Conference report by Jim Hickson (University of Oxford)
The BFE Annual Conference 2025 was set in the beautiful surrounds of Cambridge, the two main venues – the Faculty of Music and St John’s College – rendered even more pleasant by the lovely sunny weather and breathtaking blossoms throughout the city, no doubt specifically arranged for us by this year’s fabulous organising committee. There was an especially high turnout this year – ethnomusicologists came from across the globe, and there was a healthy mix of the green and the venerable, from undergraduates to professors emeriti and all in between. It was also a pleasure to welcome scholars from our sister disciplines such as anthropology, ethnochoreology, and museology, from which relationships we all stand to benefit.
The BFE Committee at the 2025 Annual General Meeting. Photo by Laudan Nooshin.
The theme of the annual conference this year looked to our relationships with the future. This broad topic allowed for many interesting interpretations of the meanings of the future, and the ways in which musicians, ethnomusicologists, and others affect and are affected by the flows of events in time. There were those that dealt with long-term futures, such as Georgina Born, whose keynote ‘Music and AI Futures’ looked at how we as a discipline might shape the future through interdisciplinarity and use of burgeoning technology. Others dealt with short-term futures, such as Courtney-Savali Andrews and Thomas Talawa Prestø, whose collaborative paper ‘Do The Water Dance!: Water Drumming as Selfpolyfication and Multitemporal Practice Between the Black Atlantic and Black Pacific’ explored the ways in which performers directly interact with the imminent future in the present, creating a constant creative dialogue between the two. And others viewed how fabulation and reimaginings of the past (whether playful, cynical or unintentional) can be used to make powerful and impactful statements on the present and new ways to think about the future, such as in Marié Abe’s keynote ‘The Poetics of Mishearing and South-South Imaginaries’ and Jake Blount’s paper ‘In the Breath of the Dead: Remixing Black Uchronia in Spirituals, Work Songs, and Avant-Garde Metal’. And of course, it is not possible to create our future if we do not survive the present, as Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta illustrated in his keynote ‘Queer Nightlife Matters: Participatory Research and Grassroots Organising in Times of Crisis’, on how ethnomusicologists can use their work to protect and uplift communities in a time of global emergency. Each of these interpretations allow the past, present and future to collapse into a single practice unbound by strictly linear conceptions of time.
Panelists discuss minorities musical futures in the US and UK. Photo by Fiorella Montero-Diaz.
Thoughts of the future in both music and ethnomusicology were also clearly at the forefront of our minds even outside the papers and keynotes. Many Q&As and discussions over coffee veered towards the subjects of AI, machine learning, and large language models. It’s clear that these are emotive topics, with many of us having strong opinions for or against the usage and implications of such technologies. Whether positively or negatively, actively or passively, we as a field will need to reckon with these developments during the coming years.
BFE Chair Fiorella Montero-Diaz (left) with BFE members Yuiko Asaba, Thomas R. Hilder and BFE Membership Liaison Officer Min Yen Ong.
Aside from the stated theme of the conference, several interesting through-lines presented themselves organically, such as ethnomusicologies on human relationships to food and food-spaces (Rowan Bayliss Hawitt, Edoardo Marcarini, Achintya Prahlad, Laura Teresa Spence, and Shzr Ee Tan); brass bands (Khadeeja Amenda, and joint papers by Ricardo Alvarez & Paulina Bronfman and Carolin Müller & Perminus Matiure); and topics surrounding Afro-centrism, Black futurity, and Afro-diaspora (Genevieve Allotey-Pappoe, Jeff Bowersox, Lauren Eldridge Stewart, Birgitta Johnson, Alisha Lola Jones, Gayle Murchison, Wayne Weaver, Emmanuela Wroth, and the above-mentioned Blount and Andrews & Prestø). A personal highlight was a paper by Wei Chen, ‘Echoes of Self: An Autoethnographic Study of Identity and Cultural Expression in Qzone Music’, a delightful auto-ethnography wherein the researcher looked at the music she posted to social media website Qzone as a teenager as a way to examine the curation and negotiation of digital public identities – a fascinating study that has repeatedly come to mind in the days following the conference.
Cambridge University Samulnori Society Concert in memory of Alexandra Leonzini. Photo by Fiorella Montero-Diaz.
And we know that the BFE conferences aren’t just about the rigorous academic discourse. The programme was also full of fun, relaxing, and celebratory events. Thursday saw a touching tribute to much-loved and much-missed Cambridge PhD student Alexandra Leonzini, who died last year, and a performance by the Cambridge University Samulnori Group to raise money for the Alexandra Leonzini PhD prize in her memory (you can contribute at https://www.philanthropy.cam.ac.uk/give-to-cambridge/music). On Friday we celebrated the life and career of Ruth Davis, holder of the first named ethnomusicology post in the UK, with memories and gratitude offered by a panel of distinguished colleagues, friends, and former students, followed by a fancy conference dinner hosted by Selwyn College, enlivened by beautiful a cappella songs by Emorja Roberson and Achintya Prahlad. Saturday saw the long-awaited return of the SEM ice cream social in the afternoon, and the evening rounded off with an open-mic session followed by dub ‘n’ dancing from the MessenJah Music Sound System in the Cambridge Guildhall.
2025 Annual Conference dinner at Selwyn College. Photo by Fiorella Montero-Diaz.
The conference came to a close on Sunday with a panel discussion featuring each of the keynote speakers, as well as BFE Chair Fiorella Montero-Diaz and Alisha Lola Jones of the Cambridge Local Organising Committee. The conversation underscored and synthesised the themes of the conference and give us a lot to think about in the year to come. A massive thanks to the University of Cambridge’s organising committee for BFE 2025: Vanessa Paloma Elbaz, Dunya Habash, Alisha Lola Jones, Peter McMurray, Jacob Olley, Rashel Pakbaz, and Steve Wilford. Bring on next year!
BFE folks enjoying lunch in the spring Cambridge sunshine. Photo by Laudan Nooshin.