures’ which have guided my work, do not necessarily practice the cult of the ancestors. Let’s say however that they enter into a dialogue with ancestors. I would have never thought of studying cultures that do not pay respect to their dead, who do not mourn. Mourning, as we all know, is, in appearance only, a nuisance for the ethnomusicologist. When a singer is mourning… he stops singing (this also, but to a lesser extent, is true of the players, professional or semi-professional). The ethnomusicologist arrives and has to put his tape recorder away. Everywhere I have been it has been like that (among the Berbers in Morocco, the Touaregs, Sardinians, Romanians…).
So it seems that mourning is a handicap for the researcher – it represents an obstacle – but this handicap cannot be avoided and is absolutely necessary: death, and respect towards it, is an essential part of cultural life. This is an anthropological rule: rejecting or minimising the respect paid to death is the same as threatening life itself; showing respect towards death is a strong indicator of a culture’s vitality. 

2. Noi cultures

What does this expression mean? In Sardinia, the pronoun Nois (Noi, in Italian) is the one, which is most often used. Every conversation, whether it is about fishing, olives, wine, sense of honour, rules of hospitality - and music of course – is always interspaced with the pronoun noi. This noi is emphasised, it always starts a sentence. Some would talk of a “Sardinian identity”. Let us say, more simply, that in Sardinia people know who they are.
Of course this noi has a variable dimension. It is the Noi, Sardi (“Us , Sardinians”) when one is in a foreign country, but it can also be the Noi ‘barbaricino’ which defines a micro regional entity within Sardinia. Or it can also be the Noi between members of a brotherhood in a village such as Castelsardo - Noi here concerns only about a hundred people; the pronoun can be attributed to an even smaller number of people (a greffa, a group of friends meeting for one or several evenings). 
What matters here is to understand that , particularly in Sardinia, the Noi is only important as far as it is a term which is in opposition to another. It can only exist in relation to a sort of ‘non-noi’ who can be a stranger or more importantly a rival. Collective Sardinian thinking is not traditional. It is first and foremost ‘contradictional’. People always think of themselves in dual terms.
Therefore a group of dancers, singers, members of a brotherhood, etc., by its birth, brings about the birth of a rival group. Sardinian society always creates divisions (mitoses). Friendly rivalries, challenges, conflicts whether real or not, and even vendetta with homicide, are an integral part of this very fascinating society and give it dynamism.
This Noi is fundamentally political (i.e.: Maoism or Troskysm often refer to the Noi - Noi, comrades - a Noi which had disastrous consequences in history!).
But the Sardinian Noi is more democratic, it implies a copy of oneself (mitosis: a division) which in order to affirm itself, demands constant negotiation. This Noi exists through an internal fracture – like a mitosis -, it generates constant actions 1) within what I would call ‘mitosic cells’ (since one always thinks of oneself as in two parts always really or virtually sectioned) and 2) towards the exterior, the other, the one who is not oneself - in other words: the ‘stranger’.
The Noi has therefore two realities: ‘inclusive’ (us, we are together even if it takes two of us to form a single unit); ‘exclusive’ (you, the others: “try to copy us”). And this Noi has to be always affirmed, proclaimed as if to convince oneself that it exists.
This particular social energy feeds into music, or rather the musics, of Sardinia (tenore, songs with guitar accompaniment, dance music, polyphonic choir, etc.). It exists in all the challenges contained in Sardinian society; such as horse races, rituals of all sorts, fighting games, morra, rounds of drinks in bars, etc.
Of course there are other micro-sociological factors, which generate social dynamism, but in Sardinia, these are particularly efficient, therefore Sardinia is ‘a rich field’ of studies for ethnomusicologists.

3. Uncomfortable cultures

I am not talking here about the uncomfortable situations in which the ethnomusicologist can find himself (nights without sleep, too much alcohol - which are an integral part of musical practice in northern Mediterranean countries as they are in most parts of the world). I am not talking about the taste for danger, for example, in Albania where wearing a seat belt in a car shows a lack of social skills and may cause offence to the driver!
I want to talk about a more fundamental issue, that of ‘discomfort’ so familiar to small rural Mediterranean societies and which puts them miles away from those timorous traditional and conservative societies that folklorists have imagined – probably in their own image.
Aside from work, masculinity is, organically, always in conflict with family life. Everything to do with leisure (music, having a few drinks in a bar) is not compatible with a western bourgeois way of life. However, all leisure activities (it. divertimento) represent first and foremost an intense social exercise. They create or re-create links. So that, contrary to appearances, it is a commitment to be in cumpania bedda (“in good company”) and to comment on the world with friends. It is difficult to give the impression that you are doing nothing when in fact everything is happening in this nothing. 
To live in this kind of culture means that in fact one must reject all forms of individualism, that could consist, for instance, in renouncing to see a friend in hospital, or also to enjoy a selfish pleasure, or even to abandon the marginal satisfaction of watching television (except football which has a specific status). The most important is to remain oneself, that is to say, to be always moved by the Noi, to which I referred earlier on.

4. Voracious cultures

We often refer to ‘living cultures’, but what does this mean? As opposed to what? Are all cultures not alive? 
‘Voracious culture’ is a lot clearer and refers to predators and big open spaces. The best example of a voracious culture is Western elitist culture, which has an extraordinary capacity to swallow everything up, in particular as far as the musics of the world are concerned. It loots them and folds them up to the size of its wallet. But this predatory capacity is not only typical of Western modern societies. Others, if not all, tend to see themselves as hegemonic and - whether they want it or not - engage in predatory in-fighting, similar to these fights that one can see on BBC wildlife programs.
Every heron knows that it can swallow a fish depending on its size, not because of its appetite but according to the chances it has of swallowing it up in one gulp. If the carp weighs more than 350 grams, the heron will not be able to swallow it up and is in danger of choking.
Musics in contact are full of carp and heron stories, and though in ethnomusicology we like to say that all musics can be assimilated and hybridised, we are well aware that many carps have killed herons and that musical cultures run the risk of disappearing by being swallowed up. As in natural selection, the ones that survive are the herons with a large throat and a supple neck. And in my opinion, these musics offer the best field of study.

This reference to a certain musical ‘vitalism’ does not solve all the problems of our field, which suffer from a trauma : not really global warming, but a kind of freezing of local traditions and a loss of self confidence. But that is another story.  

The end of this presentation will consist of a few examples from different societies (South America, Martinique, High Atlas, Sardinia, Albania, etc.). The conclusion will offer an opportunity for discussion. 

Translation: Geneviève  and Desi Wilkinson

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Richard Middleton
Newcastle University

Back to the Future: Folk, People, (Who)Man

Volk heisst nicht der Pöbel auf den Gassen, der singt und dichtet niemals, sondern schreit und verstümmelt. (“The people are not the mob of the streets, who never sing or compose, but shriek and mutilate.” – J.G. Herder)

The issue for discussion needs to be located first in a historical and cultural specificity, and Herder’s fierce distinction is a convenient marker of that place. The project of ethnomusicology founds itself on an ambiguity in Enlightenment anthropology, which is at the same time a political wager. Herder’s innocence is irrecoverable. But that loss is itself potent. We can hope to uncover the implicit conditions of a discursive regime that conditions, still, the terms of scholarly trade – including its utopian afterglow.

What object motivates Herder’s distinction? I would say, commodity. But of course its role has become more complex and more pervasive than in his world. The Volk/Pöbel as a whole buy and sell their own songs, chase their own tail, prostitute their own tale, consume themselves. This has long since become so taken for granted as to be invisible; commodity has the status of what, in the Hegelian language given renewed currency by Jameson and Žižek, we can call a ‘vanishing mediator’. The wheels, then, have long since come off the people’s wagon. To the extent that this regime has been spread worldwide, what started as specific has become, at least as tendency, universal. And to the extent that ethnomusicology is complicit in this process – scholarly reification the flip side of commodity fetishism – it has been a colonising force in a far deeper sense even than postcolonial critique has realised. The branding of ‘world music’, in scholarship as much as in the music industry, seals the deal.

Ethnomusicology, like musicology tout court, is, as Bohlman has told us, unavoidably a ‘political act’. It should act, then. It is, we might say, called to act; its gestures should be given, and give, voice. But to whose call will it respond? What manner of body politic will it call into being? Is it not more than time for shrieks and mutilations?

Why so? And why does Herder’s language point towards beastliness – for us, unavoidably, towards the sounds of the torture-chamber, concentration camp, farm factory, slaughter-house: industrialised meat? The question returns us to specificity, here to the anthropological project as such within which Herder finds his place. The quest of what has been called the ‘anthropological machine’ (see e.g. Giorgio Agamben’s The Open, 2004) is for the true nature of man – his species-essence, as the young Marx would call it. John Blacking’s How Musical Is Man? is the classic ethnomusicological gesture in this tradition (and it is worth adding that the ‘musicological machine’, towards which Herder also points, runs parallel to its anthropological analogue; the moral economy of ethnomusicology draws on both). But what if the Neanderthals also sang, as Stephen Mithen argues (The Singing Neanderthals, 2005)? Not to mention the other hominids. What about the great apes, whales, frogs, birds – and sirens, mermaids, angels and other mixed creatures? The search for origins is always a search for the self. The machine always ends up dissecting not so much its exotic historical and cultural object as its subject – modern man. The Lacanian ‘object voice’ – A Voice and Nothing More, as Mladen Dolar (2006) puts it, voice as such; at the limit, the shriek stuck in the throat, language mutilated beyond meaning – registers the impossible-real knowledge of the internal fractures that form this creature.

In a moment that, to many, feels post-historical, it is not difficult to identify (even, for many, to celebrate) the death of the Folk, of the People, of Man himself. But the fractures cleaving the human animal and thus traversing the field of natural philosophy animate also the social formation of the human family – the hierarchies of race, gender, class and sexuality; in a society structured in dominance ‘nature’ is always an ambivalent value, and so long as the nature of the Low, nature as low, the low as apparently natural, continue to shape these hierarchies, so long will the vernacular – the verna, enslaved but also native born – insist that there is history, still, to be lived, struggle to be waged. ‘Perhaps the body of the anthropophorous animal (the body of the slave) is the unresolved remnant that idealism leaves as an inheritance to thought (Agamben) – a disjunction marked, above all, by the manoeuvres of embodied and disembodied voice, put at issue more than ever by the machinery of technological mediation; can the object speak, sing, think? Yes: the shriek I hear is that of its protest at the mutilation of this remnant – which at the same time references a self-mutilation by the Low’s oppressive other.

The actors in this drama, within and without – within the self, within the social – return us one last time to the concrete: for in the present moment, with the ever more intense compression of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ – for which ‘world music’ can stand as an exemplary sign – the political stakes for the subject anthropos are not separable from the fate of creation itself. The disciplinary path might run from ethnomusicology, through a ‘demo-musicology’, to – what? A science of sounding bodies? What would need to be given up to attain this goal? Chains, certainly (to adopt Marx and Engels’s formulation), here disciplinary chains (at least). But we must look beyond the purview available to nineteenth-century revolutionaries. The world, world music too, is not there to be won, for, like the Low as such, it is tired of the theatre of ownership. The price to be paid, then, lies close to home, and the fetters are those of the self – self-possession.

“Men as a species completed their evolution thousands of years ago; but humanity as a species is just beginning its.” (Walter Benjamin)

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Suzel Ana Reily
Queen’s University Belfast

Folk music, art music, popular music: What do these categories mean today?

Not so long ago music research seemed to be neatly divided amongst three main fields: historical musicology, that focused primarily upon western art music; ethnomusicology, that dealt with the traditional musics of the world; and popular music studies, that investigated musical styles produced and promoted by the music industry. Today, however, the boundaries dividing these fields have become progressively more fluid, such that the arguments for abolishing them altogether are stronger than ever. If what distinguished these spheres in the past were the musical repertoires they focused upon, what is now leading to their unification is a common concern with musical processes and the ways people conceptualise and use music in their daily lives. Whilst certain processes may have been linked primarily to either art, popular, or folk music, today these specificities appeared to be disappearing. ‘Folk music’ can be heard on the stage, recorded, and sold as a commodity, thus mobilizing the music industry; ‘popular music’ hits may be sung communally around a campfire to the accompaniment of an acoustic guitar in a manner reminiscent to ‘folk music’; major stars of the ‘art music’ world now perform in ways that mimic the stars of pop or rock, commanding equally high fees. In light of this, can we still distinguish between ‘folk music’, ‘popular music’ and indeed ‘art music’? If these classifications are no longer valid, what other ways might there be of understanding contemporary musical universes and the dynamic forces through which they are articulated?

