Dear BFE friends, 

For various reasons, the BFE Committee has decided that the BFE’s Annual General Meeting will not be held as usual at the annual conference in Paris. Instead, an Extraordinary General Meeting (EGM) will be held in London just before the Paris conference on Tuesday 30 June at SOAS from 6.30pm to 7.30pm. 

The EGM will be held in room G3, just inside the main SOAS entrance on the left (https://www.soas.ac.uk/visitors/location/).

After the EGM, wine and soft drinks will be served and there will be a screening and discussion of my film Hanoi Eclipse: The Music of Dai Lam Linh (http://www.der.org/films/hanoi-eclipse.html) from 7.30pm to 8.45pm, also in room G3.

We would very much like for you to participate in the EGM and actively contribute to the future of the BFE, so please save the date. Further information about the agenda and business of the EGM will follow closer to the meeting.

Please book your tickets using this Eventbrite link: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/british-forum-for-ethnomusicology-egm-scr...

We look forward to seeing you there! 

The British Forum for Ethnomusicology

Laudan Nooshin  explores the ways in which musicians talk about creativity and the practices by which new music comes into being in Iranian Classical Music: The Discourses and Practice of Creativity. The book seeks to understand musical creativity as a meaningful social practice and examines how ideas about tradition, authenticity, innovation and modernity in Iranian classical music form part of a wider social discourse on creativity and national and cultural identity.

The Société Française d’Ethnomusicologie (SFE) and the British Forum for Ethnomusicology (BFE) invite abstracts for our joint conference in Paris, 2-5 July 2015.

In recognition that this will be the first joint meeting of the two institutions (and the first time the BFE will be holding its annual meeting outside the United Kingdom) we have chosen the theme

Border Crossings/Boundary Maintenance

The theme identifies several areas of scholarly reflection and inquiry to be undertaken. For contemporary ethnomusicologists, ‘boundaries’ invoke a myriad of solid, porous and imagined lines to be negotiated, crossed, or dissolved. On the one hand, they suggest the national, legal and political borders – and the cultural and linguistic differences – that once largely determined our notions of Self and Other. On the other hand, they bring to mind the abstract binaries that shaped comparative musicology and early ethnomusicology, such as Western/non-Western, past/present, sacred/secular, rural/urban, traditional/modern, oral/written, and female/male.

Within the overarching theme of ‘boundaries’, we welcome abstracts that address some of the following sub-topics:

1) Music crossing boundaries

In the first place, the conference will explore how music crosses boundaries, and is inhibited from doing so: how practices, genres, instruments, ideas, and musicians themselves move between contexts, as well as how they are resisted and shut out.

2) The bounds of tradition in music

Another privileged site of investigation will be musical tradition. The very idea of tradition has typically suggested boundaries, and possibilities that lie ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ them. What is held to be outside any given tradition is not always foreign to it, of course, for it often forms the context to which the tradition responds and sets itself in distinction. And, of course, elements from outside are often welcomed.

This theme also offers opportunities to think about the impact that ever quicker global circulation has had on music, about how traditions are patrolled and defended in this context, and about the ways traditions draw (or do not) upon a seemingly overwhelming array of new possibilities. At the same time, the conference offers chances to consider how traditions have always had insides and outsides, and how, in many times and places, boundaries have been subject to negotiation.

3) Crossing categories

The theme of boundary crossing and maintenance presents an opportunity to contemplate ideological boundaries: categories that exist in the musical practices we study and in the way we as scholars have framed these practices: sacred/secular, urban/rural, and so on. How are these categories asserted and challenged? What moves across these lines, and what does not? Are there moments when these borders become more or less significant?

4) Intellectual territories

Last, but not least, the theme of boundary crossing/maintenance also provides an opportunity to contemplate the distinctiveness of French and British (and francophone and anglophone) traditions of ethnomusicology. It allows us to ask whether, just as musical traditions have their insides and outsides, their borrowings and barriers, so too do traditions of scholarly endeavour. One goal of the conference is that it not simply be a place where scholarly boundaries are crossed and defended, but where the dynamics of this border-work are examined critically and reflexively.

The conference will take place 2–5 July 2015 at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris; it will be a bilingual event. We welcome proposals for 20-minute papers and for panels comprising three 20-minute papers. Please submit abstracts in French or English (maximum 250 words), complete with names of authors and titles, to sfeethnomusicologie.fr by 31 October 2014.

DEADLINE DATES

Publication of CFP: 31 August 2014

Submission deadline: 31 October 2014

Inform successful applicants: 15 November 2014

Registration open: TBA

Joint BFE-SFE Program Committee:
Amanda Villepastour and Byron Dueck (BFE), Susanne Fürniss and Fabrice Contri (SFE).

Link to SFE CFP

It gives us great pleasure to announce the winner of the 2014 British Forum for Ethnomusicology Book Prize:

Novak, David. Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.

The BFE Book Prize recognizes outstanding scholarship in ethnomusicology written in English. This prestigious award was presented at the BFE Annual General Meeting during the BFE annual conference at SOAS (July 2014). We hope that you can join us to congratulate the prize recipient again at the BFE High Tea Party at the SEM conference in Pittsburgh in November.
 
The BFE book committee (Martin Stokes, Simon Mills, and Hettie Malcomson) worked long and hard during the selection process, and were impressed by the extremely high quality of many of the books. In total, 17 monographs and 9 edited volumes were received, totalling 26 books, published in 2012 or 2013. The books were written by authors from diverse institutional backgrounds on subjects spanning the breadth of the current ethnomusicological field. Over half of these books were published by UK presses, with entries also with Chinese, German and US publishers.

The BFE is grateful to all those who submitted books to this competition and looks forward to future contributions.  It especially wishes to thank the three judges who reviewed the submissions:

Martin Stokes (Kings College London)
Simon Mills (Durham University)
Hettie Malcomson, chair (Southampton University)

David Novak
Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation
Duke University Press, 2013

Noise, an underground music made through an amalgam of feedback, distortion, and electronic effects, first emerged as a genre in the 1980s, circulating on cassette tapes traded between fans in Japan, Europe, and North America. With its cultivated obscurity, ear-shattering sound, and over-the-top performances, Noise has captured the imagination of a small but passionate transnational audience. For its scattered listeners, Noise always seems to be new and to come from somewhere else: in North America, it was called "Japanoise." But does Noise really belong to Japan? Is it even music at all? And why has Noise become such a compelling metaphor for the complexities of globalization and participatory media at the turn of the millennium?

In Japanoise, David Novak draws on more than a decade of research in Japan and the United States to trace the "cultural feedback" that generates and sustains Noise. He provides a rich ethnographic account of live performances, the circulation of recordings, and the lives and creative practices of musicians and listeners. He explores the technologies of Noise and the productive distortions of its networks. Capturing the textures of feedback—its sonic and cultural layers and vibrations—Novak describes musical circulation through sound and listening, recording and performance, international exchange, and the social interpretations of media.

Link to book page

Acceptance speech (mp3)