This interdisciplinary situation also required a re-thinking of the classical teaching curriculum. For example, it soon became apparent that the World Arts & Music program, which had been established before the professorships had been filled, initially only consisted of a patchwork of uncoordinated courses. These were, due to the lack of sufficient interdisciplinary teaching staff, first designed for the classical BA/ MA programs and then "recycled," i.e. also opened up for interdisciplinary students.26 While the differences in background levels of majors and non-majors was reflected in a highly differentiated grading system, the lack of a common basis and an identification reference point for the interdisciplinary students became an increasing challenge during the first semesters. We thus realized that we needed introductory courses that

universities in a relatively small country. The University of Bern has thus set a focus on Islamic Studies, rather than, for instance, Asian Art.

23 The name was also intended as a parallel to the Social Anthropology department in Bern. Furthermore, as the position is actually based at the Institute of Musicology, the term "Ethnomusicology" had been viewed as too conflict-based from a historical musicological perspective (for further details see Ross and Sweers 2012).

24 While the Universities of Geneva (Unité de Musicologie) and Neuchâtel (Institut d'ethnologie) and the Geneva Haute école de musique offer a joint MA program, none of these locations has a full professorship in ethnomusicology, which would actually be needed.

25 Approaches similar to the Bern program can be found in the Global Arts Studies Program at the University of California Merced (https://gasp.ucmerced.edu), which also includes performative and artistic elements. However, these programs that combine the study of arts, music and theatre/ dance with a theoretical emphasis are, generally speaking, still comparably rare. Most programs of that name are practically oriented, often with an emphasis on art. For example, the Canadian program World Arts Organization (http://www.worldartsorg.com) combines arts (with a focus on so-called Western arts) with applied social, communal and therapeutic work. The same focus on arts, rather than musicology, art history, or theatre sciences, also applies to other World Arts programs, such as the cross-culturally oriented MA program at Dallas International University (https://www.diu.edu/cewa/ma-world-arts/) or the programs at the UCLA World Arts and Culture department (https://www.wacd.ucla.edu).

26 For further discussion of related challenges see Schier and Schwinger (2014).

would combine the different disciplinary segments, set the basis for students to undertake interdisciplinary work, and would serve as common ground for an (inter-) disciplinary identity. We consequently established an introductory course in World Arts & Music which addresses and explores potential research themes and methods within the core tropes of the different arts. A particular focus was set on themes such as the tension between regionalism and globalism, intercultural encounter processes, value building and canon formation within a globalized context, as well as cultural memory and transmission. This confronted us with the additional challenge of having to address a wide range of themes for which we were not always specialists. We thus decided to offer the course in an alternating rhythm from a musicological or an art perspective27 by establishing, here also in tune with the reflections of Neumann and Nüning (2012), a theoretical basis taken from Cultural Studies. With regard to the latter, we likewise set up a second core course on "Cultural and Media Theory." This, however, also required a large amount of preparation and adaption from our side, as we had to establish this background ourselves. Nevertheless, the additional work has clearly paid off, as both courses have become successful beyond the World Arts & Music program. They are also attended by students of the classical humanities and cultural sciences, as well as by other disciplines, such as Latin American Studies, Geography, and Biology.

Besides clearly posing—often time-consuming—challenges, the interdisciplinary context nevertheless also brought out the specifics of Ethnomusicology more clearly. The latter, for instance, by being mirrored by the different situation in Art History. As the World Art History professorship, which is physically based in the Art History department, had been set up as an assistant professorship without tenure track, it has to be re-filled every five years. This not only poses problems with regard to personnel continuity, but particularly with regard to actually finding suitable candidates. In fact, it has turned out to be extremely difficult to recruit a suitable Fine Arts lecturer with a non-Western specialization—not to speak of someone outside Social Anthropology working outside the 'high art' canon. Having often been viewed as part of the anthropological domain, non-Western and popular non-musical art forms are still slow to arrive in the classical, often comparably conservative and 'high art' oriented disciplines—not only in Art History, but also in Theatre Sciences, for instance. Within an interdisciplinary context, the formation of specific fully developed globally oriented co-disciplines is amazingly often still viewed as extremely unusual within other disciplines. As it appears from this perspective, a small discipline like Ethnomusicology that can fall back on a broad range of institutions, large networks such as the *International Council for Traditional Music* or intra-disciplinary collaborations, e.g. between

27 The courses also alternate between German and English.

Historical Musicology and Ethnomusicology, as well as being able to address popular and contemporary themes or migration, is rather exceptional.