Looking Back

To approach these issues it could be useful to begin by looking at how the distinctions between art, popular and folk music came to crystallise as they did, reminding ourselves of the intellectual legacy from which they emerged.
The concept of the ‘folk’ surfaced with the raise in nationalist sentiments in the late 18th century, and it gained momentum throughout the 19th century. One of the major intellectuals to develop a discourse linking ‘the folk’ to ‘the nation’ was Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803). As a consequence of the Reformation, Counter Reformation, and the Thirty Years War, by the early 18th century, Germany had become fragmented into around 1800 district courts with only tenuous links to one another. In an effort to establish a common cultural terrain capable of conferring some unity upon the region, Herder led a movement to re-awaken the lost legacy of the ‘nation’. He contended that the Germanic could only be recovered through the investigation of the expressive forms – especially the poetic forms – that still survived amongst those who embodied the ‘national soul’: that is, ‘the folk’, or the peasantry. He placed peasants in this role because he perceived their behaviour and their expressive forms to display an ‘emotional’ (or irrational?) dimension, in a marked opposition to those of the privileged, aristocratic classes; this had occurred because, living – as they did – in isolation from the developments of ‘civilization’, the peasantry had not been contaminated by the ‘rational’ values of the Enlightenment, as had the elites. It was amongst the peasantry, therefore, that the unique historical and ecological legacy of Germany had been retained.
One of Herder’s primary concerns was the disappearance of the German language amongst the elites, who were progressively turning to French. Only if Germans could be once again united by one language and confident in their sense of a common heritage could the country re-establish its place in relation to the rest of Europe. To convince the elites of the value of the German language Herder aimed to re-present it to them by demonstrating its aesthetic potential. Goethe, one of Herder’s most successful followers, led the way in showing a sceptical elite how a great German legacy could be recovered. This model of nation-building was followed by other artists in a wide range of aesthetic fields, both in Germany and the rest of Europe as well many other parts of the world. Indeed, Herder’s project came to acquire global dimensions.
In effect, Herder’s model inspired artist to draw upon the (local) national heritage held by ‘the folk’, and to reshape it to generate a national art. In other words, the local, irrational motifs of ‘the folk’ were to be transformed by the artist according to universal (rational) aesthetic principles. However, if, on one hand, the ‘irrationality’ of the expressive forms of ‘the folk’ constituted the elements that distinguished one nation from other nations, they also distinguished the peasants – all peasants – from (all) the elites, regardless of nationality. Thus, the very concept of ‘art’ could only emerge in contra-distinction to another body of expressive forms, ‘folklore’, the one of universal validity, the other of purely local relevance and intelligibility. From this opposition one of the enduring tenets distinguishing art music and other forms of ‘high art’ from folk music (and folklore generally) would evolve: art constituted that which was generated for its own sake, and was thus to be contemplated solely for its aesthetic qualities; the expressive forms of the folk, on the other hand, would always be subordinated to some immediate function, aesthetics being only of secondary concern. Folklore, therefore, could never be more than a lesser form of art, just as its creators were perceived as cultural inferiors and under-civilized.
As for the category popular music, it emerged toward the late 19th century as a way of identifying the various musical forms taking shape in urban centres. These styles seemed to fall somewhere between folk and art music, drawing in equal measure from both: more cosmopolitan than folk music, but lacking the aesthetic sophistication of art music. As urban populations grew, these styles became progressively more visible, and with the emergence of the recording technology and the radio, popular music became closely associated with the music industry. Indeed, it was its very construction as ‘commodity’ that gave popular music a negative aura. Whilst the value of folk music could be seen to reside in its ‘authenticity’, that of art music in its detachment for any commitments other than its own integrity, popular music had to be content with vulgarity if it was to gain any headway in the market.
These categories – it is worth remembering – developed in western Europe in relation to the ways in which the European musical and artistic spheres were perceived by the intelligentsia. However, there have been radical global changes that have transformed the social world and redefined economic relations throughout the region. Without doubt, in Europe the peasantry has all but disappeared; indeed, even the distinction between the rural and the urban has become increasingly meaningless, given the ease of transport and the accessibility of technological advances even in the most remote of areas. The power of the aristocracy and the oligarchy has been progressively eroded, as industry and business based in urban centres have become the primary sources of wealth. Access to education and the cost of labour have provided unprecedented opportunities for social ascent amongst rural agricultural and urban working classes, radically altering the general standard of living of the population  Thus, the clear class differences that promoted marked forms of cultural segregation have been reduced, and access to a wide range of musical universes is now possible for ever larger numbers of people.
Yet, however much the world has changed, it must not be forgotten that access to economic and technological developments have been extremely unequal across the globe. If in Europe there are no longer large sectors of the population that could be classed as peasants, people whose livelihoods are linked to subsistence agricultural economies still persist in many parts of the world, particularly in the poorest regions of the world. Similarly, in such places feudal style oligarchies have also not disappeared. And western style capitalism and the individualist ideologies that support it are far from dominant throughout the globe. Thus, while the boundaries between musical universes conceptualised in class terms have been blurring in Europe, America and other prosperous regions of the world, the modes of classifying distinct musical spheres in other parts of the world may still be informed by the distribution of economic power and potential.
Critically, while in the deprived regions of the globe, many people have only limited control over their lives, in more privileged parts of the world the spheres for choices and opportunities are markedly more varied. In the western world one can choose which musical universes one wishes to participate in, and often choices are made in relation to the associations that are invoked by such seemingly out-dated categories as folk, art, and popular music. Indeed, many people continue to conceive of the world of art music (and the high arts generally) as elitist. Their prestige is certainly sustained through the heavy institutional backing they receive, with considerable funds going into supporting state orchestras, conservatories, concert halls, museums etc. The state takes on this role, seeing the high arts as vehicles to further the ‘civilizing process’, progressively elevating the ‘culture’ of the population as a whole. 
As any ‘classical’ musician knows, many years of training are required of those who make art music performance their profession. Even to undertake such an endeavour requires ‘talent’, a concept, which, as John Blacking repeated noted, limits access to the performance realm. For Bourdieu, these mechanisms of exclusion ensure that the high arts continue to serve as markers of social distinction. Nonetheless, today, the world of art music is no longer the exclusive preserve of the elites, if ever it really was. Today it is possible for members of the middle and working classes to choose to engage in this aesthetic universe, and they too can display discerning tastes. Indeed, the driver of a taxi I regularly employed in Belfast spent the day driving about town listening only to ‘classical’ music; his preferred genre was opera. After discovering this musical universe somewhat late in life, he joined a community choir and started to regularly secure season tickets to the Opera House.
People can also choose to engage in musical forms commonly identified as folk music – or ‘new folk music’, as it is referred to by some. Clearly the legions of European performers of these genres are not peasants and the performances they are involved in are not ‘functionally’ linked to a peasant life style. However, in this sphere, participants can invoke the memory of a past era in which life was simpler and more communally oriented than it is in the modern world of today. Importantly, this was an era that somehow ‘we’ – our nation – lost. Thus, folk musics might be viewed as focal points for the expression of national sentiments and nostalgia for ‘our’ past, and the revival movements emerging from them have led to the invention of countless traditions aimed at restoring a sense of community in the highly competitive, commoditized and undifferentiated cosmopolitan world that we now live in.
The huge range of styles encompassed by the umbrella term ‘popular music’ provide countless alternatives through which people of all social classes and ages can construct identities and present themselves to others. There is perhaps no other musical sphere in which the forces of hybritidy and differentiation are more marked than in contemporary popular music. Styles develop by drawing on other forms, in processes that fuse the meanings and associations linked to the forms from which they borrow to generate new possibilities and choices for the presentation of self, ranging, for instance, from the more democratic and egalitarian orientations of punk to the discerning and technical artistry of metal and its countless derivatives. Ideas about what it means to be a man, a women, a teenager, a gay person, an Anglo-Indian, a Caribbean in London, and so on, can all be articulated through creative bricolage in popular idioms. And for those with concerns over the environment or the plight of people in far away places, there’s ‘world music’.
In the contemporary western world, we are not only at liberty to construct and represent ourselves through the commodities we surround ourselves with, music being for many a central element in the definition of one’s persona, we are practically compelled to do so. Our individuality – or our own personal style – is defined by the aesthetic choices we make. Our choices give us access to different sets of social circles and voluntary associations where we hope to encounter like-minded people. We have the potential, perhaps more than ever before, to be in control of who we are and how we represent ourselves to others. And we can choose simultaneously to display a discerning taste for art music in one sphere, engage in a session of traditional Irish music in other moments, and listen to a range of popular music styles from anywhere in the world on our iPods at other times. And the more cosmopolitan we become, the wider in range our musical choices are likely to become.
While the increased possibility of choice has led to an effective erosion in traditional musical categories, the conceptual associations they evoke have remained critical to the ways in which many musical choices are made. Thus, it is clearly no longer of academic interest to classify different music using these categories; instead, they might best be treated as ‘folk categories’, and as such investigated in terms of the ways in which they are informing the musical choices people are making. And remarkably, the ‘folk’ use of these categories is truly global. Indeed, they were fully operative in the ways in which people in Campanha, a small former mining town in southern Minas Gerais, Brazil, discussed the musical universe of the town. This is where, for the past decade, I have been conducting research on the town’s musical life.

Folk categories in Campanha

Since colonial times, Campanha has prided itself in its musical heritage, and one version of this story is told by the celebrated local musician, Marcello Pompeu (1885-1988), in a small booklet entitled Subsídios para a história da música da Campanha (1977). It is important to note, however, that this document makes no mention of and of the genres associated with the town's lower classes; it focuses exclusively upon the musical activities of the local elites, describing the processional bands, church choirs, orchestras, pianos, serenades and parlour dances that entertained the more prosperous sectors of Campanha during his long life.
This omission is entirely coherent with the dominant attitudes of the local elites toward the expressive forms of the town’s subaltern classes. Indeed, the social space in Campanha is marked by a strong class divide. The local elites represent themselves as ‘enlightened’ (esclarecidos) and ‘cultured’ (gente de cultura) in opposition to the lower classes, who are seen as ‘simple’ (simples) and ‘uncultured’ (gente de pouca cultura). The lower classes, on the other hand, define themselves as ‘poor’ (pobres) in opposition to the ‘rich’ (ricos) and ‘refined’ (gente fina). Viewed in terms of the criteria used in the national census, however, most members of the local elite would hardly be classed as rich, fitting more comfortably within the category of middle class, or even lower middle or upper lower class. They live primarily around the central core of the town, while the lower classes, many of whom verge on the destitute, are concentrated in peripheral neighbourhoods around the centre.
Musically this divide is made especially visible during the two major religious festivals that mark the local annual calendar: Holy Week and the Festival of Our Lady of the Rosary (October). Holy Week, as in other towns throughout Minas Gerais, is Campanha’s most prestigious festival, a legacy of the ‘baroque culture’ that developed in Minas Gerais during the 18th century as a consequence of the wealth generated by gold. Traditionally the celebrations feature the church choir, a small orchestra and the town band, but given the constraints on space, I will restrict this discussion to the choir. The choir’s repertoire for the occasion includes pieces in the ‘barroco mineiro’ style (baroque of Minas Gerais) by such eminent composers as Manoel Dias de Oliveira (c. 1735–1813 in São José del Rey [now Tiradentes]) and Joaquim José Emerico Lobo de Mesquita (Diamantina, 1746–1805). The most prized pieces performed during Holy Week are the two sets of motets known as the Motets of the Stations [of the Cross] (Motetos de Passos) and the Motets of [Our Lady] of Pains (Motetos de Dores), both by Manoel Dias de Oliveira. In their original form, they were set to two four-part choirs, two flutes, two French horns and bass, but in Campanha one of the choirs has been suppressed, as have the French horns, and the flute parts are played by violins.
As currently constituted, the choir, know as the Coral Campanhense (Campanha Choir), was formed in the late 1950s in an effort to ensure that the repertoire associated with Holy Week would be performed competently; since then membership has fluctuated as some members have left and others recruited to replace them. The choir members are drawn primarily from amongst the local elites, the vast majority of lighter skin colour. Furthermore, the ratio of women to men is in the region of three to one. All choir members participate on a voluntary basis, and they are involved primarily for the enjoyment they get out of singing. Even though very few of them can read music, they use sheet music, as it provides a melodic and rhythmic 'aide-memoire' and it helps them keep up with the texts, most of which are in Latin. The choir’s full Holy Week repertoire, if sung continuously omitting repeats, would lasts around six hours, all of which has been memorised over years of performance.
The population of Campanha, especially those belonging to the local elites, are proud to claim that the town was the cultural centre of the region during the gold era, and the baroque nature of the Holy Week celebrations is viewed as a testament to this. The festival, therefore, is a central marker of local identity, highlighting the town’s cultural achievements. To use Bourdieu’s terminology, the choir and its repertoire are markers of distinction circumscribing the discerning tastes of those involved. 
Holy Week in Campanha is, however, now under threat due to shifts in the church’s orientation from a paternalistic stance to a preferential option for the poor. Musically, this has meant the encouragement of ‘popular’ congregational singing, giving preference to a 'modern' repertoire that is 'easy' to sing, as well as its efforts to ban the use of Latin, precisely the language used in the choir's repertoire. The shift reached Campanha in 1999, when the priest who had been in the town for over twenty years, was substituted by a new priest aligned with the so-called ‘liturgical renovation’. It was re-invigorated by the next priest, whose crusade against ‘elitisms’ within the church has been even greater. The past eight years, then, have been marked by considerable tension and debate within the parish, since many locals feel that what is at issue is nothing less than a threat to the town’s major emblems of local identity. But it is not just any identity: the musical repertoire they are now being offered by the church is seen as an offence to their aesthetic sensibilities, and understandably, such feelings are strongest amongst choir members and their families. Most of them have flatly refused to lead congregational singing at mass within the current aesthetic environment. 
In effect, the modes of religiosity that have sustained the baroque experiences are now being challenged by a ‘modern’ and ‘popular’ church, headed by a clergy intent on redefining the role of the church. Consequently, some lay communities are seeing their parish roles erode. Indeed, in Campanha the Coral Campanhense is losing control over their performances, and given that they are so functionally related to the celebrations of Holy Week, the extended repertoire that was so painstakingly memorised over decades may be left with no other context in which to be performed. At least not by this choir: more and more, the main arenas in which barroco mineiro is being heard are universities and concert halls. Thus, a distinctly community-based musical universe, functionally linked to its locality, the source of considerable aesthetic satisfaction, may buckle under the onslaught of the ‘popular’ that is arriving from the outside, as dictated by a central and global ecclesiastical authority.
While Holy Week has been dominated by ensembles whose membership belong primarily to the local privileged sectors, during the Festival of the Rosary music is provided by several African-Brazilian dance and percussion ensembles known as congados, whose members come almost exclusively from the subaltern classes. As in other parts of Brazil, the troupes are associated with blacks, and a black presence is evident in most of the groups. None of them, however, exclude people on the basis of skin colour. In Campanha, blackness is as much a social as a racial category; as a social category, it is constructed through an identification of the experience of poverty  with the historic subjugation of blacks in the country. 
The festival is a legacy of the black confraternities of the colonial period, which served as acceptable spheres for social activities amongst slaves. The members of the confraternities elected their leaders each year, one of whom would be crowned, and to celebrate the occasion, percussion ensembles paraded through the streets. The legacy of these black courts is still evident in contemporary festivals in honour of Our lady of the Rosary, as in Campanha, where royal symbolism, in the form of crowns, sceptres and capes, is still very much a part of the congado tradition. These insignia have persisted because they ennoble those who wear them and dignify the group they represent. Furthermore, ritualized inversions call attention to social hierarchies.
In the last few years there have been from three to five active congados in Campanha at any given time, ranging in size from around twenty to fifty people or more. The groups are dominated by drums, including several large bass drums known locally as treme-terras (literally earth-quakes), various caixas (cylindrical double-headed drums) of different sizes, and a few snare drums (tarois). Other percussion instruments used include tambourines (pandeiros), reco-recos (cylindrical scrapers) and shakers. Congados are not exclusively percussion ensembles; they also employ string instruments, such as violas (five double-coursed instruments slightly smaller than guitars), guitars, bandolins (mandolin-type instruments with four double courses) and violins, as well as an accordion or two and a pair of brass instruments, such as cornets, trombones or tenor saxophones. Over the instruments short verses, rarely more than four phrases in length, are sung responsorially by two duos, firstly in parallel thirds, then in parallel sixths.
Among the local elites congados are viewed with some disdain. Indeed, I was repeatedly warned to be cautious during my research, because the social space was considered to be dangerous, a notion premised on the perception that violence and fighting occurs frequently amongst congadeiros, instigated by excessive drinking and rivalries between the groups. But they are especially feared as spaces marked by the practice of black magic, or macumba. Even during the main procession of the festival, in which the congados process through the town bearing Our Lady of the Rosary on their way to the church, the sound of their drums completely dominating the soundscape, the ensembles attract limited attention outside their own communities.
Congados have frequently been the target of suppression. Indeed, they were systematically persecuted by the church, and only the oldest members of the ensembles in Campanha can still recall being allowed to enter the church building with their instruments to salute the saint. Despite what one might expect, the ‘popular’ church seems to have chosen to ignore the congados, as their projects can’t be easily reconciled with the ‘unorthodoxies’ of ‘folk’ catholicism. Thus, as long as they remain in the streets, church authorities are happy enough to leave them to their own devices. Nonetheless, the congado’s public performance retain a carnivalesque ethos as a means of communicating to the dominant sectors that they are there solely to have some fun; they need not be feared.
The disparaging attitudes held toward congados are off-set by yet another set of local discourses. Here the ensembles are placed in the category of local folklore, which represents them as valuable repositories of local heritage and potential tourist attractions. Respected voices in Campanha claimed that ‘their’ congados should receive local support, but because they are represented as local heritage - that is, collective town property - the responsibility for supporting them is made a matter for the state, exempting the individual citizen. Although the dispensation of municipal funds is mediated by individuals through clientelistic networks, state representatives can - and do - invoke the complexities of government to distance themselves from any direct link to the funds held by government, and can thereby keep donations to a minimum. Nonetheless, in recent years the municipal government have become the major patron of the congados, taking on some of the financial responsibilities associated with the Festival of Our Lady of the Rosary: it now serves meals to the congadeiros during the festival; it provides transport for the ensembles from their neighbourhoods to the church yard; and it supplies each group with a few instruments each year.
When I asked one of the local leaders of a congado whether his activities in the ensemble could be considered folklore, he responded: Eles fala que é froclore (sic), mas pra nós é religião (“They say it’s folklore, but to us it’s religion”). This exchange took place at a ‘folklore demonstration’ organised by the local culture secretary at one of the town’s secondary school. So I pushed the issue further, and asked, if that was the case, why had he agreed to participate in the event, which clearly classed the congado as folklore. The response: Veio convidar nós pra gente poder mostrar o congado, então a gente não pode negar. O santo é de todos (“They invited us so we could show the congado, so we couldn’t refuse. The saint belongs to everyone”). This episode highlights a dilemma facing the congados: that of finding ways of securing support for their associations, which is being achieved to some extent through folklorization, and yet ensure they preserve autonomy and control over their activities. 

