From the Editor

This issue of Ethnomusicology grapples with some of the big questions facing ethnomusicologists—how best to rethink familiar research practices such as translation and music analysis through decolonization, how ethnography and quantitative research methodologies complement one another, how individuals and communities navigate precarity and sustainability, and ultimately, how we might create a more equitable and resilient field. Among these articles, two authors directly address the COVID-19 pandemic and its impacts on communities and researchers. As editor, I want to note that this journal issue was not in any way designed as a thematic issue. Rather these articles reflect the kinds of questions that ethnomusicologists continue to ask in the wake of events that may not seem as current to readers in 2024 as they did four years ago in 2020—for example, travel restrictions and public health measures during the pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter protests around the world, and calls for equity and social justice within academia and other large institutions. These events continue to reverberate across the field. In no way have we resolved these social issues; however, the authors prompt readers to ask questions of ourselves and those around us, evaluate what we've done so far, consider new research methodologies, and make changes.In the opening essay, “On the Decolonial Otherwise of Translation: Alexander J. Ellis, Mário de Andrade, and the Contingency of Form,” Michael Iyanaga examines the ways in which the act of translation impacts meaning within ethnomusicological writings. Using translations associated with foundational figures in ethnomusicology, the British scholar Alexander J. Ellis and the Brazilian scholar Mário Raul de Morais Andrade, Iyanaga probes the ways in which the act of translation shapes interpretation and has the potential to challenge entrenched ways of thinking. Max Katz's article, “The Scholarly Ustad: Hindustani Music's Muslim Hereditary Professionals and their Textual Traditions,” argues that Bengali, Hindi, and Urdu texts from the 20th century enriches an understanding of how Muslim hereditary musicians in Hindustani music have contributed to and valued scholarship. Katz's work focuses on historiography, text, and translation in a multi-lingual music community in ways that enrich earlier depictions of Muslim hereditary professional musicians’ scholarly and musical practices.Juan Diego Díaz answers music theorist Philip Ewell's call to rethink music analysis in “From Clave Ethnotheory to Clave Theories: A Path Towards Decolonizing Musical Analysis.” Díaz uses clave-based music, including his own experiences dancing salsa in Colombia, Canada, and the United States, as a case study to explore how ethnomusicologists can rethink music analysis through a decolonial frame. Xi Zhang and Ian Cross present a study in which software-based tone analysis is integrated with ethnographic methodology to center interlocutors’ musical experiences in the study of music and linguistics. In “Singers’ Realizations of Linguistic Tone in Chaozhou Song,” Zhang and Cross investigate the ways in which the tonal contours of the Chaozhou language shape singers’ approach to pitch. Zhang and Cross interview the singers, emphasizing the singers’ accounts of how they learned the songs and what they value in performances of them, and then analyze note-internal pitch-change within this framework to better understand the relationship between tonal language and music.W. Donnie Scally provides an ethnographic account of a community already navigating challenges familiar to many—an aging population and increased risk from climate change—as the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in March 2020 in “Music, Shared Histories, and Futures in Toyama City, Japan: Owara Kaze no Bon and Celebrating a New Tram Connection in the Early Pandemic.” Scally considers the juxtaposition of the traditional autumn festival, Owara Kaze no Bon, as an important annual renewal of social bonds, and a brief but loud festival commemorating the opening of a tram line, a long-sought infrastructure project. Scally positions these events within the unfolding pandemic and evaluates how his early return from the field and pivot to digital ethnography changed the project itself.The consideration of the ways in which researchers and interlocutors are mutually entwined yet differentiated by their social roles and economic positionality is the theme of Tamar Sella's “Sour Solidarities: Musicians, Academics, and Precarity in Pandemic's Wake.” Sella analyzes the ways in which the independent musicians she interviewed as part of the Society for Ethnomusicology's “Musicians in America during the Covid-19 Project” navigated drastic changes to the music industry in the US during the early part of the pandemic. Musicians found themselves doing new kinds of digital labor while earning less income. Sella, however, argues that ethnomusicologists should be attentive not only to the precarity faced by their interlocutors, but also to the kinds of precarity that academic workers face in universities. Solidarities forged across social roles that have long defined ethnomusicological research may be tenuous, but Sella points out that recognizing these structural relationships offers pathways to imagining a transformation of the field and the institutions in which many of us work.Lei X Ouyang explores the ways in which specific moments give rise to more robust change in “‘Systems are Changeable’: Reading Moments through Movements.” Ouyang considers the reverberations of now familiar moments of violence and discrimination, whether in the United States or within the microcosm of the field of ethnomusicology. She proposes frameworks developed by the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective and others to suggest ways in which ethnomusicologists might respond: How might ethnomusicologists draw upon our training to face uncomfortable situations and forge new solidarities? How might we imagine academic practices that offer more care and intention than replicating past practices in the field of ethnomusicology?Careful readers may note that at the time of publication the journal is without a Sound Recording Review Editor. The editorial board, review editors, and I are rethinking the ways in which this position can encompass a wider range of sound media, including podcasts and digital-only releases.Every issue involves a great deal of teamwork and collaboration that includes the authors who share their expertise, the anonymous peer reviewers who provide guidance, the editorial board who provide oversight, review editors Jennie Gubner, Andrew Mall, and Sarah Morelli, assistant editor, Abby Rehard, and the staff at the University of Illinois Press, especially production editor, Kate Kemball. Their work is fundamental to the journal.I also thank Stephen Stuempfle, Executive Director of the Society of Ethnomusicology. Stephen has been the journal's biggest champion, and I deeply appreciate his support and insights during my time as editor. On behalf of the journal, I wish him a happy retirement. We'll miss him greatly.Finally, please submit your work to the journal, and if asked to review, please consider this essential service to the journal!

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