Call and Response: SEM President’s Roundtable 2016, “Ethnomusicological Responses to the Contemporary Dynamics of Migrants and Refugees”

Abstract

in East Africa and in the UK reminds us that the current "migrant crisis" is perhaps only named as such because it is in Europe. Her research on music as oral history and public testimonial has sought to highlight local responses to forced displacement and post-conflict social integration, and explores new epistemological approaches to re-center the needs, interests, and agencies of affected people. I would like to start my talk with two scenarios. The first involves a concert that I attended recently in a small church in London that was hosted by the Anglo-Azerbaijani society, whose membership comprises some of the 7000 ethnic Azeri refugees who settled in Britain in the 1980s and 90s following the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh (Azerbaijan- Armenian border).The first thing I noticed upon entering the hall were the massive speakers located on either side of the stage. As expected, when the music finally began -two accordions, keyboard, tar, darbuka and singer -the volume was indescribable. Yet I seemed to be the only one in the audience who was physically cowering under the force of the sound. When, after a couple of numbers, every musician on stage indicated to the sound engineer to increase the volume, the distortion became so unbearable that I politely escaped through a side exit, leaving behind a spirited crowd happily singing along to their favorite tunes.

Memory, Knowledge, and Experience: North Koreans in Britain Reflect on the Music and Dance of Their Distant Homeland

“…Writing has often linked to exile (Scheding and Levi 2010) or diasporic practices (Ramnarine 2007; Solomon 2014), although recent scholarship points to how writing about migration is at a crossroads. In respect to this, the structural-functionalist language of continuity and adaptation associated with nation-states, identity, and tradition has been largely abandoned (Stokes 2020, 1, 7–8); academic discourse and the language of development agencies are increasingly at odds with each other (Impey, in Rasmussen et al 2019, 287–9); and “system world” language is increasingly removed from “lifeworld” language (Frishkopf, after Habermas, in ibid., 304–5), limiting the scope for collaborative writing that addresses social needs (Aksoy 2019; Shao 2021).…”

Awakening the Soul with the Left Hand: Narration and Healing in Vietnam’s Diasporic Traditional Music

“…9. To my great surprise, Reyes's contributions to refugee studies do not appear in the proceedings of the 2016 and 2017 Society for Ethnomusicology President's Roundtables on refugees and migrants (Rasmussen et al 2019). One runs the risk of silencing narratives of the refugee experience when one constantly reinvents the discursive wheel with each refugee and migrant crisis.…”

Adelaida Reyes: Pioneer in the Field of Music and Forced Migration

“…Sometimes ethnomusicologists had to leave their own countries because of conflicts, or they returned to conflict zones to try to find ways to combine ethnomusicological research with confronting hate and ameliorating the suffering caused by war (Pettan 2015). In other cases, ethnomusicologists were just confronted with the fact that partners in their research projects were themselves arriving in their (the ethnomusicologists') own countries within the mass refugee movements (Rasmussen et al 2019).…”