Concluding remarks

Now that the musicological research emphasis has shifted from ‘the music’ to musical processes and the ways in which music is conceptualised, the division of labour circumscribed by the categories ‘historical musicology’, ‘ethnomusicology’, and ‘popular music studies’ seems redundant. Yet the perceptions of the musical sphere that originally established these divisions are still current in many parts of the world, informing people’s ideas about music as well as their musical choices. Although they may now appear to be little more than ‘folk’ labels, which, along with others, are scattered around music stores to assist consumers in their musical choices, their deployment can also be far more sinister, as the very legacy from which they emerged was premised on conceptions linked to the inherent value of different modes of musical expression. 
While it may be self-evident to some that the complexity and sophistication of western art music is the source of its inherent value, to others its elitism and exclusiveness constitute signs of a non-democratic social orientation that needs to be resisted. While subaltern modes of musical expression might be easily romanticised and conceived as ‘the soul of the nation’ by those whose experiences are removed, be it temporarily or geographically, from the original producers, these same groups appear quite differently to those living near them, such that marks of distinctions and prejudice can be all too visible and entrenched in the modes of interaction across the divide. Popular music too can be conceived as the ‘easy’ sounds that hinder critical thinking and a ‘true’ aesthetic experience, or the sphere in which one can experience modernity and construct a sense of ‘the true self’.
In the western world, such forces as commoditisation, individualism, and cosmopolitanism may have created a social sphere in which people have a wide range of musical styles to choose from to provide a soundtrack to their lives. But in poorer parts of the world, local modes of musical life may not be strong enough to resist the onslaughter of external and global forces. In such cases people may only have the choice of accepting or rejecting the choices made for them by powerful others, and their notions about what should reach people’s ears will dictate what prevails in the sound spaces under their control. How such categories as ‘art music’, ‘folk music’ and ‘popular music’ are conceptualised may strongly impact upon how control of the public soundscape is exercised.

Presenters and abstracts

Shino ARISAWA	> Session 12B
Shino Arisawa is a doctorate research student in the Department of Music at the School of Oriental and African Studies (London) where she also gained her masters degree in 2002. Her current research focuses on the perception of change in the “traditional” music of Japan, and she is specifically looking at the different aspects of performance styles and philosophies within ryûha (schools). She has founded the SOAS Japanese Music Society where she teaches shamisen, koto and singing. She has also performed many concerts and has given workshops within the UK, especially relating to the sankyoku ensemble Hibiki. E-mail: shino.arisawa@soas.ac.uk

Changes within ‘tradition’: The case of Japanese jiuta-sôkyoku

Within the ‘traditional’ music of Japan, emphasis is often put on one’s genealogy, which includes both kindred/adoptive lineage as well as institutional affiliation such as ryûha (school). The static image towards Japanese ‘traditional’ music is often associated with these genealogies which have been operated under the iemoto-seido (house-head system), in which a powerful iemoto (house-head) has power on his/her disciples in their ryûha. Genealogies of the musicians are often included in the concert programmes, CD notes, and stated on TV shows, but only when there is a sufficiently long historical background. Here, the genealogies can give us an image of a continuously handed down ‘tradition’ which, in many cases, highlights stability rather than flexibility or transformation. However, changes do occur throughout the relaying of music. Melodies, texts, rhythms, performance styles do change, and also new pieces are continuously added to existing repertoires to be handed down to following generations.
This paper will assess these arguments in relation to Japanese jiuta-sôkyoku, music of the koto, shamisen and the vocals, and centres on the question of changes within the same lineages. I will look at what sorts of changes occur throughout the transmission and examine how these changes become legitimised as “authentic tradition” of their lineages.

Francisco BETHENCOURT-LLOBET	> Session 1A
Francisco Bethencourt-Llobet, researcher, music teacher and guitarist, is currently completing his PhD at the International Centre for Music Studies, Newcastle University. Previously, he completed a MA in Ethnomusicology at the University of Maryland and attended postgraduate courses at Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, Mendoza (Argentina). Apart from an academic year at the University of Edinburgh, he did a BA in History of Arts at the University of la Laguna, completing  his degree in Historical Musicology at the University of Granada. His publications include: “Encontrando un lugar en la popular music: Flamenco como música popular” (2006). Email: F.J.Bethencourt-LLobet@newcastle.ac.uk

Contemporary flamenco: Lost in translation between folk and popular music

The last quarter of the twentieth century saw a re-definition of flamenco, which was mostly due to the use of musical instruments associated with other styles and to the appropriation of ‘non-flamenco’ performance spaces and practices. The beginning of the twenty-first century has witnessed the continued modification of the tradition via new technology, which both creates and reflects new ways of playing, singing and dancing flamenco. Artists have continued to cross both physical and technological borders, collaborating with other musicians, acquiring other sounds, and developing new concepts of flamenco. Rather than analysing the contemporary flamenco scene in one particular context (Spain), in this paper I propose to examine the ways in which flamenco has fitted in to the wider world popular music scene. In order to do this I will focus on festivals in which flamenco performers have collaborated with musicians from other cultural and/or musical backgrounds. The paper will present new fieldwork carried out in Spain and elsewhere and commentaries by flamenco musicians, flamencólogos and academics. The light this sheds on developments in the contemporary flamenco scene will then be compared to theoretical work taking place elsewhere in popular music studies.

David CLARKE	> Session 9
David Clarke is Professor of Music at the International Centre for Music Studies, Newcastle University. He has previously lectured at Dartington College of Arts and the University of Liverpool. His interests include the composer Michael Tippett, on whom he has published various books and articles, as well as musical aesthetics, theory and analysis. As conductor, violinist, and latterly a student of North Indian classical music, he also remains active as a musical practitioner. His publications include: The music and thought of Michael Tippett: Modern times and metaphysics (2001). E-mail: d.i.clarke@ncl.ac.uk

Late Junction: World music, cultural pluralism, and genre drift

Radio plays an important role in mediating conceptions of musical genres – shaping popular understandings of what counts as, say, world music, folk music, classical music, popular music (and any of a proliferating range of sub-genres). BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction is a case in point. The programme is listed on the World Music pages of the BBC’s website, where it is described as “a laid-back, eclectic mix of music from across the globe, ranging from Mali to Bali, and from medieval chant to 21st-century electronica”. This characterisation typifies a certain contemporary attitude to musical consumption, pluralist in character, and presupposing a liberal listening subject, relaxed about their genre preferences and perhaps commensurably fluid in how they construct their personal identity.
Individual tracks played on Late Junction may often sit between genres (contemporary postvernacular musics being a common example), or may be generically multivalent, invoking more than one genre (say, ‘nu-folk’ and indie pop). Another variant is where a generically unambiguous performance could nonetheless be described with more than one generic signifier – for example, be equally eligible for the label ‘world music’, ‘folk music’ or ‘traditional music’. All this fosters a condition of what could be termed ‘genre osmosis’; and such permeability is arguably part of a rhetorical strategy whereby Late Junction seeks to persuade us that its pluralist musical world is one of easy flow and cohesion.
The question, however, is what we should make of this when it is set against the plurality of the ‘real’ musical, cultural, social and political world. Is Late Junction’s global imaginary a harmless deception, a piece of ideological duplicity, or a salutary liberal–utopian vision of what could be? (The terms of reference here suggest a critique based on a homeopathic intake of Marx, Lacan and Žižek.) And if LJ is indeed symptomatic of the way we consume now, what are the implications for ethnomusicology? For example, should it accept such a global  imaginary as an anthropological fact? Or should it make an intervention from some other space, and, if so, what would be its corrective take on how to represent the ‘real’ of a plural world?

Pete DALE	> Session 8
Pete Dale is currently doing comparative research into ‘punk’ and ‘folk’ musics at the International Centre for Music Studies, Newcastle University, where he was previously awarded a distinction for a MA completed in 2005. Prior to this he was known in the ‘underground’ music scene for his band Red Monkey (particularly in the USA, where the group toured extensively) and the Slampt record label which he ran for 8 years. The latter was an exemplary DIY independent label which released 60 items, selling upwards of 40,000 units in total, without any support from any major label or other financial benefactor. E-mail: P.R.W.Dale@newcastle.ac.uk

Punk as folk: The problem of subjectivity in the idealised realm of collective practice

Despite a widely-held assumption that ‘punk’ was an historically-contained late-1970s ‘moment’ where certain hierarchies within popular music – who can/can’t ‘do it’, for example – were temporarily deferred, in fact a consistent and on-going underground punk movement has now existed for decades. In this subculture, where ‘Do It Yourself’ has been the guiding principle and un-trained musicianship has (to some extent) been accepted, certain correlations with elements of the contemporary ‘folk’ scene can be detected. Whilst, however, similarities with regard to operationality (eg. ‘networking’ systems, self-management, collectivism, etc.) and amateur musicianship are demonstrable, a clear divergence between ‘punk’ and ‘folk’ would seem to be found in terms of ‘modernist’ and ‘traditionalist’ tendencies respectively. 
The purpose of this paper is, firstly, to examine the ground shared by the two sub-cultures and, secondly, to open a debate as to whether the creative subject can, in some cases and perhaps in all cases, transcend the over-worn presumption that individuality of expression can only be produced through novelty of form/content. Can a musical ‘event’ ever be entirely devoid of some degree of self-expression from the subject(s) who make it happen? Perhaps not, yet does it therefore necessarily follow that “(w)e should all be creators together, and in this way transform the limited social practice of music making into something universal and collective” (Toynbee, “Music, culture and creativity”, 2003)?

Ruth DAVIS	> Session 12B
Ruth Davis is University Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology and Fellow and Director of Studies in Music at Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge. After training as a pianist at the Royal Academy of Music she graduated in Music from King's College London; she then pursued graduate studies in Ethnomusicology at the University of Amsterdam and in Ethnomusicology and Historical Musicology at Princeton University. She obtained her PhD from Princeton in 1986. She has published and broadcast extensively in the fields of North African and Middle Eastern music, particularly on her original field work on mainland Tunisia and the island of Djerba. Other field locations include the UK, with Kurdish and Iraqi musicians, Peru, Uzbekistan and Israel. Recent publications include Ma'luf. Reflections on the Arab Andalusian Music of Tunisia (2004); “Robert Lachmann’s Oriental Music: A broadcasting initiative in 1930s Palestine” (2005). E-mail: rfd11@cam.ac.uk

Pop music or people’s music? Changing identities and forgotten histories in the Tunisian canon

When commercial recording was introduced to North Africa in the early twentieth century, the recorded repertory at first mirrored that of the live musical environment. In Tunisia, a type of strophic song in colloquial Arabic known as ‘ughniyya (literally, song; pl. aghani) emerged as the favoured genre. Musically innovative, the commercial ‘ughniyya was characterised by earthy language and themes reflecting real life situations and emotions. Associated almost exclusively with Jewish musicians and singers, it was rooted in the type of songs traditionally sung in taverns and coffee houses, or by women at wedding parties and other domestic events.
With the mass emigration of Tunisian Jews following independence in 1956, the Jewish aghani fell out of favour in mainstream musical life. However, they continued to be sung in the remaining Jewish communities where they assumed the status of traditional Jewish songs. Sung by both men and women at wedding parties or, adapted to Hebrew words, by men in the synagogue, the songs are invested with memories of specific personalities and events, providing nostalgic links to a colonial past when Tunisian Jewish identity remained intact and unchallenged.
In this paper I trace the journey of individual aghani from their commercial origins to their representations in Jewish life-cycle and religious events, and their revival, since the 1990s, in mainstream Tunisian life.  Rehabilitated as turath sha’abiyya (literally, heritage of the people) the popular songs of the Protectorate are valued today as authentic Tunisian songs whose specific Jewish associations have, however, become faded or lost.

Nicoletta DEMETRIOU	> Session 4B
Nicoletta Demetriou is a third-year PhD student in the Department of Music, School of Oriental and African Studies (London). Before coming to London she studied music in Cyprus, Thessaloniki and Vienna. She currently writes her PhD dissertation on Fonés songs, change and continuity in Cypriot folk music, under the supervision of Richard Widdess. E-mail: 155443@soas.ac.uk

‘Traditionalists’ vs. ‘modernists’: Folk music performers in contemporary Cyprus

Following the extensive urbanisation and modernisation of Cyprus in the second half of the twentieth century, folk music gradually lost the significant place it previously occupied in society. Since the early 1990s however, and with the help of state-funded programmes, Cypriot folk music has experienced a ‘revival’- this time on the contemporary stage (Livingston, “Music revivals: towards a general theory”, 1999). This new situation has created an unprecedented challenge amongst folk music groups, each of which competes for the ‘lion’s share’ in attracting audiences. Given that the production of new folk music in Cyprus is reduced to a minimum (in line with the widely held in Cyprus “no new song can be a folksong” maxim), the way each performer or group decides to present its music is vital in their fight to win the market. On the one hand there are the ‘traditionalists’, performing music with the fewest possible innovations and advocating that folk music should remain the way our forefathers bequeathed it to us. On the other hand there are the ‘modernists’, who choose to use new instruments and instrumentations, and experiment with new ‘up-beat’ rhythms and ‘fusions’. 
This paper discusses the various approaches of performers in presenting (or representing) Cypriot folk music on the contemporary stage. Drawing on my fieldwork and commercial recordings, I aim to examine these approaches with regards to how contemporary performers relate themselves to the revivalist movement as well as how they choose to represent their identity.

