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SEM NewsletterBarbara Smith HonoredContinued from page 1koto, she introduced ethnic music performance classes into the MusicDepartment’s curriculum. Recognizingthe value and potential of ethnomusicology at the University of Hawai‘i, shealso designed lecture courses and education workshops. She established themaster’s degree program in ethnomusicology in 1960.Smith has been active in nationaland international organizations, such asthe International Council for TraditionalMusic-UNESCO, Society for Ethnomusicology and the Music Educators National Conference. She held high officein the International Council for Traditional Music, College Music Society,Study Group on Musics of Oceania, andSociety for Ethnomusicology. In 1986her peers honored her with an invitation to present the Charles Seeger Memorial Lecture, the prestigious keynoteaddress at the national meeting of theSociety for Ethnomusicology. In 2001,the Society awarded her the title ofHonorary Member.She has also contributed in quietways. She assisted in the organizationof the University Micronesian Club andhelped them produce a recording oftheir music. She organized a number ofleadership seminars for artists and artsadministrators at the East-West Center,participants of which are now in national arts positions in their own countries. Most recently she undertook thefinal editing of the Queen Lili‘uokalaniSong Book after the death of previouseditor Dorothy K. Gillet, a colleagueand close friend. Her dedication andcontribution to local communities havenot gone unnoticed. In 1969, she received the state of Hawai‘i Governor’sAward for the preservation of HawaiianLanguage, Art and Culture, and in 1983she was publicly recognized as a “pioneer” by a Resolution of the City Council of Honolulu.The program on April 29 began at3:00 p.m. It included congratulatoryspeeches by university officials, chair ofthe Board of Regents, and a presentation of a mele inoa (name chant) composed and performed by master chanterKa‘upena Wong. Guests, including UHpresident David McLain, UH Manoachancellor, campus unit representatives,community leaders, educators, formerand present colleagues, and the Smithfamily were treated to performances bythe UH Gamelan Ensemble, UH Gagaku,and Hawaiian hula performed by students in the department.Barbara Smith giving a speech at the ceremony during which the Amphitheatre andEthnomusicologyWing of the Department of Music at the University of Hawai‘i,Manoa was dedicated to her name. April 29, 2006.32006 Seeger LecturerContinued from page 1ments began with music studies thatincluded voice, violin, and piano. Thatconservatory background has facilitatedefficient communication with othermusic colleagues, and has been especially beneficial for issues simultaneouslyrelevant to ethnomusicology, dance ethnology, and anthropology. During herdoctoral studies at the University ofHawai‘i at Manoa, Kaeppler recognizedthe centrality of expressive culture tounderstanding the Pacific Region. Thedissertation in anthropology, The Structure of Tongan Dance (1967), was herfirst major contribution to that understanding. Although the Kingdom ofTonga continues to be her primaryresearch focus, she is active and productive concerning other areas ofPolynesia, including traditional Hawai‘i.In 1967, she joined the Anthropology Department at the Bishop Museum(Honolulu). At the same time, shetaught ethnomusicology courses on thePacificfor the University of Hawai‘i atManoa. In 1980, she received a nationalcalling to her present position, Curatorfor Oceania, at the Museum of NaturalHistory, Smithsonian Institution, inWashington DC.Dr. Kaeppler is a pioneer withbreadth. As dance ethnologist, shedeveloped a system of dance analysisthat identifies culturally significant unitsof movement—the kineme; it has become a useful methodological tool forcomparative studies of movement anddance in other parts of the world. Ascultural anthropologist, she has exploredissues of aesthetic, examining intersensemodalities relative to Tongan aesthetics, identity, and cultural specificity. Ascurator, her 1978 exhibition at the BishopMuseum “Artificial Curiosities” was signal. A pioneering odyssey of re-discovery, detective work, and negotiation,her efforts successfully located and assembled 18th century Hawaiian objectsfrom museums and private collectionsthroughout the world, including (at thetime) politically sensitive parts of Eastern Europe, and all the areas whereCook stopped, such as the northwestcoast of America. As wordsmith, shehas contributed the phrase “airport art”to current discussions of tourism, popular culture, and property rights.Continued on page 48

4SEM NewsletterBecoming EthnomusicologistsOn the New InterdisciplinarityBy Philip V. Bohlman, SEM PresidentIt’s surely been perplexing for all ofus: What ethnomusicologists callinterdisciplinarity often bears little resemblance to the interdisciplinarityclaimed by others. Ethnomusicologistscite their past, the intellectual history inwhich music took its place among somany other cultural practices and phenomena. Interdisciplinary thinking hasnaturally resonated with the combinedart forms of the natya-sastra in SouthAsia or the multilayered presence ofmusica in the medieval quadrivium.Our more recent disciplinary forebearsembraced comparative method andmoved deftly between and among morerather than fewer disciplinary realms(see, e.g., Nettl and Bohlman 1991).Ethnomusicologists not only studyin the different departments of the academia, but they assume teaching positions that naturally spill