For the second year running, the BFE is delighted to announce joint winners of the prize for the best BFE student paper, which this year were delivered at the BFE/SFE Conference in Paris (2–5 July 2015). From the submissions received, the panel felt that two were particularly deserving winners.
Dear BFE members,
Following the call for nominations for election to the BFE Committee, I would like to update you on the new membership of the Committee.
Dear BFE friends,
Dear BFE members,
The British Forum for Ethnomusicology is delighted to welcome Barley Norton (Goldsmiths College) as our new Chair. Barley was co-opted on 30 June 2014 in the role of BFE Chair Elect and will take on his new role from April 2015.
On behalf of the BFE committee, I extend my warm congratulations to Jennifer McCallum (PhD candidate, King's College, London), winner of the BFE Student Paper Prize for our 2014 annual conference at SOAS (held jointly with AAWM).
The prize committee stated:
This year there were several outstanding papers by BFE student members. For the first time, therefore, we are giving two honourable mentions in addition to the winning paper. All three papers draw on a good range of theoretical and background sources, often a challenge in short conference papers.
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
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.
The British Forum for Ethnomusicology is delighted to announce that Barley Norton (Goldsmiths College) has agreed to be the next BFE Chair.
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)