We nevertheless soon felt that the early interdisciplinary collaboration among colleagues within the research center was also difficult. Despite common interests in contemporary developments, we found that we actually employed different academic languages cf. Frodeman (2010) and Neumann and Nüning (2012). This was even more evident in our context than between the classical predominantly mono-cultural (i.e. Western oriented) Historical Musicology, Art History, and Literature Studies that not only shared Western high art as a main focus, but also common methodological elements taken from History, Philology, and Literature.28

However, viewed positively, these so-called problems actually point to central exciting—challenges of interdisciplinary work, including the negotiation of accepted ways of speaking and writing styles, as well as different methodological starting points.29 This was also apparent in our complete disagreement on the role of methodology and the position of theory: While, from an ethnomusicological perspective, I insisted on qualitative empirical work (e.g. fieldwork and related methodological self-reflection), this was only marginally accepted by my first World Art History colleague, and completely rejected by my World Literature colleague, who set an emphasis on hermeneutic interpretation (and, for instance, did not accept the voice of the author as part of the research). Interdisciplinary work is thus not only intertwined with a constant process of negotiating concepts or methods, but also requires an awareness of potential pitfalls.

While besides some common thematic interests, (critical) theory thus increasingly emerged as the Center's common academic communicative basis, it soon became apparent that neither Ethnomusicology nor Art History had a say in this context. Neither did other, even less theory-oriented disciplines, such as Religious Studies and the smaller Literature disciplines (Hispanic, French, and Italian Studies)—or even Historical Musicology. Within this context, it helped that the major body of ethnomusicological publications was in English and could thus be approached by international students who have constituted a central part of the interdisciplinary programs. At the same time, the increasing focus on English as a common academic language, partly likewise in teaching, clearly excluded not only theoretical approaches, but also other disciplines dominated by, for instance, German/ French/ Spanish discourses. We thus

28 The same applies to the *Center for the Study of Language and Society* that has never had any of these problems to the same extent.

29 Including the usage of terminological concepts within an international context. As "Künste" [arts] signifies all artistic disciplines in German, the study program was named "World Arts" —which, however, was read by students as "Kunst" [fine arts]. We thus changed the title of the program to "World Arts & Music."

noticed that the dominance of and orientation towards (English) literature theory that had shaped the cultural studies discourses with authors like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (e.g. 1988) or Homi Bhabha (e.g. 2004) —particularly affected students if we did not counter-argue or intervene otherwise. This occurred partly to the extent that some Literature students occasionally simply refused to even experiment with ethnomusicological or empirical approaches—even though other predominant theorists like Michel Foucault (e.g. 1969) or Pierre Bourdieu (e.g. 1979) had also developed their approaches on the basis of empirical sociological research.

This attitude is nevertheless a reminder to the discipline of Ethnomusicology that a major body of currently popular theoretical models has mostly been taken from larger disciplines such as Literature, Sociology, and Anthropology. This also became apparent during an interdisciplinary research project on *Theory and Practice of Authenticity in Global Cultural Production* (2013-2017)30 —which, as an outcome of the center-related exchange, combined research teams from Literature Studies, Sociology, Ethnomusicology, and Art History from the Universities of Bern and Lausanne. The reception of theoretical approaches developed outside Anthropology, Sociology, and Literature Studies remained rare. One of the few exceptions, which we started to apply more comprehensively in our context, was reflection on a possible framework of the construction of the evaluation of authenticity by art historian Denis Dutton (2003), who had developed a broader conceptual framework of authenticity discourses on the basis of juxtaposing case studies from art and music.

This situation also applies to ethnomusicological research. Despite the stunning international publication output in recent years, few of these excellent studies and observations will ever enter interdisciplinary discourses, which could contribute to a different level of visibility. Looking at the discipline's general paradigm of studying all "musics in/ as culture" (Merriam 1960; 1964) and the initial comparative musicological search for a broader understanding of human music making, I wonder why the broader reception of ethnomusicological research has remained comparably marginal—despite its promising potential. Moreover, ontologies of musical works are predominantly written by philosophers of art who are mostly trained—if at all—in Western art music and accordingly argue from that perspective (see, for instance, Davies 2003). This situation is likewise reflected within the university context. For example, even representatives of the "smaller" disciplines at our faculty often prefer to look for a sociologist, anthropologist, or literature scientist for the interdisciplinary distinguished lecture series. This raises the question of how Ethnomusicology (and

30 The project was financed by the Swiss National Foundation (SNF) as part of the interdisciplinary *Sinergia* program (see also http://www.cgs.unibe.ch/content/forschung/drittmittelprojekte/authenticity/ index\_ger.html).

the other musicological sub-disciplines) could enter these debates—that are also significant public platforms—more strongly and audibly. It is happening, but there is still work to do.

