The three essays in this second issue of the 2022 volume demonstrate music’s versatility in generating new ideas and vitality. From Celtic music festivals in Portugal to Indian folk drumming in Singapore to creative developments of Arabic prosody in Lebanon, our authors weave a narrative of how music forms the basis of artistic and cultural traditions upon which individual and collective histories and aspirations flourish.
Susana Moreno-Fernández and Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco posit that Celtic music festivals in Porto and Sendim in the north of Portugal created new spaces for framing “a common cultural heritage” in the post-1974 Europeanisation of Portugal. Jinxing (Gene) Lai shows how Indian folk drumming in Singapore integrates diverse drumming traditions from India with the aesthetics of multiculturalism in Singapore to produce new concepts, styles, and processes in pan-Indian folk drumming, continuously traditionalised, formalised, and authenticated through every performance. Focusing on the poetic metres and rhythmic cycles of a twenty-first century composition, Maria M. Rijo Lopes da Cunha outlines a trajectory of contemporary innovations and continuity in the Arabic music-poetry tradition in the context of the Tajdīd min al-Dakhil (Renewal from Within) movement in Lebanon.
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As the general editor of the Yearbook for Traditional Music (2018–2022), I have had the utmost privilege to work with an outstanding group of colleagues. Their dedication to, and support of, the journal, and of the International Council for Traditional Music, has enabled the Yearbook for Traditional Music to flourish through several important changes, from self-publishing to the Cambridge University Press, a single volume per year to two issues per volume each year.
Alexander Cannon and Kirsty Gillespie helped eased me into the role of general editor with their experience as the book review and audio review editors. Rebecca Draisey-Collishaw, Keith Howard, Tan Sooi Beng, and J. Lawrence Witzleben guided me in learning how to manage the journal more effectively and efficiently through their editorship of the journal. I would also like to thank Kati Szego and Anna Yates-Lu for their help in so many ways. Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco, Don Niles, and Carlos Yoder have always made themselves available for any questions I may have about the journal—and about life in general—and have helped me through decisive moments in the journal’s trajectory. I am grateful to Holly O’Neill for her guidance and friendship when our journal moved to the Cambridge University Press, and to Emily Radican-Bradford and Jonathan Geffner for their indefatigable support.
My heartfelt thanks to all authors and reviewers, and our peer reviewers, who have helped push the journal to greater heights. I have learned so much through your writings and through our interactions. And to our authors, thank you very much for collaboratively creating our front cover that featured some of the beautiful photographs from your research.
Giorgio Biancorosso, Lonán Ó Briain, Tasaw Lu Hsin-chun, and Luo Ai Mei have been indispensable to the growth of the Yearbook for Traditional Music in the past five years. They have been generous and steadfast in sharing their editorial expertise and unceasing curiosity to constantly create new ideas for the journal. My tenure as the general editor would have been impossible without their collegiality and friendship.