across the departmental borders. We publish andcreate in a vast array of forms anddiscourses, and we muster a vast arsenal of methods and skills to do so.Applied ethnomusicology, no less, ispredicated upon a professionalinterdisciplinarity, a conviction thatethnomusicology’s multidimensionalitycan and does make a difference farbeyond the practice of music. This ishow we perceive our interdisciplinarity,always already a motivation for why wechoose to become ethnomusicologists.If I dare to claim interdisciplinarity asfundamental, even natural, in ethnomusicology, few within our discipline wouldtake issue. The more pressing issuewould be ensuring that the traditionalinterdisciplinarity be maintained andenhanced (cf. Bergeron and Bohlman1992, and Cook and Everist 1999).Interdisciplinarity elsewhere, however, looks very different. It insists onits innovation, presented as a challengeto the academy because of new partnerships, which together aim to redress theshortcomings of the past (see, e.g.,Nelson and Gaonkar 1996). It dividesthe disciplines between those clingingto the singular disciplinarity of the pastand those joining forces to move intothe future. Not surprisingly, ethnomusicology has welcomed the recent turntoward interdisciplinarity, and manyethnomusicologists have turned eagerlyto the new partnerships.How curious, then, that the interdisciplinarity that we have practiced for solong has been largely ignored. Howperplexing, then, that ethnomusicology’spassage across disciplinary boundariesis only one-way. How disturbing, even,that the failure of other fields to recognize our interdisciplinarity has becomeso very quotidian: at my own university,indeed, a three-year Mellon Foundationproject on “The Fate of the Disciplines”at its humanities institute failed entirelyto include ethnomusicology and a music department that strives toward intensive and extensive interdisciplinarity. The key difference, I dare say, liesin an anxiety about survival, borne bythe word “fate.” Ethnomusicology, inits new interdisciplinarity, has long agomoved beyond that anxiety.In this column, I reflect on twodifferent forms of interdisciplinarity, twodifferent chronotopes, or time/places.It is the second of these, which I believedeserves to be called the “newinterdisciplinarity,” that we claim whenwe choose to become ethnomusicologists, and my reflections will, understandably, turn in that direction duringthe course of the column. While preparing to write about ethnomusicology’sinterdisciplinarity, I have been verysurprised to discover that otherinterdisciplinarities were, comparativelyspeaking, rather limited in scope andquite conservative in reach.First of all, if one undertakes a searchthrough library and internet referencesources, one turns up surprisingly fewsubject or title listings that refer directlyor indirectly to interdisciplinary study.More often than not, the works onedoes find are the products of conferences or institutional endeavors that aretesting the waters for the feasibility ofrecent or potential alliances. At one endof a continuum of such alliances arestudies of interdisciplinary methods inthe cognitive sciences (e.g., Kline 1995,and Flem et al. 1998); at the other endthere are attempts to assess and systematize the alliances within new multidisciplinary fields, such as cultural studies(e.g., Nelson and Gaonkar 1996, andAnderson and Valente 2002).Across the continuum, there is aconcern for issues of borders—disciplinary and cultural—and ownership—personal and discursive (cf. Aleksandrowicz and Ruß 2001, and Strathern2004). I refer to these issues quitedeliberately as “concerns,” and in thissense they differ from the issues thatethnomusicologists address in their workon interdisciplinarity, which far morefrequently express the daring of experiment and the optimism of moving intounexplored domains of knowledge.Even when they are cautious about pastachievements and the need for evenmore sweeping interdisciplinarity, ethnomusicologists bring a celebratory toneto the challenges of their field (see, e.g.,the essays in Stobart, forthcoming).Perhaps because of the anxiety towhich I have been alluding, the methods that might constitute the continuumof our colleagues in other fields tendtoward the tentative. The standard titleformula includes some recipe for “interdisciplinary approaches to ”, or itestablishes a sense of distance by observing “interdisciplinarity in .” Weare not always sure whether an authoror editor adopts interdisciplinarity asher own. Quite the contrary, manyscholars seem unwilling to give themselves wholly to the new scholarshipthey are assessing. The anxiety, clearly,circles around the dilemma of claimingtoo much. Breadth rather than depthcontinues to provide the safest ground.The interdisciplinarity we witness inmany fields coalesces around an objectthat is subject to “approaches,” and anobjectifying discipline of which interdisciplinarity is one of many constitutive parts. In this sense, ethnomusicology looks very different. It is not theobject, “music,” that becomes the focusof an approach. “Music,” as it did in the