The professorship of Cultural Anthropology of Music had also been attached to the *Center for Cultural/ Global Studies,* because it offered, by touching on contemporary themes, excellent suitability for interdisciplinary and faculty projects, and for teaching, which has been strongly supported by the University in Bern. Given the relatively open curriculum structures (notwithstanding the Bologna Process) that continue to include a large number of thematically free modules, interdisciplinary co-teaching has been highly popular in Bern. For example, Ethnomusicology has been requested as a partner for co-taught seminars with the departments, e.g. of Law, Latin American Studies/History, or English/ American Literature, to name just a few, by which it was even further tied into the broader university structure.31

However, within these teaching contexts I have noticed that one further challenge for Ethnomusicology in an interdisciplinary context has been our actual object of study—music. While many other disciplines seem to be more easily approachable at first sight, talking about music seems to scare many interdisciplinary students and colleagues alike. I had the impression that they were actually afraid of approaching music as a sound(ing) experience at all. This too results in dominant voices on music often actually avoiding talking directly about music. Apparently, there is not only a gap between ethnomusicological work and broader discourses, but one can also observe avoidance strategies when it comes to the musical substance. This is much less the case with regard to the fine arts and points to further challenges that need to be tackled for a stronger presence within interdisciplinary contexts. One possible approach utilized in Bern is a strong integration of soundscape issues that have proven helpful in bridging fears. Developing the lack of music-related language on the basis of sound perception and training requires little initial expertise (see below).

Good interconnection with the non-academic sector has been a further major factor for the broader visibility, and thus acceptance, of the discipline. Journalism is just one of the many examples here. However, a glimpse at the context of the English-speaking world music scenes shows that the relationship to journalism sometimes still appears (as evident from earlier magazines like *Songlines* and *FRoots*) as a battlefield of authority of interpretation. As caricatures likewise indicate, Ethnomusicology is still (at least oc-

31 "Law, Justice, Crime and Punishment in Folk and Popular Music" (with Martino Mona, Department of Law, autumn semester 2015), "Music and Politics in North and South America in the 1960s and 1970s" (with Christian Büschges, Latin American/ History Department, autumn semester 2017) or 'Da Blues:' The Blues in Music, Society, Literature and Film" (with Thomas Claviez, English/American Literature Department, spring semester 2018).

casionally) shaped by stereotyped colonial images. This is particularly apparent in satirical cartoons, whose overdrawn stereotypes reveal the as yet existent outside image of our discipline. Illustrations, as evident in *Songlines*, utilize, for instance, male bearded figures in tropical outfits and with thick glasses, sitting and recording with impressive technical devices.32 Yet also the highly original *FRoots*-BIFF series, created by *Guardian* cartoonists Chris Garrett and Mick Kidd, gives us an insight into commonly understood stereotypes—be it the "ethnomusicologist" (BIFF 2007), the "professor" (BIFF 2005), the "Dean of Social Sciences" (BIFF 2006b), as well as "the folkie" (BIFF 2006a) or the "digital talent scout" (BIFF 2006c). In addition, women do not appear in leading positions, nor are they presented as discussants—they only occur as (sharp) commentators. Similarly, many photographic images follow these specific male stereotypes that are often tied to colonial-related gender stereotypes. While there has clearly been a transformation in recent years, we might also take this as an indicator for further reflection on the outside reception and awareness of our discipline.

I never experienced this distance to journalism so strongly in the German-speaking countries, where students, due to the almost complete lack of job opportunities inside academia, had to address the issue of job careers outside university from very early on. In the most positive cases, where careers and independent scholars outside academia are valued on an equal level, this has resulted in a highly productive university-based journalism network in which both sides profit from each other.33

## *Ethnomusicology in Local Application*

While it thus seems that smaller disciplines are often overlooked or disadvantaged within the larger cultural and political theoretical discourses, Ethnomusicology can nevertheless become a strong focus of public interest that can attract (positive) attention within the broader political and institutional context. However, within the previously sketched political framework, communication of what ethnomusicologists do remains a major issue, and I regard the field of Applied Ethnomusicology as a major factor within this context. Not only that it contributes to a stronger visibility of the discipline in general, it is also here that Ethnomusicology clearly connects to the UNESCO line of argument *and* is likewise able to counter neoliberal discourses on a similar argumentative level.

32 See David Arditti`s cartoon for Meadley (2003), "Bête Noire: Ethnomusicologists."

33 In all of these debates, it is also apparent that Ethnomusicology is viewed as a kind of "queer" discipline—when it is based on a university context it often lacks the infrastructure for the practical side; and when based at a university of music, it is often marginalized because it is practical (art) music and not research that matters there. There are exceptions, of course, but I have also heard similar complaints from Historical Musicology colleagues.

While roughly described as putting "ethnomusicological scholarship, knowledge, and understanding to practical use" (Titon 2015: 4), Applied Ethnomusicology is often more strongly limited to the concept of "a music-centered intervention in a particular community whose purpose is to benefit that community—for example, a social improvement, a musical benefit, a cultural good, an economic advantage" (ibid). As is apparent from the articles published in the *Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology* (Pettan and Titon 2015), a key mode of engaging with local communities has been through world music performance ensemble activities in the English-speaking world (cf. Solis 2004).