Jochen EISENTRAUT	> Session 4A
Jochen Eisentraut has spent the first dozen years of his professional life writing music for television and theatre before taking up a lectureship at the University of Wales Bangor in 1995. After also teaching and examining at Liverpool University, he withdrew from lecturing in 2003 in order to to carry out creative projects and concentrate on his PhD for which he has just had a successful viva. E-mail: jochensax@hotmail.com

Folk in time, pop in space: Individualisation and notions of vernacular authenticity

In revisiting possible distinctions between notions of folk and popular music this paper explores the contrasting relationship of these macro-genres to ideas of time, space and authenticity. Folk music appears to be more a signifier of place whereas popular music is addressed to a particular moment. Drawing on examples from globalised Brazilian music and English musical nationalism, areas of difference, overlap and increasing interaction between traditional‚ and popular vernaculars are highlighted and explored. The use of ethnically marked music or musical elements to variously flavour cosmopolitan musical experience and play a role in the functioning of music as a “technology of the self” (DeNora), raises questions about levels of involvement and the applicability of ethnographic research models, since any communities thus constituted may be fragmented and dispersed geographically, while the experiences involved may nevertheless be highly significant in the lives of many individuals. 

Richard ELLIOTT	> Session 3B
Graduated from the University of Warwick with a BA in Comparative American Studies, Richard Elliott has completed his MA with the Open University, having turned his attention to the study of popular music. He is currently completing his PhD investigating aspects of loss in popular music. He teaches at the International Centre for Music Studies, Newcastle University, on modules covering popular music, music and cultural theory, and world music. He is associate editor of  the new Newcastle-based journal Radical Musicology (http://www.radical-musicology.org.uk/). E-mail: richard.elliott@ncl.ac.uk

Tudo isto ainda é fado? Fado as local and global practice

Fado has been regularly classed alongside other musics such as rembetika, tango and flamenco as a kind of urban folk music with strong connections to an underclass. Yet such an easy definition, however accurate, may prevent us from seeing fado as a music that has tended to be disdained by ethnomusicologists for being too commercial and neglected by popular music scholars for being too folkloric: in short fado has become, like so many musics in this situation, that liminal entity known as world music. The rise in global popularity of the so-called “new fadistas” over the last decade has led fado to a level of visibility unmatched since the heyday of the internationally-renowned fadista Amália Rodrigues. Current fado performers, in particular Mariza, have found themselves at the forefront of a star system promoted by the culture industry that is the contemporary world music network. In between these moments of visibility, meanwhile, and no doubt preceding and succeeding them, fado continues as a local popular practice.
Drawing on research into the historiography of fado and on cultural theoretical perspectives on contemporary fado performance, this paper will examine the relationships between fado as a local practice and a global phenomenon. By looking at the mediation between the local and the global it will examine how myth-making and the figure of the ‘star fadista’ provide both the conditions of possibility for effective transmission of fado and a narrative that informs both local knowledge and media promotion of the music in equal measure.

Franco FABBRI	> Session 11
Franco Fabbri, born in Sâo Paulo (Brazil) in 1949, teaches ‘Popular music’ and ‘Musica contemporanea dei media’ at the Università di Torino (both courses are about popular music history and aesthetics), ‘Musicologia’ at the Università di Genova, ‘Economia dei beni musicali’ (music economy) at the Università di Milano. He served as chairman of Iaspm during two terms: 1985-1987 and 2005-2007. As a musician and music activist, he has been a member of the rock band Stormy Six since 1966, and president of l’Orchestra since 1975. His latest book is L’ascolto tabù (2005). Selected essays (also in English) and more biographical information (mostly in Italian) can be found at his website, www.francofabbri.net. E-mail: ffabbri@iol.it

The king is naked: The musicological unified field and its articulation
[Text available in the Round table section]

Héctor FOUCE & José Antonio GONZÁLEZ SERENA	> Session 4A
Héctor Fouce has a PhD in Journalism, and currently teaches at the Department of Ethnomusicology of the Conservatorio Superior de Música de Aragón, Zaragoza (Spain). He also teaches Semiotics at the European Institute of Design, in Madrid. He is a member of the work team Semiótica para profanos, and works regularly as a musical critic in LaNetro.com. He is President of IASPM-Spain and secretary of SIbE (Sociedad de Etnomusicología). Among his publications: Industria cultural y música popular (2004); El futuro ya está aquí. Música pop y cambio cultural (2006). E-mail: hector@fouce.net
José Antonio González Serena is finishing his PhD at University Autonoma, Barcelona, on some processes of Spanish folk and traditional music. He teaches at the Department of Ethnomusicology of the Conservatorio Superior de Música de Aragón, Zaragoza. His work Danzantas y maiordoms, espadas y cols. Procesos de transformación y reciclaje en la música tradicional de la Ribagorza is forthcoming. E-mail: ONCINO@teleline.es

The construction of Spanish popular music: Tradition, modernity and globalization

The construction of contemporary Spanish popular music is strongly linked to some national identity issues that emerged along the 20th century. These issues have their roots in a very strained relationship between the traditional culture the dictatorial government (1939-1976) defined as the only way to be Spanish and styles and genres imported by minority intellectual groups trying to connect Spanish culture with modernity.
Pop music was strongly rejected during the dictatorship’s era as an invasion from a foreign culture – namely, the Anglo American culture. When democracy returned, pop music became a symbol of normality, the flag of modern Spain. Subsequently, traditional music became old fashioned and it was approached ironically during the 80’s. But nowadays the dynamics between popular music and tradition have changed: this ironic approach has disappeared and pop musicians seem to accept Spanish musical tradition as a legitimate source for musical inspiration. There is also a recovery of genres coming from the Latin-American tradition that form part of the Spanish musical memory, like bolero.
Summing up, Spanish popular music has been constructed as a melting pot of rock culture, traditional music and the Latin-American heritage. Currently, different styles related to world music are also being incorporated in the so-called música mestiza. This paper will go deeper in the interactions between all these kinds of music and the creation of a cultural national identity less problematic than a century ago.

Vic GAMMON	> Session 6
Vic Gammon is Senior Lecturer in Folk & Traditional music at the International Centre for Music Studies, Newcastle University. He was previously Senior Lecturer at the University of Leeds. His research interests are in the vernacular musics of Britain and North America,  and in music education. He has also a continuing activity as a performer, that is the basis of his teaching and research. His book Desire, drink and death in English folk and vernacular song, 1600-1900 is forthcoming. E-mail: vic.gammon@ncl.ac.uk

Fabian HOLT	> Session 8
Fabian Holt is Associate Professor of Music and Performance at the University of Roskilde in Denmark. He received his doctoral degree from the University of Copenhagen in 2002 and has taught at the Universities of Copenhagen and Chicago. His teaching repertory includes courses on jazz and American popular musics, performance theory, world music, and ethnomusicological theory. His monograph Genre in Popular Music will be published in 2007. E-mail: fabianh@ruc.dk

Polarized vernaculars: Anti-fascist rock concerts in contemporary Germany

This paper examines a cultural context in which categories such as folk and popular music are defined less by musical differences than by political conflict. Neo-Nazism has experienced a minor boom in Germany since the unification of the country in 1990, and music plays a central role in this. As illustrated by the so-called schoolyard CDs that have been distributed in several hundred thousand copies, the Neo-Nazis employs a wide range of vernacular musics, and especially folk and pop. The most visible counter-reactions come from the punk rock scene, in which there are efforts to keep Neo-Nazism out of popular music and define punk as an authentic subculture. This brings up old questions about the myth and reality of political resistance in popular music. I conclude with a case study of the political dimension of the concert practices of the band ZSK in Berlin. The band has connections with governmental, pro-democratic youth organisations and with anti-fascist groups, both of which are consciously employing popular music to reach their political goals.

David W. HUGHES	> Session 9
David W. Hughes is Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at at the School of Oriental and African Studies (London). His current main areas of research are Japanese music (various genres); music education in Japan; oral mnemonics worldwide; and street musicians in Java. Two of his books will appear this year: Traditional folk song in modern Japan, and (co-edited with Alison Tokita) The Ashgate Research Companion to Japanese Music. E-mail: Dh6@soas.ac.uk

“There are no real folk songs anymore”: Japanese folk song from village to stage to the world

Only gradually during the 20th century did rural Japanese absorb scholars’ view that they were ‘folk’, singing a special category of song called ‘folk song’ (min’yõ). Ironically, by the time this term was widely accepted, many intellectuals were claiming that no ‘real’ folk songs were left. With urbanization and modernization, village songs are now heard more often in new contexts (on stage; via the media), in new arrangements (rarely unaccompanied; several types of traditional instrument added), for new purposes (profit, nostalgia for rural lifeways), and taught in new ways (notation; formal, paid instruction). Are urban-based professionals and media now the official controllers of min’yõ?
Resisting this trend, local ‘preservation societies’ (hozonkai) strive to maintain local ‘ownership’, performing these songs as they believe their ancestors had, setting up national contests whose competitors must maintain the traditional singing style. Are they the true owners and inheritors of this genre?
Meanwhile, the modern ‘stage’ min’yõ style is in turn challenged by those steeped in ‘other’ musics, seeing themselves as ‘global’ Japanese. The Yosakoi Sōran Festival and similar events feature teams of youths in postmodern costumes, street-dancing to rock arrangements of min’yõ. Recordings of min’yõ now may feature keyboards, kanun, djembe … And yet the musicians and dancers involved will claim a solid link to ‘tradition’ and Japanese identity. Are they the saviours of this genre?
Each phrase in the quotation from Fabbri in the Call for Papers could be problematized for min’yõ. Should the ethnomusicologist take a stance?

Jaime JONES	> Session 3A
Jaime Jones is currently a PhD Candidate at the University of Chicago. He has completed 22 months of fieldwork in Pune, India, for the dissertation Performing the sacred: The aesthetics and kinaesthetics of Bhakti. This research was supported by grants from the Fulbright Foundation, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the University of Chicago. He is currently working on the chapter "The Sacred Indian Ocean" for The Cambridge History of World Music. His publication include: “The aesthetics of Gandhi's vision: Idioms of utopia in practice” (2005). E-mail: jamesyjones@gmail.com

Making little great: The musical mobility of an Indian devotional vernacular

The division of Indian arts, problematically codified by Milton Singer as “great” (‘classical,’ Sanskritic, pan-Indian practices) and “little” (multiple, regional, vernacular manifestations of culture), complicates yet continues to influence definitions of musical genre in India. 
In Maharashtra, the saint-songs of the Varkaris (a local devotional Hindu sect) have comprised a mainstream vernacular music since the 13th century. For the huge number of historically non-literate castes of the countryside, these Marathi songs slowly became the central texts of a performance literature. The Varkari canon is preserved today within families and castes, most carefully through the pakhawaj (barrel-drum) players who accompany performance, and who learn a highly virtuosic improvisational style from a handful of established gurus. To some Maharashtrians, ‘little’ tradition becomes central, guarded and retained through years of study.
In this presentation I focus on the role of the individual music-maker in the construction and contestation of generic divisions of musical status. The paper is based on 18 months of fieldwork conducted in the city of Pune, where I studied and worked extensively with pakhawaj guru Tukarambhuva Bhumkar. As a Varkari, Bhumkar strives to pass on a tradition of knowledge to his student-disciples. As a musician, he transmits a musical virtuosity that is approached through innovation, improvisation, and synthesis that relies upon Hindustani ‘classical’ standards. 
For the individual performer, genre boundaries are not definitive; rather they encompass a field of play upon which the negotiation of style, form, and even the practicalities of a musical career may take place. 

Marie JORRITSMA	> Session 5B
Marie Jorritsma recently completed her PhD studies in ethnomusicology at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Her dissertation, entitled Sonic spaces:  inscribing “coloured” voices in the Karoo, South Africa was supervised by Carol Muller. Marie is South African born and currently lectures at Unisa in Pretoria. Marie serves as reviews editor for the journal, Muziki and as secretary for the newly formed South African Society for Research in Music (SASRIM). In addition to contributing a review of the film Amandla!:  A revolution in four-part harmony (2003), Marie has presented her work at the Society for Ethnomusicology annual conference, the South African Musicological Society conference and at the 2004 Chicago Ravinia Festival Symposium on South African music. E-mail: Jorrimr@unisa.ac.za

Syncretic authenticities:  The sonic spaces of sacred song in Graaff-Reinet, South Africa

A common stereotype of those classified as “coloured” in apartheid South Africa was that, because of their mixed racial heritage, they had no authentic racial or cultural identity and history. Nurtured and sustained by a policy of racial purity, the apartheid regime held a deeply ambivalent position towards those it categorized as “coloured,” the racial group it defined as “not a white person or a native.” Oral and written sources typically convey “coloured” people’s ethnic identity, cultural history and musical heritage as similarly lacking. 
This paper counters that lingering stereotype by examining how musical performance enabled “coloured” community members around the town of Graaff-Reinet to claim a collective place under apartheid and in post-apartheid South Africa. My fieldwork research on the church hymns and koortjies (choruses) reveals that sacred song dates back over two centuries in this community. It is also a combination of disparate musical and cultural sources, including Khoisan and Xhosa indigenous practices, mission Christianity and British and Dutch colonial influences. How can this tradition, with its syncretic origins and history of apartheid oppression, be recognized as an authentic part of the South African musical landscape? Using theories of creolization (Glissant, Caribbean Discourse; Erasmus, Coloured by History, Shaped by Place; Nuttall and Michael, Senses of Culture), I argue that affinities among South African peoples ensure that fluid boundaries exist between various musical styles. The richly integrated musical encounters inherent in the sonic spaces of “coloured” sacred song thus demonstrate the need for acknowledgement of “new” musical authenticities in South Africa.

