This article discusses reciprocity in research as engaged scholarship and, more specifically, applied ethnomusicology. It draws on two ethnographic studies and their associated activism in Cape Town, South Africa and Lagos, Nigeria. The article investigates the histories of engaged scholarship and applied ethnomusicology and suggests that each community requires a method of engagement based on its contextual specifics. Hence, the case studies may be seen to animate workable approaches in different socio-cultural contexts. The paper concludes that these methods may serve as frameworks for developing site-specific strategies of engaged scholarship in other parts of Africa.

This article analyzes the internationalization of Mozambican music within the “World Music” market during the country’s transitional period from a single-party socialist-led system to a multiparty, liberal one (1987–1994) in relation to the country’s nation-building process. The comparative examination of three cases—Orchestra Marrabenta Star de Moçambique, the song “Baila Maria” by Grupo RM (Amoya), and Real World Records’ albums by Eyuphuro and Ghorwane—shows that the “World Music” market not only served as an escape valve from the country’s lethargic phonographic industry but also emerged as a privileged channel to promote Mozambique’s official musical policy abroad during a crucial civil war-torn period.

What is music? In my view, this is the most basic question in all musicologies, be it the so-called systematic and comparative musicology (according to Guido Adler's founding article of 1885), the historical musicology of “Western art music,” ethnomusicology, or other existing as well as possible musicologies, as far as they are oriented towards a generalizable term such as the term “music” is.

In this article, I show how the Dialita women’s choir uses music to contest the ongoing denial of state-sponsored violence that followed the Indonesian tragedy of 1965–66, particularly as it impacted women. More specifically, Dialita uses their experiences and positionalities as women to perform an alternative collective memory for younger generations of Indonesians. Composed in prison, Dialita’s musical repertoire memorialises the affects and effects of imprisonment, exile, trauma, and survival. Due to government censure and public condemnation, the songs had been silenced by the Indonesian state and hidden underground from the public since the Indonesian tragedy. In the early 2000s, the women of Dialita formed a musical group and courageously began performing in public, collaborating with young musicians and recording the songs. I contend that women’s collective singing is an act of critical remembrance, opening a new front in struggles for truth and reconciliation, especially when juridical appeals and strategies have been rebuffed.

Chilean musical and political themes were an important element of East German life during the socialist presidency of Salvador Allende (1970–1973) and the violent military dictatorship (1973–1990) that overthrew him. The musical movement nueva canción (new song) was critical in mobilising solidarity with Chile around the world. In East Germany, the state-sponsored Singebewegung (singing movement) and the Liedermacher*innen1 (song makers) who were sometimes more openly critical both performed Chilean themes and covers. In addition to promoting solidarity, both groups drew on the musical identity of this group to arouse political participation towards different ends.

Although (ethno)choreology within European scholarship maintains its continuity as a methodologically and theoretically grounded discipline, there is an ongoing need among scholars to re-evaluate its traits and achievements and (re)position it within both the social sciences and/or humanities. Sustained scholarly attention to basic questions about the nature of the field of study encourages discussion and debate about a number of issues, including the name of the discipline and whether it should specify the object of research (e.g., Lange 1981:5; Giurchescu 2007:5; Koutsouba 2008:227) or designate the “perspective” of its investigation Giurchescu and Torp 1991:1; Ivanova-Nyberg 2011:31). These ongoing dialogues also support debate on the basic epistemological and methodological orientation of “constructing dance knowledge” (Gore and Bakka 2007:93), which during recent decades has fluctuated between empirical and hermeneutic poles (Bakka and Karoblis 2010:179–84).

Gospel music is a type of Protestant Christian music in both white and black American traditions. White gospel or European American gospel music dates back to the late-nineteenth-century revival movement and has developed within three identifiable traditions: northern urban gospel, southern gospel, and country and bluegrass gospel. Black gospel or African American gospel music emerged in the 1930s in northern industrial cities, drawing on spirituals, jubilee singing, the blues, and hymnody from various traditions, then developed and flourished throughout North America. Today the influence of gospel music, particularly from the African American and northern urban white traditions, extends across many cultures (Shearon et al. 2012). In Japan, African American gospel music has become very popular since the early 1990s, and its popularity continues to the present day. This paper examines the way that African American gospel music took root and was localized in Japan in its social, cultural, and historical contexts.

In an earlier paper (McLean 1961)—presented at the IFMC Vienna Conference in 1960—I emphasized what seemed to me to be an extreme conservatism associated with the transmission of traditional Maori singing—or waiata—style. I outlined some of the evidence for this, and indicated ways in which accuracy of transmission was attained in practice. As a sequel, I should like now to examine Maori concepts of accuracy more closely, and go on to consider anomalies presented by such phenomena as traditionally approved reworkings of waiata texts, the undoubted existence of melodic variants of particular songs, and an evident current trend towards accelerated change in waiata singing style itself.