However, the concept of "Applied Ethnomusicology" actually contains a much broader range of practical approaches with regard to what Pettan (2008) differentiated into action, adjustment, administrative, and advocative ethnomusicology. This becomes clearly evident from a global perspective that includes, to just name a few examples, agency within an archival context, strengthening the acceptance and tolerance as well as the self-determination of minority cultures, mediation in tourism and political contexts, specifically in conflict situations. Particularly with regard to the latter, musical knowledge of "other" cultures is not only conveyed through performance, but also through education (cf. Krüger 2009) as well as through lectures and public displays (see Pettan and Titon 2015 for a detailed overview).

Ethnomusicology mirrored in an interdisciplinary context at university sometimes reveals the astonishment of colleagues, and partly even envy of how many of us actually perform music (our Theatre Sciences colleagues rarely ever act in plays, for instance)—as well as amazement about the range of practical applications of the discipline in society. Notwithstanding any claims of the ideals of Humboldt-related education, and of science independent of any political or trends, I could always see a transition from initial confusion when I described my deeper interest in my favorite genres (folk rock—that was clearly considered to be a superfluous occupation) to fascination and respect when I talked about my applied work. This especially related to the intercultural *Polyphony of Cultures* project which I had undertaken as a local conflict resolution approach at the *Hochschule für Musik und Theater Rostock* ["University of Music and Theatre Rostock"] between 2005-2008.34

Moreover, once an applied project mattered to the (local) community, the visibility and social acceptance of the related discipline (in this case Ethnomusicology) increased almost automatically on all levels. As is apparent from the German-speaking countries, applied work has strongly focused on intercultural music education in a

34 A CD/CD-ROM project aimed at raising tolerance through music, connected with a didactic teaching aid supporting teachers who had to deal with right-wing extremist music in the classroom. (Fassnacht and Sweers 2006/8; see also Sweers 2015).

schools and broader communal context in recent years, which is also evident in the implementation of related degree programs.35 This was particularly expanded during the second decade of the new millennium, when work with migrant communities clearly became a major issue. As music has been widely regarded as a major element in related projects, musicological perspectives are clearly in demand, as I experienced during the annual meeting of the Swiss Theological Society in 2017. This meeting had specifically requested an ethnomusicological insight into the role of music in interreligious encounters.36 Yet, as I noticed in that context too, there is often a clear helplessness within other disciplines with regard to whom to contact, which might point to a further area where improvement is needed for the discipline in general.

## *Soundscape Research in Application*

As an example of what can happen if the discipline reacts to public demands and areas of interest, I would like to illustrate the potential of a deeper local and social impact of Ethnomusicology by sketching the interconnectedness of academic research and local communities in the case of soundscape research. While soundscape research has been strongly emerging within Ethnomusicology during the second decade of the new millennium, related academic research has also been paralleled by a growing public interest in that theme. While still a rather unusual focus in the applied canon, soundscape research in particular seems to provide a broad range of options for connecting academia with the community on an easily accessible level. For example, from 2014- 2017 the University of Bern, together with the Universities of Ljubljana and Belgrade, conducted a soundscape project on *City Sonic Ecology: The Urban Soundscape of Bern, Ljubljana, and Belgrade.*37 In the case of Bern, this was accompanied by several seminars, including an applied seminar, undertaken together with Bern Tourism and Cristina Urchueguía (Historical Musicology). Here, student teams developed six different soundscape tours through the city that also included interaction with local communities, such as instrument makers, during the autumn semester 2015. These tours were

35 See, for instance, the University of Hildesheim, which has been offering an MA program in *Kulturelle Diversität in musikalischer Bildung* ["Cultural Diversity in Musical Education"]: https://www.unihildesheim.de/studium/studienangebot/weiterbildung-berufsbegleitend/kulturelle-diversitaet-in-dermusikalischen-bildung-master-of-arts-ma-zertifikatsstudium/.

36 Jahrestagung der Schweizerischen Theologischen Gesellschaft (SThG): *Musik in interreligiösen Begegnungen*. September 21-23, 2017. Landgut Castelen, Augst (Switzerland).

37 SNF SCOPES Project *City Sonic Ecology: Urban Soundscapes of Bern, Ljubljana, and Belgrade* (Britta Sweers, with Ivana Medic, SASA Belgrade, and Ana Hofman, Slovenian Academy of Sciences, Ljubljana as co-project leaders): http://citysonicecology.com.

subsequently synthesized by Bern Tourism into actually realized soundscape tours (Sweers 2017), while Bern Tourism, in turn, provided students with constant feedback regarding the practical realization of their ideas.