Simon KEEGAN-PHIPPS	> Session 1B
Simon Keegan-Phipps graduated with a Masters degree in Ethnomusicology from the University of Durham in 2003, and has recently submitted his PhD thesis at the Newcastle University (ICMuS), entitled Teaching folk: The educational institutionalization of folk music in contemporary England.  Research interests include: ethnomusicology ‘at home’; the definition and pedagogy of folk music; and ‘world music’ in Western popular culture. E-mail: simonkeegan_phipps@yahoo.co.uk

The collision of worlds in Hall 2: ‘Arlo’ by Tom Oakes

In 2005 the flautist Tom Oakes was awarded a Bachelor of Music in Folk and Traditional Music (the ‘folk degree’), from the Newcastle University.  His final examination, on 27th May, was in the form of a thirty minute recital, held in Hall 2 of The Sage Gateshead, open to the public and promoted by the educational institution Folkworks (by whom the degree course is jointly run with the University). This paper offers a textual analysis of one of the seven pieces performed by Oakes in that concert. Entitled ‘Arlo’, this piece was composed by the performer, whose programme notes cite the ‘Finnish Tango’ genre as its primary musical inspiration, whilst acknowledging the title’s reference to the hero of Douglas Coupland’s short story The Boy with the Hummingbird Eyes. However, the piece also makes direct material and instrumental references to a number of other musics (including mid-C20th jazz and Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez); whilst Oakes, himself, is a celebrated exponent of the Irish (wooden) flute, he originates from Devon, England.
This paper shall discuss the plurality of musical influences at work on the piece, offering alternative readings of this musical event as: a manifestation within folk music of Frederic Jameson’s postmodernism (‘blank parody’; ‘speech in a dead language’); a development of the post-vernacular folk music culture of Folkworks and the North East; and demonstrative of the construction of distinctiveness in the contemporary folk music marketplace.

Natalie KIRSCHSTEIN	> Session 5A
Natalie Kirschstein is a graduate student in Ethnomusicology at Harvard University, and has just submitted her PhD thesis, titled Reclaiming the future: Communal space, collective memory, and political narrative on Uruguay's murga stage. Her other research interests include music and politics, Irish and Irish-American music, and 20th Century American composers. E-mail: kirschst@fas.harvard.edu

The Uruguayan murga as “the voice of the people”: Song, metaphor and the language of political agency

Murga, Uruguay’s most popular genre of carnival music, is a sung chronicle of the year. Through parody and satire, in rich poetic and metaphorical language, ensembles recount the events of the past twelve months, critiquing and commenting on political and social issues, such as education, human rights, poverty and health care. As a space within which to contest the status quo, murga has been dubbed “the voice of the people.” While the voice is a commonplace metaphor for agency or power, it is significant in murga on a number of levels – political, historical, textual, musical, theatrical. Murga is a historical document wherein the sung voice acts literally as the bearer of an alternative history and therefore as a locus of political agency. Murga’s voice also carries history as a specifically musical record: texts are usually set to well-known tunes from the past year or to older popular tunes, which are often quoted intentionally as metaphors themselves. The voice, the sung voice, and the act of singing have all come to signify political and social freedom. Murga thus prompts an analytical approach which considers not only musical texts, but also the action of performing them, and an approach to language which considers not only words but also actions as metaphors. Drawing on examples from carnivals 2005, 2006 and 2007, older lyrics, and personal testimonies, my paper explores the relationship between text, music and action as central to murga’s social and political role.

Simone KRÜGER	> Session 12A
Simone Krüger has recently completed an AHRC-funded PhD on Experiencing ethnomusicology: Student experiences of the transmission of ethnomusicology at universities in the UK and Germany at the University of Sheffield. This research assesses the ways in which the transmission of ethnomusicology and world musics impacts on students’ changes of attitude and perspective towards self and other. Simone has taught on ethnomusicology and world music courses at universities in Liverpool, Manchester and Bangor for numerous years now. She is now an Academic Leader and Researcher at Edge Hill University, and is also involved in the development of new music programmes in the Department of Performing Arts. E-mail: Krugers@edgehill.ac.uk

Listening to ethnomusicology: Student experiences of tradition and authenticity

Applying ethnography across universities in the UK and Germany, my research is concerned with the transmission of ethnomusicology and the ways in which students make sense of their (world) musical encounters. Whilst I observed and immersed myself into activities involving the listening to, performing and composing of world musics in the university classroom, I found that there exists considerable emphasis on students’ listening to ethnomusicologists in classes and seminars. This is the focus of this paper, which will discuss students’ complex experiences within their broader social and cultural contexts. Trying to understand the ways in which listening to ethnomusicology produced sense and conveyed meaning to students, this paper will specifically address the role played by concepts of tradition and authenticity in directing students’ listening experiences. 
Discussions will start with considerations about the (re)disciplining of ethnomusicology at universities. Here, I will specifically argue that while ethnomusicologists may have become more interested in hybrid musics in their research, they have yet to design more hybridised and holistic world musics courses. The discussions will be followed by illustrating the ways in which students often brought preconceived concepts of authenticity to ethnomusicology and its transmission, which was reconstructed in powerful ways through the physical, material, literate, and sonic spaces, as well as the ethnomusicologist’s ethnicity. Illustrating various examples from universities across the UK and Germany, the paper will illuminate the ways in which students’ socioculturally constructed concept of authenticity shaped their listening to and experiencing of ethnomusicology.

Carolyn LANDAU	> Session 12A
Carolyn Landau is undertaking doctoral research at City University into the use of recorded music by the Moroccan community in London and the potential use by this community of archival sound recordings held by the British Library Sound Archive. In 2005 she completed a Masters in ethnomusicology at SOAS, her dissertation focusing on Algerian musicians in London. Between 2002 and 2006 she worked in the World and Traditional Music Section of the British Library Sound Archive and prior to this spent a year researching the musics of the Yemba people in West Cameroon. She is a graduate in music and French of the University of Birmingham. E-mail: carolynlandau@hotmail.com

The responsibility and potential of ethnomusicology sound archives:
Understanding and interacting with Moroccan communities in London

Although recorded sound is central to the discipline of ethnomusicology, the role and work of sound archives has, until recently, been neglected within the discipline. Following several years’ work in the British Library Sound Archive’s World and Traditional Music Section, my current research and this paper addresses the responsibilities and potential of ethnomusicology sound archives towards, not only the ethnomusicological community, but also those communities (and their descendents) represented on the recordings held by such archives. How can ethnomusicology sound archives meaningfully interact with and serve the needs of diasporic communities in Britain? And what can the ethnomusicologist learn about the use and role of music recordings for such communities once the communities themselves gain access to archival sound recordings? My focus for this paper is on Moroccan communities in Britain (closely related to recent research amongst Algerian musicians in London) as an example of smaller, more recently formed communities in contrast to more established communities such as African Caribbean and South Asian, which have been better researched and written about within ethnomusicological literature. Since archival sound recordings are central to my research, I hope to add my own voice and experience to the current debate around the value and role of archival sound recordings for the ethnomusicologist, whilst also seeking to better understand the role recorded music can play in the complicated processes of integration of diasporic communities in Britain, thus placing my research within the burgeoning field of applied ethnomusicology. 

Tony LANGLOIS & Desi WILKINSON	> Session 4B
Tony Langlois gained his PhD at Queen's University, Belfast in 1997 for research on the music of the Algerian/Moroccan border. He has since been employed by the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland Community Relations Council and Trinity College, Dublin. He is currently lecturing in ethnomusicology at University College Cork. He is the author of a number of articles on popular and  North African musics, ethnicity, cultural politics and music videos. His current research considers representations of identity of major festivals in Morocco and Algeria. Email: t.langlois@ulster.ac.uk
Desi Wilkinson has pursued a career as a professional musician in tandem with his academic reseach. His main interests include the percieved 'Celtic diaspora' and the traditional musics of Ireland, Brittany, North America and North Africa. He has toured extensively and has made numerous recordings both as a soloist and with highly significant groups from the world of Irish music. Among his publications: “‘Celtitude,’ professionalism and the Fest Noz in traditional music in Brittany” (2003). E-mail: d.wilkinson@ncl.ac.uk

The musical negotiation of identities in Algeria

This paper will examine the role that music plays in the construction of national identity in contemporary Algeria. 
The first independent Algerian republic employed discourses of modernity, socialism, Arab and African nationalism, in order to create a culture of national unity. In so doing it effectively denied a strong French cultural inheritance, religious critiques of socialism and rejected claims for language rights made by significant ‘berber’ ethnic minority groups.  The nationalist project was largely succesful in the economically bouyant 1960’s, but the 1980’s, the state’s discursive authenticity was challenged to the verge of civil war, by Islamist political groups who had galvanised  widespread resentment and by an increasingly vociferous berber cultural movement.
This paper will illustrate a parallel musical development over this period. For example, in early years of independence, andalous art music was accorded high status, whilst many popular genres voicing dissafection or regional ethnicities were largely excluded from broadcast or recording. As the state’s authority over the economy, culture and politics began to weaken, so popular musics from the Berber Kabyle region, Raï from Oran and Cha’abi from Algiers, became problematically audible. 
The 1990’s witnessed a period of horrific bloodshed in Algeria, but although challenges still exist, the country has lately entered a period of relative stability. The current government now promotes an idea of ‘Berberitude’ as an alternative to either ‘Westernity’ or ‘Islamist Arabism’. This policy is manifested at a national level in arts strategies, film, theatre and music festivals, which promote  a generic Algerian ‘berber’ identity. 
This paper will trace the fluctuating relations between cultural politics and music in the emergence national identity and show how this new inclusivity is manifested in contemporary musical practices in Algeria.

Claire LEVY	> Session 10
Claire Levy is senior research fellow in musicology and deputy director of the Institute of Art Studies at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. She was a Fulbright winner (1994-95) and the author of Dialogical music: Blues, popular culture and the myths of modernity (2005), as well as of numerous articles and book chapters (in Bulgarian and English) on a variety of popular music issues, of several entries for the Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, co-author of the text book Music, culture, society (2001), editor of Music and cultural identity (2003) and Popular music today: Practices, approaches (2001). Her book Ethnojazz is forthcoming. Claire Levy teaches courses on popular music at New Bulgarian University and the Sofia University. She was the Member-at-large (1999-2001), the General Secretary (2001-2003) and the Chair (2003-2005) of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. E-mail: levy@cablebg.net

(Neo)Folk on club stage: Towards a post-ethnic perspective? 

While ethnomusicologists are busy to explore any tiny detail of the exotic Other (imagined ideally as the ‘charming primitive’), and popular musicologists seem to be more concerned about the cultural study of music, the actual processes take to unpredictable moves as if to illustrate that music is always “temporal, contested, and emergent” (Clifford, in the “Introduction” of Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography, 1986). No doubt, this statement gets new range of arguments in the modern cultural situation. The acceleration in migration and crossing of musical languages seems to blur not only the boundaries between ‘folk, ‘pop’, and ‘art’ as historically constructed domains, but also between narrowly constructed ideas concerning the issue of ethnicity and its relation to music. Such an assumption becomes evident while observing Bulgarian performers with different ethnic origins, experienced in folk, pop, jazz, classical music, wedding bands, or world music, who intertwine their creativities and open new perspectives before musical thinking. Drawing on the concept of hybridity and the understanding that music is not a possession (Middleton, “Musical belongings”, 2000), this paper explores recent development which I would call ‘from wedding playing to experimental music’. As observed in the music of Ikadem and Atesh Tayfa, performed on the stage of Sofia jazz club, this phenomenon features multiethnic line-ups and a style, based on variety of vernacular genres that further expands the effective fusion between ‘ethnic’ vocabularies. Based on anthropological observations, the paper develops the idea that such styles might be seen in the light of post-ethnicity (Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond multiculturalism, 1995) and argues as well on the question of possible new aesthetical vision towards the cultural Other.

Bernard LORTAT-JACOB	> Session 11
Bernard Lortat-Jacob is Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, and was during 14 years  Director of the Ethnomusicological Laboratory at the Musée de l'Homme. His works concern the Mediterranean area (mainly : Morocco, Sardinia, Albania, Romania) on which he has published several books and a great number of discs, including: Musiques en fête. Maroc, Sardaigne, Roumanie (1994), Sardinian chronicles (1994), Canti di passione (1996), and À tue-tête. Chant et violon au Pays de l’Oach, Roumanie (with J. Bouët and Speranta Radulescu, 2002). E-mail: lortat.jacob@free.fr

What constitutes a rich field of study for ethnomusicology?
[Text available in the Round table section]

Sílvia MARTÍNEZ GARCIA	> Session 5A
Silvia Martinez Garcia is Head of the Musicology Department in the Escola Superior de Musica de Catalunya and teaches Popular Music and World Music at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. Her main fieldwork is on popular music. In 1997 she collaborated with Ramón Pelinski on the re-study of a traditional repertoires performed in the Spanish province of Castelló. She has published one book on heavy metal music (Enganxats al heavy. Música, cultura i trangressió, 1999), numerous essays, and several chapters in books on ethnomusicology, popular music and pedagogy. At the present she leads a research project on Music and Migration related to Asian communities in Spain. E-mail: silvia.martinez@musikeon.net

Bollywood music experiences and peripheral diasporas

It’s well known that Spain was until 1970s a country from which people left, in successive migratory waves, looking for a job and a better life. Scarcely thirty years later, as a full European country, Spain has become a receiver of immigration coming from Latin America, Africa and Asia. This process has not been as progressive as in other countries like UK, Netherlands or France but abrupt and parallel to a more general globalization movement. Nowadays the new scenes created around most recently settled big communities, like Pakistani and Indian, are fascinating. Just a few years ago, Spain became part of the international networks that promotes official scene of Bollywood music with the first Sharuk Khan’s Tour coming to Spanish. At the same time, an informal and particular market has been growing and disseminating through neighbourhoods with a clear majority of immigrant population coming from those countries. A discreet and a-legal distribution net of video-clips, films and music nests in telephone calling Centres, food stores, Hairdressing saloons, and all kind of stores managed by- and oriented to Asian migrants. 
This phenomenon is well known in USA or UK. As a matter of fact, the Bhangra, one of the most representative musical genres in recent Indian popular music, was mixed in London and created by young Asian-British musicians. Nevertheless the immigrants settled recently in Spain, as well as in other peripheral countries (i.e. neither ex-colonialist and nor priority destination countries), develop cultural practices related to a double reference as a diasporic group: a) the original cultural context, with all its diversity and complexity, and b) the long-time settled communities in western countries, which provide supplementary meanings and references to help negotiate their identity and their new situation.
The musical practices provide situations to negotiate concepts like “modern”, “traditional”, “own”, “authentic”, etc. in front of Indian and Pakistani references and in front of those long-time settled communities in the Anglo-Saxon countries. This paper will expose my recent research on South Asian immigrant’s practices in Spain related to popular music’s, specifically focused on Bollywood’s soundtracks.

