Contemporary Ethnomusicology

Contemporary work in ethnomusicology examines the music and the musical lives of numerous individuals and societies. We are as likely to study people living in our own home locations as those once considered exotic Others, and we range across the whole spectrum of music making, from contemporary avant-garde and popular styles to longer-standing classical and vernacular musics, following musicians as they move through and around the world. One unifying theme in the ethnomusicological approach is the method of participant-observation: typically, we work closely with our musical contacts over a sustained period. We often learn performance alongside others in the tradition as a means of building expertise and sharing experience. In this and our other enquiries, we aim to build up an understanding not only of the music itself but also of the society or group in question, looking particularly at their understandings of music and the role music plays in their broader lives.Applications to examine a particular kind of music in a fixed location remain welcome, but there is also scope for new research into emerging themes, such as

• Musical memories and musically imagined worlds among expatriate Chileans in Britain
• Urban ethnomusicology: theory, method and practice
• Musical learning, competition and critique among club DJs
• Biography and ethnography: comparative historical ethnomusicology with particular reference to musicians in early nineteenth-century Calcutta, Beijing, Vienna and Boston
• Multi-site study: tracking the movement of Congolese artists between Kinshasa and Paris
• Other ethnomusicologies: how disciplinary assumptions variously shape objects of study
• Composition as a technique of ethnomusicological research