Journalists had been strongly interested in issues of soundscape research anyway, and we were subsequently partly contacted by former students who now, as journalists (working at the Swiss Public Radio), still followed the themes offered at our institute. How strongly the network to journalism could make an impact again became apparent in the context of this soundscape project. For example, after the seminar had been featured in two local newspapers (e.g. Bürgi 2016, Matti 2016) and a radio documentary (Marti 2016) —both of which were contacts that basically emerged by word of mouth—I was requested to give a public lecture in the series *Buch am Mittag* ["Book During Lunchtime"] in March 2016. Organized by the University Library, it was attended by a large Bernese audience. The theme apparently mattered, because the strong emotional reactions of the audience to my descriptions were quite striking. Many listeners subsequently added many more examples of affective sound perception with regard to the locality, and also their views about main sound hot spots—partly in lengthy e-mails after the presentation.

This immersion in soundscape issues then started to interconnect with broader communal and governmental structures, indicating that ethnomusicological work was being increasingly noticed outside the academic context. For example, the *Buch am Mittag* lecture resulted in a request for collaboration by the *Amt für Umweltkoordination und Energie AUE* ["Department of Environmental Coordination and Energy"] during summer 2016. Employing engineers and chemists, this public institution focuses on a wide range of noise and sound protection regulations (including industrial noise restrictions and architectural regulations). While it was easy to measure noise and sound according to medically and physically determined standards, i.e. fixed decibel measurement values, the engineers had reached a problematic point, as the perception of sound and noise also seemed to be shaped by highly subjective human factors. As these could not be tackled physically, the department had requested help from the humanities, which among others resulted in a joint city fieldwork exploration.

However, the need for expert knowledge stratified to further sociocultural areas, as evident from two other invitations that had likewise been the result of the soundscape work. In October 2017, I was invited to teach a soundscape class at Bern's *Kinderuniversität* ["Children's University"]. Unlike other children's universities, this institution is highly inclusive. Rather than requiring entrance exams, it allows anyone to register his or her children.38 I had been specifically requested to teach the children—aged between 8-12—how to listen in the age of mobile phones. The segment consisted

38 See also *Kinderuniversität Bern*: http://www.kinderuni.unibe.ch/

of two parts—a lecture on Friday evening and a practical class during the following morning. As I noticed during the lecture, which was attended by approximately 70 children, these children—still at an age before puberty—were extremely attentive, almost eagerly soaking up any information, yet also clearly keen to reflect on sensory experiences, such as hearing observations. I had been falling back on a version of Murray Schafer's ear cleaning exercises (Schafer 1969) which had been adapted by a Staten Island-based children's project.39 More specifically, it followed the pattern of sound recollections ("Which were the first three sounds you heard this morning?"), self-observations ("Which sounds do you (dis)like?"), and environmental observations ("How do leaves / approaching cars, etc. sound?"; "What can you hear in this room?"; "What can you hear at the front of the room, and what at the back?"). I was amazed by the children's input, yet also by their extreme curiosity and creativity, which became particularly apparent when we created sound maps of the area during the following morning. Given that these kinds of subjects are rarely ever taught at regular school (and few school teachers have a background in this field), it pointed to an elementary human need in education—another area where Ethnomusicology could be stepping in more clearly.

The latter examples indicate the interconnectedness of soundscape research with environmental issues and reveal an issue which is highly accessible to the public (soundscape research can easily also be undertaken by "amateurs" who are unable to read or to perform music). At the same time, the work with soundscape provided a connection to religious and political discourses. On an academic level, the need for broader exchange with the discipline became apparent at a panel discussion at Bern's so-called *Haus der Religionen* [a sort of ecumenical center]. Founded in 2002, the location has hosted eight religious communities within one building at Bern's Europaplatz since 2014.40 I had been invited to a panel discussion on "What does Bern sound like?" during a theme day "Tag der Klänge" ["Day of Sounds"] on October 24, 2017. Sound has been a major element in denoting religious spheres—be it with regard to Christian church bells, the call of the muezzin, processions, etc.—which has been taken so much for granted that a more differentiated reflection on them only started in connection with the soundscape debates. Again, Ethnomusicology was requested to provide a broader perspective, because, as it became apparent, the audible proximity of the respective different religions had made it necessary to re-negotiate terms with regard to the interior, due to difficulties regarding sound insulation that had been

39 N.A. "Clean Your Ears." *Sounds Like Staten Island*." (Retrieved Dec. 1, 2012 from http://www. soundslikestatenisland.com. Link is disfunct).