Anthony McCANN	> Session 12A
Anthony McCann works as Lecturer in Contemporary Folk Culture at the Academy for Irish Cultural Heritages of the University of Ulster. He has previously held teaching and research positions at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the University of Sheffield, Sheffield Hallam University, the University of Limerick, and the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage of the Smithsonian Institution. His PhD research, completed in 2002, focused on the expansionary character of the operations of the Irish Music Rights Organisation, a performing rights collection agency, from 1995-2000. Among his publications:  “‘Raising One Higher than the Other’: The Hierarchy of Tradition in Representations of Gaelic and English Language Song in Ireland” (with Lillis Ó Laoire , 2003). E-mail: at.mccann@ulster.ac.uk

Questioning educational strategies: Challenges of radical pedagogy in discussions about ‘Irish traditional music’

Scholars in the field of radical pedagogy have critically analyzed the role and effect of institutional education in our lives. Thinkers such as Paolo Freire, Ivan Illich and others have highlighted the negative contribution of many formal educational strategies to relations of domination, oppression, and dehumanization. The intense commodification of knowledge experienced in many educational contexts, they argue, can be profoundly disempowering. Illich (Deschooling society, 1970) calls for the disestablishment of the schooling system itself. More recently, Prakash and Esteva (Escaping education: Living as learning within grassroots cultures, 1998) make the case that formal education constitutes an assault on the values of traditional communities. They interrogate the relationship between the socializing power of education and a globalizing capitalist ethos, arguing that ‘education’ often constitutes an insidious continuation of colonial ideologies.
In postcolonial Ireland such concerns must be taken seriously. This paper is an opportunity to further interrogate the relationship between formal education and the value systems of vernacular or traditional culture in Irish contexts. It will critically address issues raised by the increasing presence of formal educational authorities in the discourses and practices of ‘Irish traditional music’. It is hoped that we can perhaps rethink the effects of formal education on the ways we understand the role of ‘folk’ and ‘popular’ musical practices in our lives, thereby coming to renewed understandings of the possibilities and politics of ‘tradition’. 

Kristin McGEE	> Session 2A
Kristin McGee has been an assistant professor of popular music at the University of Groningen since 2003. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2003 and is currently revising her dissertation on the all-girl bands of the 1930s and 1940s for a book to be published by Wesleyan University in 2007. Her book, entitled Some liked it hot: Jazz women, race and representation in film and television explores the relationship between media, performance and women in jazz. McGee’s other research interests include popular music of the South Asian Diaspora, European popular music and jazz films. McGee is also an accomplished saxophonist and has played with numerous fusion and instrumental groups in Chicago including Las Toallitas and Funkadesi. E-mail: kamcgee32@yahoo.com

Swinging the classics, Hazel Scott and Hollywood’s racial-musical matrix

By age four, piano prodigy Hazel Scott exhibited a tendency to absorb countervailing musical influences. Scott’s early indoctrination into the double worlds of conservatory classicism and Black popular theatrical music facilitated her codification of musical styles conceptualized as heavily gendered and racially distinct. Her subsequent and widely publicized 1930s’ appearances at New York’s integrated Café Society provided Scott with a model she would incorporate into her life-long professional career. Moreover, during the 1940s, Scott’s film appearances dramatically contrasted with prior Hollywood depictions of black female musicality (Cripps, Hollywood’s High Noon: Moviemaking & Society before Television,1997; Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: an Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, 1973; Carby, “On the Threshold of Woman’s Era’: Lynching, Empire and Sexuality in Black Feminist Theory”, 1985) as she became the first black female jazz musician to play herself, as an elegantly attired and innovative improvising soloist. Indeed, her rigid insistence upon similarly respectful characterizations of co-starring African American women caused Scott to be blacklisted from Hollywood for nearly 15 years. This paper explores the reception of Scott’s early profession career, and in particular of her radical proclivity for ‘swinging the classics,’ a practice whereby blurring proscribed racial and gendered musical boundaries paralleled Scott’s unheralded physical mobility in the entertainment world. By comparing Scott’s mass mediated filmed performances with reviews by white jazz critics and black journalists (Agee, “Pseudo-Folk”, 1958; Hughes, “Old Ghost revives atavistic memories in a Lady of the DAR”, 1948), I suggest that Scott’s insistence upon respectable, individualistic self-representation, her prolific incorporation of both classical and jazz idioms and her particularly physical performance style transgressed normative performative behavior, upsetting both middle class African American and purist white jazz sensibilities.

Simon McKERRELL	> Session 2B
Simon McKerrell is Head of Piping Studies for the BA (Scottish Music - Piping) degree at the National Piping Centre in Glasgow and is also a part-time lecturer at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, Glasgow.  He plays the Highland, Uilleann and Border bagpipes to an expert standard and is in regular demand throughout the world as a recitalist and teacher.  He was awarded the PhD in 2005 for a thesis that examined the concept of mode and aesthetics of competition solo piping in Scotland.  His research is grounded in performance experience and the experiences of musicians. E-mail: smckerrell@googlemail.com

Modern Scottish bands (1970-1990): ‘Cash as authenticity’

Coming from the folk revival in full flow at the end of the 1960s, their was an awakening by young traditional musicians that they could make a living from their music. There were already a number of highly successful young groups of singers and growing out of the success of the folk revival began the instrumental revival of the late 1970s and 1980s.  The principal success of the Scottish folk revival was the popularisation of folk music rooted in a renewed sense of nationalism.  However, it laid the foundations for the instrumental revival by also educating audiences and establishing many more venues for performance throughout Britain.  This made it financially viable for young traditional musicians to earn a living from their music.  Using the musical evidence and interview material, I argue that many of the successes and innovations in the 1970s and 1980s were driven by financial motives.  This contrasts with the folk revival ethos, primarily driven by political ideals and a search for cultural authenticity.  The needs of a touring band to play gigs and be ‘on-the-road’ led to some of the key developments of the time. For example personnel changes are often characterised by lack of choice; those who can commit to touring are in the band.  Eventually this established commercial success, as measured through record sales and cash from gigs, as the new authenticity which eventually prevailed over the earlier, ideological revivalist model of success based upon repertoire and style.  This is evidenced by the albums of the time, by the change in instrumentation, the new prevalence of composition over arrangement and the testament of professional traditional musicians.

Richard MIDDLETON	> Session 11
Richard Middleton is Emeritus Professor of Music at the International Centre for Music Studies, Newcastle University. Author of several books on popular music, including Studying popular music (1990) and Voicing the popular. On the subjects of popular music (2006), he was also a founding editor of the journal Popular Music and is co-editor of The cultural study of music: A critical introduction (2003). E-mail: richard.middleton@ncl.ac.uk

Back to the Future: Folk, People, (Who)Man
[Text available in the Round table section]

Irena MIHOLIć	> Session 4A
Irena Miholić is research assistant at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb. Her research interests include: traditional instruments and instrumental ensembles, music making, popular music, and music education. She is a member of ICTM and ESEM. Beside scientific work, she practices music making and teaches in a music school. Among her publications: “Dulcimer in musical life of Northern and Northwestern Croatia at the end of the Twentieth century” (2003); “Musicians and instrument makers” (2004). E-mail: irena@ief.hr

Where does folk music end and popular begin? Issues from field research in Croatia

In this paper I would like to present some of the frequently asked questions I get as an ethnomusicologist. 
During field research for my MA thesis in Hrvatsko zagorje region of northwestern Croatia, I tried to find some answers about the region's folk instruments ensembles, and I visited some of the local “festivals of folk music”. Because most of the songs performed there were newly composed (both lyrics and music), it was, in some cases, hard to find clear distinctions between folk music, as the people from that region call it, and popular (entertainment) music. But, when the musicians from that region present their “home” to “outsiders”, they usually do it through stage performances of "old music and dances", which are in most cases the choreographed ones. 
As an ethnomusicologist, I'm often asked to evaluate which of these “stage performances” are more authentic. But, how to judge authenticity? Why are these performances in the eyes of people closer to “folk” music than the “new” songs which really are performed in all kind of gatherings, especially informal ones? Why do they call these new songs “folk”? 
In this presentation I would like to raise a question which lurked and often resurged in my own research, that is : How can we (and should we) decide where folk music ends and popular begins.

Eoghan NEFF	> Session 2A
Eoghan Neff is currently researching for his PhD in Ethnomusicology at Cardiff University. He graduated in music from University College Cork, attaining the academic distinction of College Scholar and receiving the prestigious Sean O'Riada Memorial Prize, amongst others. In 2006, he graduated MA in Ethnomusicology at the University of Limerick where he examined the place of improvisation in Irish music. His current doctoral research concerns the history of the violin in Irish traditional music, being principally concerned with the role of ergonomics in musical practice. Eoghan Neff is also an established performer of Irish music, featured on many acclaimed albums and having won a number of national awards. E-mail: fiddling@eircom.net

Banish Misfortune: Edward Cronin and post-famine fiddling of Ireland

This paper concerns the fiddling tradition of Ireland during the late nineteenth century, and particularly that of Edward Cronin (b.1838). As one of the many Irish immigrants to Chicago following the Great Famine, Cronin eventually gained prominence for his involvement with Capt. Francis O'Neill's legendary collection of Irish folk melodies, participating in both the collecting and contributing of tunes. It is from O'Neill that we learn of Cronin’s extraordinary technical prowess and exemplary musical knowledge, in his opinion, being superior to those of his contemporaries. 
This paper will look at Cronin’s performance of the well-known double-jig Banish Misfortune. Taken from an O’Neill cylinder, this recording has unfortunately received surprisingly little attention in recent times. However, Cronin demonstrates here a musical palette that may challenge present-day expectations of performance practice during the late nineteenth century. Although like many of his contemporaries he was recognised as a musician for dancers, here instead playing with an unusual rhythmic inventiveness unsuited to the dance context. It rather demonstrates a virtuosity more appropriate to the concert stage.
This paper will provide a detailed musical analysis of the performance together with related contextual research stemming from documented sources of Cronin's additional performances, compositions, and manner. Edward Cronin's recording not only encourages a fresh examination of post-famine Irish fiddle music; it prompts a reconsideration of how we interpret evidence from literary sources divorced from any sound evidence (such as audio recordings) within the study of traditional or folk music of the past.

Laudan NOOSHIN	> Session 8
Laudan Nooshin is a Senior Lecturer in the Music Department at City University, London. Current research interests include contemporary developments in Iranian traditional and popular musics; gender issues, with particular reference to the work of women musicians in Iran; neo/post-colonialism, Orientalism and the politics of cultural representation; music and power; and music and cultural identity. Her recent writings have appeared as book chapters and as articles in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Ethnomusicology Forum and Iranian Studies. She has two forthcoming books: Music and the play of power in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia (edited volume), and Iranian classical music: The discourses and practice of creativity . E-mail: laadan@onetel.com

“We have to become universal”: Internationalist discourses and language choice in contemporary Iranian rock music

The post-1997 ‘cultural thaw’ in Iran and the ensuing relaxation of restrictions on local popular music has led to the emergence of a largely rock-oriented grassroots popular music movement in which musicians are able to circumvent official government channels largely by circulating their music through the Internet. Iranian rock is interesting for a number of reasons: as well as providing a forum through which musicians can express their views in the context of wider debates on democratisation and an emergent civil society in Iran, this music allows for the projection of alternative visions of Iranian identity in an increasingly globalised environment. In particular, through their musical and verbal discourses, many musicians seek to disengage themselves from the nationalist agenda which has long dominated aesthetic discussions of Iranian music.
One indicator of this trend is the increasing number of musicians choosing to sing in English rather than in Persian, something which is often justified in terms of ‘becoming universal’ and reaching non-Iranian audiences. Whilst the use of English has hitherto been unremarked upon in the context of cover versions of Euro-American songs, the deliberate choice of English for original songs by Iranian bands has sparked an intense debate which touches on deep-rooted anxieties about questions of national identity. Drawing on several periods of fieldwork in Iran, this paper will explore some of the issues raised by the debate over language choice and consider the implications in terms of competing visions of Iranian identity.

Kathleen J. NOSS VAN BUREN	> Session 12B
Kathleen J. Noss Van Buren is a Lecturer in Ethnomusicology in the Department of  Music at the University of Sheffield. She received her M.A. in 2002 and  PhD in 2006 from the Department of Ethnomusicology at the University of  California, Los Angeles. She also holds a B.A. in English and a  self-designed B.M. in Ethnomusicology from Lawrence University and  Conservatory of Music in Appleton, Wisconsin. Her primary research focuses  on uses of music in community education campaigns (such as to address  HIV/AIDS and children's rights) in Nairobi, Kenya. Broader interests include  music and dance of Africa and the African diaspora, the efficacy of music  and musicians in promoting social change, applied ethnomusicology, and medical ethnomusicology. Her publications include articles and book chapters  in Percussive notes, African Folklore: An Encyclopedia (2004), and Interacting with scriptures in Africa (2005). E-mail: k.j.vanburen@sheffield.ac.uk

Tradition, change, and multiplicity in contemporary musical life in Nairobi, Kenya

With a population of over two million people of diverse ethnicities, Nairobi, Kenya, is the largest urban centre in East Africa. The city’s continued growth has been fueled by large-scale movement from rural areas of Kenya to Nairobi. People from other parts of Africa, seeking employment opportunities or fleeing political insecurities, also migrate to the city. Furthermore, Asians, Europeans, and people from other regions of the world form a significant minority. Included in this mixing of peoples are professional and amateur musicians. To Nairobi, they bring their own musical heritages, and in the city they join other artists in trying to retain, refine, or find their musical voices. As styles co-exist, fuse, and clash, musicians debate the value of tradition and change and reflect on the future of arts in Africa.
Based on fieldwork in 2004 and 2007, this paper explores dialogues on tradition and change in Nairobi in relation to three events: (1) a performance (“The Ivory”) in 2004 by the group Arts Alive comparing the lives of ancestors and today’s urban residents; (2) the Drum Café, a series of workshops beginning in 2006 comprising drumming and discussions on cultural tradition and development; and (3) ongoing performances by school children in Nairobi. Discussion of these events is framed by perspectives from other performers and event organizers in Nairobi, as well as from scholarly literature in ethnomusicology, history, and philosophy (for instance, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Kofi Agawu, and Bethwell Alan Ogot) on the multiplicity of arts and life in Africa.

John Morgan O’CONNELL	> Session 10
John Morgan O’Connell is a Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at Cardiff University. He is a graduate of Oxford University, the Guildhall School of Music and UCLA, where he completed his PhD in ethnomusicology on Turkish music. He has also taught ethnomusicology at the University of Limerick, holding positions in Otago University and Brown University amongst others. His publications concern in principle the musical traditions of the Islamic world, at present completing a book on the alaturka phenomenon in Turkey and editing a volume on music and context in the Middle East. In 2004, he hosted the 15th ICTM Colloquium, an event that considered the place of music in conflict from an ethnomusicological perspective (published in 2007). This April, he will convene an international symposium at Cardiff University entitled: “National Ethnomusicologies: The European Perspective”. E-mail: oconnelljm@Cardiff.ac.uk

Old West, new East: Europe in ethnomusicology and ethnomusicology in Europe

This paper concerns the status of Europe in ethnomusicology and the standing of ethnomusicology in Europe. In particular, it will look at the emergence of Europe as an ethnographic ‘other’, a new East arising in the old West. On the one hand, it will examine the changing attitudes towards Europe in ethnomusicology, a transformation from a national study of music folklore to an international interest in music anthropology. On the other hand, it will look at the position of ethnomusicology in Europe, new programmes expanding and old programmes declining in different national contexts. In this matter, the distinction between the local and the global may still have significance for ethnomusicology, a national interest in cultural patrimony seemingly at variance with an international concern for scholarly exchange. While such a distinction may disclose different histories in ethnomusicology, it may also provide a productive tension for realising a new disciplinary vision. By manipulating established grids of distinction, this vision might find a common ground between folklore and anthropology, transcending an established dichotomy that has significance for ethnomusicology: that is, encompassing both the study of music as a product and the study of music as a process. In this way, European ethnomusicology has made the ‘folk’ once again ‘popular’ by embracing the liminal space that exists between the musicological and the anthropological approaches to the field.