SEM Newsletternatya-sastra or the quadrivium, hasmultiple meanings and ontologies, andthe subject positions that individualsand collectives bring to its creation andperformance are diverse rather thansingular. “Music” is disciplined in manyrather than few ways, and interdisciplinarity affords many rather than fewways of realizing it. As we seek throughout our lifetimes to discipline music, werealize that it can never be reduced toan object.Signaling the shift from an old to anew interdisciplinarity in ethnomusicology was a complementary shift fromobject to subject, from music as a selfcontained sonic object to music as adiscursive field. Constituting that discursive field ethnomusicologists havecome to recognize, is the complex ofborders, indeed, the common groundprovided by the in-betweenness of theprefix “inter.” Interdisciplinarity in ethnomusicology, therefore, results fromthe fluidity represented by in-betweenness, and it resists adhering to the fixedqualities implicit in the singularity of anisolated discipline. The critical issuesfor ethnomusicology lie in the complexnature of the “inter” as a signifier ofchange and multidimensionality.As we embark upon the second halfcentury of SEM’s history we recognizethat the domains of ethnomusicology’snew interdisciplinarity have becomesites of practice in quite different ways.Primarily to suggest some points ofdeparture to which each reader of theSEM Newsletter will add his or her ownsites of in-betweenness practice, let mesuggest an initial six that are particularlyimportant in my own work: (1) themultiple domains between ontologiesof music; (2) performance; (3) representation; (4) geographies of worldmusic; (5) ideology; and (6) politics.These initial domains of in-betweenness stretch between the old and thenew interdisciplinarity, but they do notdo so in a narrowly teleological way, forthey retain much of the old just as theyremold it to shape the new.The domains provide fields for generating practice and metaphor, thuslinking discourse and activism, andensuring that our interdisciplinarity isrestive and engaged. Take, for example, the fourth domain, which mayseem at first glance pedestrian, conservatively clinging to threadbare notionsof area-studies and nationalist parochi-Signaling the shift froman old to a new interdisciplinarity in ethnomusicology was a complementary shift from object tosubject, from music as aself-contained sonic object to music as a discursive field.alism. As a domain of in-betweenness,however, the crucial questions becomenot those of border, but rather of border-crossing. Local styles and repertories are not isolated for special claims ofexceptionalism, but rather broadenedinto regional and global mixes. Diaspora and displacement are recalibratedby music to re-chart the multiple histories of modernity.The domains of in-betweennessrarely connect the old and the newdisciplinarity in neat or convenient ways.Ontological questions become discomfiting, for example, in the current USimperialism that silences musics andexpressive practices that voice opposition and resistance, particularly throughthe promulgation of false representations of Islam. Clearly, the in-betweenness of the domains becomes extensively multidimensional, with the ontological and representational spilling overinto the ideological and political. Performance, as a public act, unleashes thepolitical; representation inevitably expresses the ideological. Cultural attributes claimed as tangential to musicby many—identity, race, violence—notonly mark music but come to disciplineit, forcing ethnomusicology to respondthrough the new interdisciplinarity.Have I simply arrived again at thestarting point of this column, admittingthat interdisciplinarity has differentmeanings for ethnomusicology? Yesand no. On one hand, I have pushedthe argument beyond what might be acomfortable recognition of uniqueness,even pyrrhic pride in the admission thatwe were there first. Still, I, for one, takevery little comfort in being different forits own sake. On the other hand, Ibelieve it is an essential quality of thenew interdisciplinarity that its domainsof in-betweenness have formed notsimply to be taken for granted. The5present challenge has become one ofclosing the gap and realigning muchthat has been separated by the schismsrealized by disciplines insisting on pervasive otherness. Fundamental toethnomusicology’s new interdisciplinarity is the activist impulse that leads us toadopt disciplinary practices that caneffect change, not simply accept it.Ethnomusicology’s interdisciplinarity,perhaps, really is distinctive. It is crucial, as we become ethnomusicologists,to recognize that distinctiveness and toengage it in such ways that others willnot shy from its critical challenge, butinstead embrace it as a new interdisciplinarity that is truly shared by many.Works CitedAleksandrowicz, Dariusz, and HansGünther Ruß, eds. 2001. erdam: Rodopi.Anderson, Amanda, and Joseph Valente,eds. 2002. Disciplinarity at the Fin deSiècle. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Bergeron, Katherine, and Philip V.Bohlman, eds. 1992. DiscipliningMusic: Musicology and Its Canons.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Cook, Nicholas, and Mark Everist, eds.1999. Rethinking Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Flem, Lydia, et al., eds. 1998. Interdisciplinarités. Paris: Seuil.Kline, S. J. 1995. Conceptual Foundations for Multidisciplinary Thinking.Stanford: Stanford University Press.Nelson, Cary, and Dilip ParameshwarGaonkar, eds. 1996. Disciplinarityand Dissent in Cultural Studies. NewYork: Routledge.Nettl, Bruno, and Philip V. Bohlman,eds. 1991. Comparative Musicologyand Anthropology of Music: Essays onthe History of Ethnomusicology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Stobart, Henry, ed. Forthcoming. TheNew (Ethno)musicologies. Lanham,Md.: Scarecrow. (Europea: Ethnomusicologies and Modernities)Strathern, Marilyn. 2004. Commonsand Borderlands: Working Papers onInterdisciplinarity, Accountabilityand the Flow of Knowledge. Wantage:Sean Kingston.