40 See website *Haus der Religionen*—*Dialog der Kulturen*: https://www.haus-der-religionen.ch

too costly.41 The need for ethnomusicological reflection also related to sounds from outside. As I could observe within the audience, the conscious reflection of what bells represent was a revelation for many. This likewise applied to the discussion on how to negotiate a parallel existence in terms of sound between the different religions, also as a reflection of the modern situation of migration. The complex political situation had particularly become apparent in the *Minarettstreit* ["minaret debate"] in Switzerland.42 Speaking from the perspective of soundscape: by banning the construction of minaret towers, the authorities had basically been forcing Muslim communities into a sounding interior. As became apparent here, the Jewish community, due to century-long persecution, had moved to the interior of the building anyway, a situation which was even further aggravated due to ongoing threats in the current international political situation. Yet the discussion also revealed surprising adaptation strategies. For example, the Hindu community had reduced its loud processions to one outdoor event per year and had adapted to using the sound of Christian bells. As one Hindu priest indicated, they had started to pray at the sound of any bell, particularly Christian church bells, which have been integrated into their system as symbolic representatives of the universal OM sound. Within this public event, the ethnomusicologist might be described as a synthesizing figure who brings out all these different positions to broader public knowledge—and acceptance. As is evident here, ethnomusicological knowledge stratifies deeply into any society and its expertise is highly in demand—if the existence of the discipline is visible. Maybe I am too optimistic, but there are many ways to integrate academic ethnomusicological work even more deeply into society, as these examples indicate.

## *Outlook*

Musics matter, and Ethnomusicology is a small discipline that matters. In fact, it matters so much that it is actually deeply interconnected—sometimes to the extent that I occasionally feel overwhelmed by the numerous requests for contribution or collaboration. This not only includes university-based interdisciplinary teaching and research or trans-disciplinary academic requests for cooperation. It also relates to recurring requests for applied activities within the broader regional community. With regard to this specific example of applied soundscape research, there are further indicators that

41 For example, it proved extremely difficult for the Buddhist community to meditate at the same time as Hindu rituals were going on one floor below.

42 See *Eidgenössische Volksinitiative «Gegen den Bau von Minaretten».* Schweizer Eidgenossenschaft Bundeskanzlei BK. https://www.bk.admin.ch/ch/d/pore/vi/vis353.html

this work might have a deep impact in the community. Soundscape has become a recurring theme not only in the media, but also in the local community in general. It is still too early for any further long-term conclusions here, but is seems that this specific development is intertwined with, for instance, stronger environmental awareness and a concern with human well-being and local conflict resolution, including the perception of the situation of migrant communities in the city.

While this is truly an indicator of the importance of the discipline, it is difficult to manage due to the small number of ethnomusicologists within a department—and, as a minority, this is connected with recurring negotiations regarding ethnomusicological perspectives within existing dominant structures. Nevertheless, if it works—as I have been experiencing at the University of Bern since 2009—it is a highly satisfying experience, even if it "just" relates to drafting cultural-political responses together with Historical Musicology colleagues. However, moving towards a sustainable future for the discipline, it will be necessary to continue addressing the challenges indicated in this article of which we need to be aware in the current economic and political situation.

*References*

Aebischer, Christoph. 2015.  *Berner Zeitung* (28.9.2015). https://www.bernerzeitung.ch/schweiz/standard/svp-knoepft-sich-die-freiestudienwahl-vor/story/14058933 (07.04.2019).

BIFF. 2005. "… with Professor Max Reinlegen." *FRoots* 265 (August/ September), 90.

\_\_\_\_\_\_. 2006a. "One Evening in May …" *FRoots* 275 (May), 90.

\_\_\_\_\_\_. 2006b. "It`s World Cup Mania Again," *FRoots* 276 (June), 82.

\_\_\_\_\_\_. 2006c. No title. *FRoots 277* (July), 82.

72

Bhabha, Homi. 2004. *The Location of Culture*. London: Routledge.

Giroux, Henry A. 2014. *Neoliberalism's War on Higher Education*. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Krüger, Simone. 2009. *Experiencing Ethnomusicology. Teaching and Learning in European Universities*. Farnham: Ashgate.

\_\_\_\_\_\_. 1964. *The Anthropology of Music*. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

SAGW. 2016. *It's the humanities, stupid!* https://abouthumanities.sagw.ch/ (07.04.2019).

Schafer, Raymond Murray. 1969. *Ear Cleaning: Notes for an Experimental Music Score*. New York: Berandol Music Limited.

\_\_\_\_\_\_. 1977. *The Tuning of the World*. New York: Knopf.

Sweers, Britta. 2000. "Ethnomusicology in Germany." *SEM Newsletter* (May 2000). 1, 4–5.

The Position of University-Based Ethnomusicology from an Interdisciplinary Perspective

*Bildung* (9.9.2013): http://www.bpb.de/gesellschaft/kultur/zukunft-bildung/146201/bildungsideale (07.04.2019).

*Online Sources*

City Sonic Ecology: http://citysonicecology.com (07.04.2019).

Kinderuniversität Bern. http://www.kinderuni.unibe.ch/ (07.04.2019).

University of California, Los Angeles: "World Arts and Culture" https://www.wacd.ucla.edu (07.04.2019).