Suzel Ana REILY	> Session 11
Suzel Ana Reily is a Reader in Ethnomusicology and Social Anthropology at Queen’s University Belfast. She obtained her PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of São Paulo in 1990. Her publications include: Voices of the Magi: Enchanted Journeys in Southeast Brazil (2002), the special editorship of Brazilian musics, Brazilian identities (British Journal of Ethnomusicology 9.1, 2000), The musical human: Rethinking John Blacking’s ethnomusicology in the 21st Century (2006), and the production of a website/CD-Rom based on John Blacking’s ethnography of the Venda girls’ initiation school. E-mail: s.reily@qub.ac.uk

Folk music, art music, popular music: What do these categories mean today?
[Text available in the Round table section]

Ian RUSSELL	> Sessions 5B, 6
Ian Russell is Director of the Elphinstone Institute at the University of Aberdeen. This institute specialises in Folklore and Ethnology (see www.abdn.ac.uk/elphinstone). His current research is focused on the traditional culture of North-East Scotland, including sacred singing, ballad singing, flute bands, free reed instruments, recitation, Travellers’ tradition, and the local craft of building model sailing luggers, known as ‘boaties’. He has also conducted extensive fieldwork into singing traditions in the English Pennines, especially Christmas carolling. E-mail: ian.russell@abdn.ac.uk

Between the sacred and the secular: Vernacular performance in North-East Scottish coastal communities

In this paper I aim to explore the complexities of the sacred and the secular dimensions of expressive culture in North-East Scottish fishing villages. I look at the way community hymns, gospel music, male voice choir performance, karaoke, religious addresses, and prayers are combined in a vernacular performance context that is manifested in religious soirées held in village/public/church halls. Here the evangelical hymns of Ira D. Sankey rub shoulders with praise songs of recent/local composition, male-voice close harmony singing contrasts with teenage female vocal duets, a guest preacher delivers an address, a ‘master-of-ceremonies’ cements the experience with jokes and anecdotes in a strong local Scots tongue, and ‘party’ refreshments are served. Certain hymns with motifs about the sea, loss of life, or danger, mostly dating from the nineteenth century, mark out the performance and clearly resonate with the local communities. Such traditions require a vital social basis for their continued social practice (Bohlman, The study of folk music in the modern world, 1988). Thus, not only is the soirée experience understood in terms of its musical constituents, but also the nature of the whole event is examined from the perspective of artists’ performances and audience receptions. The role of the soirée is considered within contemporary contexts, with references to its continuities and innovations, in relation to the community within which it interacts (observing hierarchies and the role of gender), and how cultural distinctiveness is manifested through it. In an anti-modernist stance, Abrahams (Everyday life: a poetics of vernacular practices, 2005) identifies the spirit of cultural insurgency demonstrated by folklore studies in its focus on everyday culture, noting that: ‘In vernacular vigour we trust’. The principles of this discourse are summed up by Berger and Del Negro (Identity and everyday life: Essays in the study of folklore, music, and popular culture, 2004) in a series of programmatic statements, for example, that all people are capable of creative activity, that scholars should not impose external value systems, and that good ethnography foregrounds participant perspectives.

Roshan SAMTANI	> Session 1A
Born in Kumasi (Ghana), Roshan Samtani received a Bachelor’s degree in jazz studies from the renowned jazz conservatory William Paterson University (Wayne, New Jersey).  His research interests include: improvisation, cognition and performance, jazz, flamenco, the music of India, the music of the Arab world. He received a PhD (Ethnomusicology) from Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island) in 2006. In addition to performances at numerous venues in the United States and Spain, he has performed at various festivals including the Copenhagen International Jazz Festival (Denmark), the Ezkaray Jazz Festival (Basque Country), The El Escorial Festival (Madrid), The Sarah Vaughan Festival (Newark, New Jersey). Among his works: “Nuevas y viejas tradiciones en el estudio del flamenco”, in La Ciudad es  para ti: Nuevas y viejas tradiciones en ámbitos urbanos (2004). E-mail: roshan_samtani@yahoo.com

Contemporary flamenco guitar performance: A case study in musical change

Flamenco is a syncretic genre that developed in the province of Andalucia (Spain) in the 19th century.  Created during the course of performance, it is an eloquent example of the way in which remembered repertoires are constantly renewed and reinvigorated through the process of improvisation.
This paper examines contemporary flamenco guitar performance in two regions of Spain: Madrid and Jerez de la Frontera (Andalucia).  Musical change in guitar performance has been historically associated with guitarists based in Madrid, the capital. On the other hand in Jerez de la Frontera (a town known as the ‘cradle’ of flamenco), a more austere style of performance serves as the standard for aesthetic excellence.
My goal is to illustrate the important musical changes that have occurred in this sophisticated performance style over the past century.  The broader conclusions drawn from this study suggest that the discourse of authenticity still plays a central role in the definition(s) and evaluations of contemporary flamenco.
The fieldwork for this study, anchored in the methodologies of holicipation (to use a term recently coined by Andrew Killick) and participant-observation, was carried out in Madrid and Jerez de la Frontera (Spain).

Susana SARDO & Jorge CASTRO RIBEIRO	> Session 1A
Susana Sardo is assistant Professor at the Department of Art and Communication, Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal. She received her PhD in Ethnomusicology at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, where she studied with Salwa El Shawan Castelo Branco. Her research interests include music of Goa and the Goan diaspora, music and the post-colonial approach, and music and the lusophonic world, including Portugal. She has conducted fieldwork and archival research in Portugal and in India. Her publications include: (as coordinator) Journey of Sounds, a 12 CD collection published in 1988, about the musical landscape created by the Portuguese postcoloniality; Velhas palavras novas leituras: Poesia popular e melodias da região de entre Douro e Vouga, 5 CD with booklet + 5 DVD collection about musical processes in five administrative regions of the North of Portugal, Saint Mary Lands (co-edited with Jorge Castro Ribeiro). E-mail: ssardo@ca.ua.pt
Jorge Castro Ribeiro is lecturer at the Department of Art and Communication, Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal. He is current Ph.D candidate in Ethnomusicology at the same university, under the orientation of Susana Sardo and co-orientation of Salwa El Shawan Castelo Branco. His present research falls on cape-verdian music among immigrants in Portugal, viewed as a post-colonial result, specially the social role of batuque, a choreographic, poetic and musical genre associated with women and the particular culture of Santiago island of Cape Verde. He has carried fieldwork in Cape Verde, Madeira archipelago, Brasil and Portugal. His publications include: Cabo Verde: Dez granzin di tera. (1998) one CD included on the 12 CD collection The Journey of Sounds; Portugal: Festivities songs and dances from Minho and Madeira; Velhas palavras novas leituras: Poesia popular e melodias da região de entre Douro e Vouga (co-edited with Susana Sardo). E-mail: jribeiro@ca.ua.pt

Village with Traditions: Searching, learning and training for authenticity in contemporary Portugal

In October 2005, during a research project about musical processes in five administrative regions of the north of Portugal (Lands of Santa Maria), we observed a private a restrictive event, promoted by a federation of regional folk associations, whose label was “Village with Traditions” (Aldeia com Tradições). During one full day, about 200 persons, members of five of more then 2000 folkloric Portuguese ensembles (Ranchos Folclóricos), created a nineteen century scene in which they sung, played, danced, handcrafted, worked, cooked and so on, and trying to rebuild the landscape of what they called “the authentic tradition”. What is interesting and remarkable in this event – which is annually repeated and represents similar initiatives which take place in other places all over the country – is that during the whole day the performers and the public are the same persons. It is organized to remember the past and, by consequence, to recreate the folklore background that is alive in the performer’s imagination. 
This paper tries to share our experience of ethnographic work and to inquire the new challenge of the contemporary world that offers to the folkloric groups the necessity to rebuild the past by using the social and the historical narratives as decisive conditions to define performance identity. 

Shayna SILVERSTEIN	> Session 4B
Shayna Silverstein is currently pursuing a PhD in ethnomusicology at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation project explores affective publics, cosmopolitanism, and sectarianism in the context of contemporary vernacular music and dance practices in Lebanon and Syria. Shayna regularly consults and contributes to public and private sector cultural endeavors, including the Silk Road Project and Tabadol Project.  She received her B.A. in History from Yale University in 2000. Shayna also plays violin with Middle Eastern and Western art music ensembles. E-mail: smeis@uchicago.edu

“New wave” dabke: Popular music and media in Lebanon and Syria

In Lebanon and Syria, a professional singer's career depends on his or her versatility in front of audiences who ascribe stylistic authenticity to particular localities on the basis of dialectical wordplay that engages themes such as love, nature, morality, and sectarian-specific eulogies. While live performances of these practices, which include improvisatory vocal genres ( e.g. ’ataba, dal’ouna, huwar and mawwal), have been recorded for playback on cassettes and CDs since the early 1980s, a generation of singers has emerged in the last decade that constitute what is popularly referred to as “new wave” dabke.
Today, music and video recordings of new wave dabke circulate in public spaces and domestic environments as a distinct commodity form in a niche that materialized between formal and informal media markets in the late 1990s. Based on ethnographic interviews and commercial recordings, I consider the production of small media in an informal network of (re)production, distribution and consumption in order to ask how participation in these processes produces a discourse on musical aesthetics that blurs distinctions based on genre, form, and style.
In this paper, I explore how these mediations participate in modern subject-formation, that is, how cultural practices are embedded in social relations that relate, in complex ways, to geopolitical boundaries, sectarian identity, and class relations. By situating contemporary vernacular practices of new wave dabke within Lebanese production networks, I suggest how the production of musical aesthetics is a discursive process that marks social change and adaptation within and between sectarian communities.

Christian SPENCER ESPINOZA	> Session 2A
Christian Spencer Espinosa has graduated in Sociology (1997) and Music (2001) at Catholic University, in Santiago de Chile. He has studied the relationships between popular and classical music, the Chilean cultural industry during the XXth century, and the chilean way toward nationalism in researches with different approaches (musicological, sociological and historical). As a musician, he has developed musical activity as a guitar player performer and especially as a cuatro venezolano performer in some latinoamerican, chilean and venezuelan music groups. He is member of the Chilean Musicological Society (SChM) and IASPM (Latinamerican Branch). At the moment he is studying the Ph. D. Musicology at Universidad Complutense in Madrid (2nd year) with a Scholarship of the Chilean Government. E-mail: canazo@gmail.com

Ubiquitous, representative, national and transgressive: The folk-popular zamacueca in Chile in the middle XIXth century

The zamacueca was the most important partner dance during the first part of the 19th century in the Andean zone, which included Chile, Argentina, Perú and Bolivia. Its common practice was enlarged from the city to little towns and countrysides in rural areas and gave rise another relevant genres. However, it was in Chile where the genre achieved more development, taking roots in upper, middle and low classes and spreading out into private and public spaces.
Considered folk and popular music at the same time, the zamacueca took its metric poetry roots from the spaniard romance songbook, also used the instrumentation of traditional chilean songs (harp, guitar, percussion). On the other hand, such as popular music, it was able to be in the theatre, the street, the chingana (a day/night handmade tavern built with branchs and cloth materials), at parks and in the Chilean, Peruvian and Argentinean salones, even at the opera.
This double condition -sometimes ambiguity- allowed the zamacueca to have four special and convergent characteristics: the ubiquitous, because of its systematic growth not only in the small town but also in the south american bigger places; the qualities of representative, since it was danced and performed by upper, middle and lower social classes; national, due to the popular idea that it had to belong to “all Chilean people”; and finally it was a transgressor genre since he managed to hold and perpetuate a lascivious choreography inside upper classes spaces (salón).

Britta SWEERS	> Session 3B
Britta Sweers is Junior Professor of Ethnomusicology at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater, Rostock (Germany). Having studied musicology, philosophy, and anthropology in Hamburg and Bloomington (USA), she also worked as online editor for Folk/World Music. Her main research is focused on the transformation of traditional music. She has undertaken fieldwork in various Anglo-American regions and in north-eastern Europe. Her publications include Lontano – ‘Aus weiter Ferne’: Zur musiksprache und assoziationsvielfalt György Ligetis (1997), Electric folk: The changing face of English traditional music (2004), and “The power to influence minds: German folk music during the Nazi era and after”, in Annie J. Randall (ed.), Music, power, and politics (2005). She was also guest editor of The World of Music titled Contemporary British music traditions (46/1, 2004) and is co-editor of the Frankfurter Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft. E-mail: B.Sweers@T-Online.de

The different layers of global perception: World music and the music of the Baltics and Tatarstan

Using examples from the Baltics and Tatarstan, this paper first examines the relationship between the music of the so-called world music sphere and local sound realities. The Australian-Tatar world music artist Zulya became central for conveying a picture of Tatar traditions—although she had not been part of local Tatar music scenes. It might thus easy to argue that the music of the (western-oriented) world music sphere presents an artificial fusion of modern popular styles with selected attractive traditional elements. This argument has often been used in the discourse that emerged with the various folk rock genres (particularly in Britain). Yet, as becomes apparent with the Latvian post-folklore group Ilgi, the situation is much more complex: For example, folk rock bands are often part of specialized local scenes that are only vaguely noticed within the global world music sphere.
Moreover, Latvia and Tatarstan provide good starting-points for a re-examination of the historical dimension of globalization. Musical globalization has frequently been equated with a negative impact of western popular music. Yet this music has often been viewed as a fresh alternative to the previously dominating Soviet culture in Latvia and Tatarstan. Since the 1990s, both regions have developed new national identities that also fall back on the idea of distinct vernacular music traditions—that likewise serve as identification elements within the world music sphere. However, a closer historical examination reveals that the cultures of both regions have been shaped by various early global influences over many centuries.

Hwee-San TAN	> Session 3A
Hwee-San Tan is Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at University College Dublin. Her main area of research is Buddhist music and ritual in China and Taiwan. She is currently examining the issues surrounding globalization of Chinese Buddhist music. She has published widely in both English and Chinese. She is a board member for both CHIME (European Foundation for Chinese Music Research) and the Centre for Intercultural Musicology at Churchill College (Cambridge). She will be organising the 12th International CHIME Conference at UCD in October 2007. E-mail: hwee-san.tan@ucd.ie, ht5@soas.ac.uk

Sounds of the Human World: The new authentic sounds of global Buddhist liturgy?

