From the Editors

From the Editors,

Welcome to Volume 20 of Ethnomusicology Review! This volume includes a featured article and four peer-reviewed works on a wide variety of topics within the field of ethnomusicology. This journal volume marks thirty-one years since the beginning of Ethnomusicology Review (formerly Pacific Review of Ethnomusicology), and in the past few years we’ve expanded our Sounding Board to be an up-to-date space for book and music reviews, fieldwork updates, discussions on historical topics, archiving, popular music, and jazz.

Volume 20

For our twentieth volume, we are happy to offer four peer-reviewed articles and one invited piece. Each of these essays addresses unique and important arenas in the field of ethnomusicology, and many of them take advantage of being able to present in an online format. Jeff Roy’s journey alongside of the Dancing Queens, a transgender performance group in northern India, addresses issues of identity reformation through singing and dancing. Through prose of his travels and participation with the Dancing Queens, pictures, and links to videos of performances, Roy offers us the opportunity to view the staging of song and dance as a means for the performers to re-encode their way of life by transitioning from “illicit” street performances to the more respected arena of the stage. Also addressing issues of identity, Christian Rinaudo brings us to Veracruz Mexico where the “black” or “African” dimension of mestizaje is addressed primarily through popular music instead of activism. Rinaudo employs the concept of symbolic boundaries to demonstrate how those of Afro-Carribean cultural have sought to acknowledge their heritage in an environment that has typically paid more attention to the mixing of Spanish and Indian groups of people.  Moving back to the other side of the Atlantic, Fernando Barrera provides us with a Spanish-language article examining both compositional and non-formal influences in the adoption of flamenco by Spanish indie bands. Barrera accomplishes this through the lens of intertextuality and a detailed examination of song lyrics. Ryan J. Bazinet brings us an audio essay featuring Trinidadian Shango Feasts as experienced in Brooklyn, New York. Bazinet demonstrates the critical nature of music’s role in this religious practice through using Michael Tenzer’s concept of periodicity  to show how musical time and ritual time are the same. Finally, our invited piece by Ryan Koons and Elisabeth Le Guin leads us into a dialogue about the construction and performance of the UCLA Early Music Ensemble’s 2015 Winter Quarter concert featuring pieces derived from Indigenous American and European interaction. Koons and Le Guin use this venue to help us examine issues of “authenticity,” accuracy, intercultural sensitivity while designing an engaging musical performance. 

Sounding Board

The Sounding Board is an ever-evolving entity and this year we have continued our tradition of adding new areas of interest. New pieces are published multiple times per month and this gives us the opportunity to keep up with current musical events and newly published works. Through the Sounding Board we continue Ethnomusicology Review’s legacy of being a place where many voices are heard. If you have not already, we encourage you to peruse our past selections from the year. Our subsections this past year include:

What’s Goin’ On: News, Editorials, and Reviews, curated by Schuyler Whelden, features reviews and editorials related to performance events, books and media.     

Notes from the Field, curated by Rose Boomsma, includes stories from fieldwork from people working all over the world.

From the Archives, curated by Maureen Russell, delves into interesting content from UCLA’s expansive Ethnomusicology Archive.

Space is the Place: Ethnomusicology of Jazz, curated by Dean Reynolds, combines ethnomusicology with jazz studies.

Historical Perspectives, curated by Kristina Nielsen, focuses on thoughts about music from the past.

Bring the Noise: Popular Music Studies, curated by Otto Stuparitz, includes anything and everything from the field of popular music studies.

Ecomusicology, curated by Ben Cosgrove, combines the studies of music, nature, and culture in its essays. 

Crossing Borders, curated by Leen Rhee, is transdisciplinary, combining a myriad of different areas with the studies of music and culture.

Most of you reading this will find something that interests you, along with a subsection that you could consider contributing to. Pieces go up year round and we encourage you to contact us about ideas! Ethnomusicology Review continues to be an Open Access resource and our current journal will be available online, in a downloadable pdf, and in print early next year. Thank you for all who contributed through submitting articles and esssays, editing, and advising.We look forward to dialogues being created through the comments section in our journal volume and on the Sounding Board.