*Abstract*

The popularity of Cultural Studies promises a broad interdisciplinary exchange and maybe even the formation of new disciplines in which ethnomusicology could play a central role. However, major public discourses are still dominated by the larger disciplines, such as English/ American Literature, Sociology, or Anthropology. This not only applies to key themes such as globalization, postcolonial issues and gender, but also to arts and music. Drawing on experiences gained while directing the Center for Cultural Studies and the Center for Global Studies at the University of Bern, this presentation first analyzes the presence of smaller disciplines, such as ethnomusicology, within the interdisciplinary university context, yet also from a broader sociocultural and sociopolitical perceptive.

While it thus seems that smaller disciplines are often overlooked within the larger discourses, ethnomusicology can nevertheless become a strong focus of public interest. This is particularly evident with regard to applied work. For example, recent urban and environmental soundscape projects in Bern not only drew the attention of newspaper and radio journalism, but also led to requests by groups as diverse as the Environmental Department, the House of Religions, the Children's University, and Bern Tourism. How far are these two contrasting situations coincidences—and to what extent do they provide an insight into broader mechanisms behind the perception of university-based ethnomusicological work? To which degree can these situations be influenced by the ethnomusicologist—and is this necessary at all?

*Samuel Araujo*

# Music, Research and Public Interest A Dialogical Praxis for Social Justice

## *Rehearsal as Sound Praxis (I)*

The sounds heard as an introduction to a public presentation related to this paper1 were recorded in 2013, during a rehearsal of a head arrangement, as early jazz players used to call an arrangement of a tune consisting of direct learning of interrelated sonic phrases and spoken clues, all of which were worked out in performance by one or more of the participating musicians rather than through a score. In the example mentioned, four musicians were heard, each of them contributing a distinct part to the overall performance:

1 Symposium "Music Matters! Ethnomusicology and its Socio-Political Relevance Today," 28–30 September, 2017, on behalf of installation of the new ICTM Secretariat at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna. The author thankfully acknowledges the financial support by the local organizers, making his participation possible.

2 Hand-held, no-cymbal tambourine, played with a stick.

4 – the songwriter—also author of this text—shortly demonstrating the opening vocal part with non-lexical sounds, and providing clues to the different sections of the song.

Ready to sing and/or play additional instruments, four other people did not have a chance to participate in the recording due to an unexpected and closing contribution eventually imposed on the arrangement, the sounds of machine guns and grenades of just another routine battle between two rival groups involved in some way3 with the retail drug business within one of the largest favelas of Rio, Maré, with approximately 150,000 inhabitants. In the face of the regular absence of the police as a law-enforcing agency as well as the lack of more significant and systematic state action in favelas, the already mentioned forces struggle to impose their armed authority on residents in many ways. These may range from controlling certain services such as illegal cable TV connections (locally known as *gatonet*) to threatening the lives of passers-by who happen to come from an area "belonging" to a rival group, which in some cases means walking a few yards away from "one's community." Accordingly, such armed groups also impose their authority on the sonic space either through gunfire, such as in the event in the recording, or through relatively safer initiatives such as patronizing music and dance events within favelas.

Examining in more detail the agents, context and space of the rehearsal is equally important to this discussion. All of the intended participants in the sample performance under analysis are members of Musicultura, a research group working according to participatory protocols in social sciences research. The group consists of local residents with ages ranging from 16 to 30 years, comprising students enrolled in high schools and universities, as well as a smaller, ad hoc number of volunteers. As consistently reported in the ethnomusicological literature in Brazil and abroad (Araujo et al. 2015, 2006; Araujo and Cambria 2013; Cambria 2012; Araujo 2013, 2012, 2008; Grupo Musicultura 2010), such experience was initiated in 2004 as a result of relatively long negotiations between the Ethnomusicology Laboratory of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (LE-UFRJ) and the directorship of a non-governmental organization (NGO) founded and run by local activists in Maré. This organization had been engaged for a number of years in work stressing educational and cultural issues based on bottom-up perspectives as a way to fight exploitation, discrimination and political disenfranchisement among the local population. In the initial contacts, the university was represented by myself, another colleague in a post-doctoral posi-

3 Two such groups are major retail drug-selling factions in Rio, but the shooting may also be attributed to any of two other sources, the State military police or private militiamen generally consisting of either former or off-duty policemen, all four possible groups involved in extortion schemes.

tion and two master's students in the field of ethnomusicology.4 This working group listened carefully to and kept systematic records of the NGO's previous experience as voiced by its directors and some other activists participating in the initial talks. These interlocutors were visibly curious about this, to them, exotic idea of integrating what the NGO already did into an apparently unknown category, music research (an often asked question: What, in the world, is music research?!). The NGO's more sought after activity, on the other hand, mainly comprised structured courses offered to the local student population aimed at reinforcing contents of formal education through a more horizontal approach and also offering cultural opportunities perceived as otherwise non-available otherwise to local residents. Formal music and dance classes, ranging from classical to popular styles, plus video making, hip hop, storytelling workshops etc. were common activities developed by the institution. As also stated in previous publications, this was consistently justified by the NGO's representatives by invoking Bourdieu's classic titles such as Distinction (Bourdieu 1984) or Rules of Art (Bourdieu 1996), the first of which has been quite influential in Brazil since its first Portuguese translation was released in the late 1960s. In time, this is by no means surprising, given that a number of the NGO representatives had university degrees in the humanities.