Liturgical singing plays an intrinsic role in Chinese Buddhist rituals to enhance the religious community’s spirituality and religiosity. The musical style of the various liturgies is believed to have changed minimally for several centuries, and whatever music might have been added in recent centuries is stylistically of a piece with, and thus indistinguishable from, its predecessors.
However, the early 20th-century Buddhist reform movement led by the eminent monk Taixu brought new developments to Chinese Buddhism and its music. As part of this reform, new Buddhist songs in a more contemporaneous style were composed to unite lay and monastic Buddhists and to serve as a didactic and proselytising tool. Taixu’s reform and the song movement, curtailed on the mainland under communism, are being perpetuated in Taiwan by Xingyun, the founder of the largest order in Taiwan. Since the 1950s, Xing Yun has been encouraging the growth of the Buddhist song movement, culminating in the worldwide Buddhist song competition, Sounds of the Human World, launched in 2003. In this last, believers and non-believers, professional musicians and amateurs from various parts of the world vie in composing and performing new songs in the spirit of Humanistic Buddhism.
This paper will explore the phenomenon of the new Buddhist song movement from Taixu to Xing Yun. We will examine how traditional liturgy has been affected, how practitioners talk about this new music, and how modernization and globalization pose new challenges to the social and cultural formations of the Chinese Buddhist establishment. These aspects will allow us to consider the questions of tradition, innovation and reconstructed authenticity and how ethnomusicology confronts the challenges of new changes.

Shzr Ee TAN	> Session 5B
Shzr Ee Tan is a Research Student Fellow at the School Of Oriental and African Studies (London), studying Taiwanese aboriginal song. She is also interested in musics of the Chinese diaspora, cultural politics of new media platforms and music-scapes in Singapore, subjects on which she has published (Chime, Ethnomusicology Forum; Journal of American Folklore). E-mail: shzree@yahoo.com; shzree@soas.ac.uk

Singing the other exotic: Taiwanese aborigines ‘take’ China, Japan and America

The aborigines of Taiwan, a Malayo-Polynesian people, number about 400,000, or 1.7 per cent of the island’s population. Music has been one of the main vehicles for the articulation of aboriginal identity in the face mainstream Han-Chinese culture. While the musical representation of this marginalised identity is a multi-faceted process that can be detected in anything from agricultural worksongs to tourist shows, a space for counter-representation has also opened up. Specifically, in traditional and neo-traditional settings of ritual folksong and karaoke, foreign texts, gestures and melodies have been inserted and sung for reverse-exotic value. The co-option of these musical signifiers, sometimes to the effect of party tricks or irony, reflect different ways in which aborigines image the Other. This Other, in many cases, refers not simply to the Han-Chinese people, but also Japanese and American culture at large. The musical embodiment of these foreign gestures and melodies, against the backdrop soundscapes of an already-marginalised aboriginal world, reflects a complex system of inter-cultural relationships. Through the semiotic manipulation of insertions like the word mijiu (“rice wine” in Mandarin), or cha-cha-cha sung to an aboriginal karaoke beat, or the indigenisation of a complete Japanese song, aborigines have learnt to make politico-musical ‘takes’ on Chinese and Japanese colonial culture. The process is further complicated by the knowledge that the truly traditional does not exist first place, and how foreign elements are exactly re-framed in a contemporary aboriginal culture that has not escaped Sinicization, Japanisation and Americanisation. Are we listening to a traditional aboriginal song with added ‘Chinese’s elements, or really retro Japanese pop, given an exotic aboriginal twist? Beyond counter-representation of former colonial masters, can singing of the exoticised Other also be a parodied self-effacement of aboriginal cultural health (and its many woes), or an aspiration to Greater America in emulation of Elvis and Tom Jones? This paper looks at several case studies of aboriginal song in the field and in the record industry, and seeks to explore the deeper cultural politics hidden within the mix of local and foreign signifiers.

Aspasia THEODOSIOU	> Session 5A
Aspasia Theodosiou is a temporary lecturer in anthropology of music at the Department of Music, Epirus Institute of Technology, Greece, having gained her PhD from the University of Manchester, where she is holding the post of the Honorary Research Fellow. She has conducted extensive field research with Gypsy musicians on the Greek –Albanian border in NW Greece. Her research interests include place, location, belonging, nation-state, borders, ambiguity/marginality, embodiment, music-playing practices, flexibility, reflexivity, recognition/mis-recognition, Gypsies. Her current research focuses on Greek musicians in Istanbul and involves questions about the nature of musical exchanges and separations, and the social relations and conflicts, across the Greek – Turkish borders. At present she is working on a book manuscript about Gypsy music-making in the context of the Greek nation-state and its relatively recent emphasis on reasserting regions and ‘authentic’ regional cultures in a multicultural nationalism. E-mail: aspasia.theodosiou@manchester.ac.uk, cissy_theo@hotmail.com

“Initiatives with a difference”: Music festivals, ‘authenticity’ and plasticity on the Greek-Albanian border

Consider what happened when, in the midst of the overall ‘populist’ landscape of summer folk musical performances organised all around the area of Greek-Albanian border, in Epirus (NW Greece), a different kind of musical festival was well funded, advertised and organised. Promoted mostly by the supporters of a broadly anti-folklore ‘new-aest hetic’, the festival, as it came to be known, was faced with the daunting task to assert the difference between ‘authenticity’ and ‘plasticity’, and teach the locals ‘aesthetic culture’.
While the concept of ‘authenticity’ is an important category in cultural debates and has emerged in parallel with the notion of modernity (e.g., Bayart, The Illusion of Cultural Identity, 1996; Handler, ‘Authenticity’, in Anthropology Today, 1986; Herzfeld, The Body Impolitic: Artisan and Artifice in the Global Hierarchy of Value, 2004; Heynen, ‘Questioning Authenticity’ 2006), it is often critiqued for its vagueness. This paper aims to contribute to the project of specifying the dynamics of a new kind of ‘authenticity’ by identifying how, in cultural arrangements such as the festival described above, ‘authenticity’, and especially its interconnections with ‘culture’, ‘nature’ and ‘aesthetic pleasure’ are being reworked, the interventions invited in their name, and the manner in which those become intertwined at different nodes of social hierarchies, and are effectively imbued with authority.

Cheryl A. TOBLER	> Session 2B
Cheryl A. Tobler is a University Fellow and doctoral candidate in ethnomusicology at the University of Maryland at College Park, USA.  A performer of Irish and Old-Time music, she is co-author of A guide to the Crooked Road, a book on regional music tourism in southwest Virginia, USA. She is currently writing her dissertation on the musical identity of the Scottish Travellers. E-mail: ctobler@umd.edu

Musical codes in Scottish Traveller ballads: Maintenance and survival of a musical tradition

Members of the Scottish Traveller community, a historically peripatetic group, are known as excellent folksingers and storytellers, such as Jeannie Robertson, Belle Stewart, and Duncan Williamson.  Most research, however, has focused on individual Travellers or on Traveller social issues, with less research conducted on specific aspects that identify their music as pertaining to a wider Traveller community. As many Travellers, however, have now become settled, leaving their nomadic way of life, their traditional means for sharing and transmitting this music is threatened.  But what aspects of Traveller music identify it as being from the Traveller culture, especially since the tunes and ballads Travellers are known for are also staples of the non-Traveller folk music community? Their music is coded with elements of their culture, codes that are also visible in their performance practices despite being affected by the influence of early folklorists and a changing way of life.  Through musical analysis and interviews, I will examine in this paper these codes and explore what Travellers themselves say about their own music and its survival.

Elizabeth TRAVASSOS	> Session 10
Elizabeth Travassos is Associate Professor in the Center for Arts and Literature at the Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (Unirio). She earned a PhD in Social Anthropology from the National Museum at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (Ufrj), in 1996. Her main interests are Brazilian popular/folk music, folklore and ethnography, art as ideology in the modern societies. She is the author of Os mandarins milagrosos: arte e etnografia em Mário de Andrade e Béla Bartók (1997) and Modernismo e música brasileira (1999). With Cláudia Matos and Fernanda Medeiros, she edited the book Ao encontro da palavra cantada: poesia, música, voz (2001). E-mail: etravas@alternex.com.br

Vocal styles and social processes

The interest in ‘folklore’ has increased among Brazilian professional musicians during the last decades. However, an analysis of recorded and live performances identified with this revival of traditional repertoires and genres suggests that the professional interpretations of folk music give small attention to the vocal styles of the sources. While musical instruments, texts and tunes seem to be easily learned by professional musicians, the vocal delivery marks a strong border between them and the ‘folk’. How do ethnomusicologists deal with this phenomenon? On the one hand, concepts such as ‘folklore’ and ‘popular culture’ have been correctly historicized and practically lost all their substance. The notion of ‘folk culture’ was banished from any serious debate in the social sciences. On the other hand, the particularities of the vocal delivery cannot be dismissed as idiosyncrasies of individual singers. They cannot be ‘explained’ by the internal analysis of the musical code, neither can they be attributed to dialectal variations of spoken Portuguese. As Alan Lomax argued many decades ago, it is not difficult to find out empirically observable correlations between singing styles and cultural groups – the problem is to describe the nexus between voice, society and culture.
My purpose in this paper is to discuss some of the methodological tools available to cope with the problem of the voice as a site of social processes. I will focus particularly on some aspects of the controversial cantometrical method (Alan Lomax) and on the ‘vocal anthropology’ (proposed by Steven Feld and others).

Pete WILBY	> Session 1B
Pete Wilby is Acting Degree Leader for BA Media and Communication (Public Relations) at the University of Central England in Birmingham. He teaches theory and practice in PR, Music Promotion and Journalism. He has researched and published in several media-related areas including the popular press, radio and PR. Pete is also a semi-professional musician and music promoter and is currently undertaking research for PhD into regulated cultural practices of amateur music, with a focus on folk and traditional music in the UK. E-mail: Peter.Wilby@uce.ac.uk

Regulating the amateur: traditional music and cultural control

This paper examines the discourses of folk music within the ‘amateur’ network of folk clubs and music and song sessions across the UK. It provides details of research in progress into the tensions between the largely unregulated practices of amateur folk music and three external agencies which appear to impinge upon them:
1. The music industry as a commercial enterprise setting ‘professional’ standards in performance, organisational practices and technical resources.
2. Administrative and bureaucratic practices of regulation ranging from the PRS, local authority licensing, etc. to cultural agencies seeking to promote folk as a form of creative or community artistic expression. 
3. 'Mainstream' popular culture and its transformation of ‘folk’ culture into commodity forms, e.g. for Irish theme pubs, medieval banquets, etc. 
I argue that these agencies represent a form of cultural control seeking to regulate amateur music practices and the experiences of performers and audiences. Based primarily on participant-observation study of folk clubs in the English Midlands the research examines how discourses of ‘mainstream’ culture, commodification and political management are apparent in amateur folk events and asks whether these undermine the perceived integrity of amateur music as a genuine form of cultural expression. 
The research acknowledges studies of folk music as forms of cultural expression (e.g. Blacking, How musical is man?; Finnegan, Oral tradition and the verbal arts) and of generic and structural developments in forms of traditional music (e.g. Oakley, The devil’s music; Sweers, Electric folk). It develops themes identified in Brocken’s study of the British Folk Revival, through its localised focus on a folk music circuit and its experiential, ethnographic approach.
Frances WILKINS	> Session 2B
Frances Wilkins is a PhD research student at the Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen. She is working under the supervision of Ian Russell on a documentation and research project concerning Sacred Singing traditions in the fishing communities of North and North-East Scotland. This project aims to record and analyse current practices, placing them historically and contemporaneously within the faith communities and understanding them in their social and cultural contexts.  Previously she completed a degree in Music at the School of Oriental and African Studies (London) and in addition to her studies teaches Scottish traditional music and plays concertina and fiddle regularly in dance bands and other music groups in Aberdeen. E-mail: frances.wilkins@abdn.ac.uk

Let the Lower Lights be Burning: The development of gospel singing in the fishing communities of North-East Scotland

Evangelism became firmly entrenched in coastal communities in North-East Scotland during the mid-nineteenth century and the time of the 1859-60 ‘Great Awakening’, and many gospel hymns relating to the movement first became popularised in the area during the visits of American Evangelists Dwight L. Moody and Ira D. Sankey in 1874. Previous to this, music in worship consisted predominately of psalmody conforming to Calvinist ideals of congregational singing dating back to Reformation times, with the Scottish Psalter in its various editions as the only source for singing in public worship. The aim of this paper is to discuss the changing status of gospel singing and singers among evangelical Christians in North-East Scotland from the introduction of gospel hymns up to the present day. Among issues discussed will be the growing availability of recorded material, recording technology, increasing emphasis on the solo singer and the growing nature of individual expression, and introduction of instruments. Considerable importance will be placed on the observation that these fishing communities have fostered an environment in which personal expressions of devotion through individual interpretations of hymns is actively encouraged and admired amongst the population. By way of illustrating this, I will be using as a case study recordings of different interpretations of the same hymn, Let the Lower Lights be Burning (written by Philip P. Bliss in 1871). In doing this, I will be exploring how the hymn has been reinterpreted through time by discussing different singing styles, instrumentation, and melodic and textual interpretation.

Credits

Convenor	Dr Goffredo Plastino
		International Centre for Music Studies
		Armstrong Building
		Newcastle University
		Newcastle upon Tyne
		NE1 7RU
		Tel: +44.(0)191.222.3578
		Fax: +44.(0)191.222.5242
		E-mail: goffredo.plastino@ncl.ac.uk

Conference Committee	Dr Ian Biddle
		International Centre for Music Studies
		Newcastle University
		E-mail: i.d.biddle@ncl.ac.uk

		Dr Caroline Bithell
				Martin Harris Centre for Music and Drama
		University of Manchester
		E-mail: Caroline.Bithell@manchester.ac.uk

		Dr Vic Gammon
		International Centre for Music Studies
		Newcastle University
		E-mail: Vic.Gammon@ncl.ac.uk

		Dr Goffredo Plastino

		Dr Tina K. Ramnarine
		Chair of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology
		Department of Music, Royal Holloway
		University of London
		E-mail: tina.ramnarine@rhul.ac.uk

		Dr Ian Russel
		The Elphinstone Institute
		University of Aberdeen
		E-mail: ian.russell@abdn.ac.uk

Secretary	Catherine Todd
		International Centre for Cultural & Heritage Studies
		Bruce Building
		Newcastle University
		Newcastle-upon-Tyne
		NE1 7RU, UK
		Tel: +44(0)191. 222.3995
		Fax: +44(0)191.222.5564
		E-mail: BFEConference@ncl.ac.uk

Web site		www.ncl.ac.uk/sacs/music-conferences/BFE2007/

Web master	Richard Elliott
		International Centre for Music Studies
		Newcastle University

Technician	John Ayers
		International Centre for Music Studies
		Newcastle University

Assistants	Francisco Bethencourt-Llobet
		Thomas Hodgson
		Maria Martínez Gabaldon

Photos	All the photos are details of the Sardinian Prepared Guitar, an instrument conceived and played by composer, free improviser and ethnomusicologist Paolo Angeli. Information regarding Paolo Angeli, his music and his publications can be found at: www.paoloangeli.it
The photographs are by Nanni Angeli. More details about his photographic works can be found at: www.nanniangeli.com