6SEM NewsletterAnnouncementsAnthropology of Music in Mediterranean CulturesThe study group on the Anthropology of Music in Mediterranean Cultureswill hold its 7th meeting in Venice,hosted by the Fondazione Ugo e OlgaLevi, June 28-30, 2007. The theme willbe “Cosmopolitan Cities and MigrantMusics.” This is the first reconvening ofthe group after Tullia Magrini, founderand soul of it, so prematurely passedaway in Summer 2005. The meeting isan opportunity for the people whomore closely shared Tullia’s interests tomeet again, to discuss the future of thegroup and of its publication Music &Anthropology. Those interested in attending the meeting may contactMarcello Sorce Keller at (email)[email protected] and Willemina de Hen-BijlInstrumental Collections at DukeUniversityIn March 2005, the Duke UniversityMusical Instrument Collections officiallywelcomed the arrival of the Frans &Willemina de Hen-Bijl Collection ofMusical Instruments.ProfessorFerdinand J. de Hen, Belgian organologist and ethnomusicologist, acquiredthe collection during his numerous research expeditions. The collection ofover 200 instruments from Africa, theAmericas, Europe, East Asia, India, theMiddle East, and others, is named inhonor of his parents. The Duke University Musical Instrument Collections islocated at the Mary Duke Biddle MusicBuilding, East Campus, Department ofMusic, Durham, North Carolina; (tel)919.660.3320; (fax) 919.660.3301.From the World and TraditionalMusic section of the British Library Sound Archive in collaboration with Topic Records Just over five years ago, the Worldand Traditional Music section signed anagreement with London record publisher, Topic Records, to produce CDsof music from its collections. Thiscontract was renewed for a further fiveyears in November 2004. To date wehave brought out 15 CDs, with thenewest three hot off the press thisspring.Alan Lomax: Mirades MiradasGlances, edited by Antoni PizàAlan Lomax (1915-2002) was one ofthe most important song collectors ofthe 20th century. In 1952, he visitedSpain in order to record the extant folktraditions of the country in a fieldtripsponsored by the BBC. The materialscompiled during his fieldtrips aroundSpain were used in the Columbia WorldLibrary of Folk and Primitive Music issued in the 1950s on LPs and re-issuedmore recently on CDs by RounderRecords. Alan Lomax: Mirades MiradasGlances presents the first compilationof Alan Lomax’s beautiful photographsof musicians taken during his 1952 tripto Barcelona, Mallorca and Ibiza. Thebook includes transcriptions of his personal diaries and a CD with recordedselections cross-referenced with theportraits. (Barcelona: Lunwerg /Fundacio Sa Nostra, 2006; 157p. ill.;31cm; ISBN 84-9785-271-0; in English,Spanish, and Catalan). Women of Egypt 1924-1931: Pioneersof Stardom and Fame (compilation andnotes by Amira Mitchell). TSCD931Among the great Egyptian singingstars of the 1920s, Umm Kulthum is oneof the few remembered. Of the womenwho were once her arch-rivals andwhose fame extended from Syria toMorocco, barely their names are recalled, and even less so their music.Attracted to a burgeoning artistic sceneand a receptive audience to femaleper

SEM Newsletter 3 koto, she introduced ethnic music per- formance classes into the Music Department’s curriculum. Recognizing the value and potent