For about four months, university representatives and the organization's directorship engaged in conversations, watching videos on the NGO's cultural and educational activism, and participating more directly in local events, including full-weekend seminars to reflect upon the institutional performance in general. This joint brainstorming collective finally had the idea of starting a collaborative initiative through the constitution of a group of local residents consisting of both university and high school students. Such an unorthodox research team would be progressively introduced through practical activities to the principles of dialogical pedagogy (associated with the work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire and followers) and later to those of participatory action-research (associated with the work of Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda and followers), which are in many aspects convergent (see Freire 2005; Fals Borda 2010, 1979) with the former. It is very interesting to look back at this foundational moment, since both parties of the joint initiative—the university team and the NGOs—had their respective interests and perspectives horizontally negotiated before they could be more or less agreed upon in a jointly conceived project design. From scratch to practice, the initial group of participants started its regular activities in April

4 Respectively, Dr. Luiz Fernando Nascimento de Lima (Ph.D. University of Helsinki, 2001), Vincenzo Cambria (Ph.D., Wesleyan University, 2012), today an Adjunct Professor of Ethnomusicology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro State (UNIRIO), and Virginia Barbosa (M.M., Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, UFRJ), currently a doctoral student in ethnomusicology at UFRJ.

2004, comprising 28 people altogether: three non-residents (two graduate students and myself) plus 25 local residents, including one local music teacher in the public school system,5 four undergraduate university students6 and 20 high school students.

As described in later publications either authored collectively (e.g., Araujo et al. 2006; Grupo Musicultura 2010; Araujo and Cambria 2013) or individually (Cambria 2012, Araujo 2013) by participants of Musicultura, the initial research procedures left residents visibly surprised if not intrigued since the outsiders, i.e. non-residents, made a systematic effort towards not presenting them with any aprioristic and unnegotiable concepts, goals and/or premises, but only open questions such as: What is music for you? Why? Do you think your definition of music is shared by other people within or outside Maré? By whom and why do you think so? Such questions hardly sounded like standard questions previously asked by researchers in other fields such as anthropology or sociology. The latter, since their first interlocutions with residents, usually made a point of showing in advance that they knew something, if not a great deal, about the culture and way of life of the community they, the academic researchers, had single-handedly chosen to research.

However, this procedure might very well be still a clever strategy of the outsiders just to open up a more fluid conversation with and to earn the trust of the local residents, but which would soon be replaced by a more conventional, top-down mode of only apparent or limited participation, in which community members end up acting mostly or entirely as providers of access to information an outsider would find hard to obtain through other means. Looking retrospectively, this was not the case. On the contrary, since then the group has deepened its autonomy in assuming the authorship of the research, and deciding for its continuity over these more than 13 years, as well as in favor of its own self-determination in defining the goals, methods and multifaceted forms of public diffusion of results and sociopolitical intervention.

But what exactly then constitutes Musicultura, considering it has had about 150 changing participants over its 13 years or so of existence, each averaging an 18-month participation period? Is it a coherent collective with a recognizable identity despite

5 Eduardo Antonio Duque, music teacher in Rio de Janeiro State's public system and later Master of Music in Ethnomusicology (UFRJ, 2007).

6 Among which, respectively, Alexandre Dias da Silva, later a Master of Music in Ethnomusicology (UFRJ, 2011), and today a history teacher in the City of Rio de Janeiro's public system; Erica Cristian Reis dos Santos, later a Bachelor in both Dance (2009) and Physical Education (2011), and currently a physical education teacher in the City of Nova Iguaçu's public system as well as a student at the Master's Program in Education (PROPED, UERJ); Mariluci Correia do Nascimento, later a Bachelor in History (UFRJ, 2010); and Sinésio Jefferson Silva, history teacher in the City of Rio de Janeiro's public system and later Master of Music in Ethnomusicology (UFRJ, 2005) and Ph.D. in Urban Planning (UFRJ, 2016).

the changes in its composition or, otherwise, multiple collectives with identities as different as the life histories and specific interests of its specific participants at a given time? Does it follow some rigidly institutionalized principles and guidelines to a point that its variable human constituency does not affect its overall identity, revealing then a conservative and top-down structure disguised under discourses on dialogism, autonomy and direct democracy, rather than running the risk of having to reinvent itself as new members keep coming in?

These being obviously questions which can be properly answered only through the participation of the subjects themselves, I will only suggest here that, no matter what the answer is, a number of principles, methods and issues have constantly been at stake in the collective debates over the pertinence or not of the group's continuity, as highlighted below:

1. Critically Acknowledging the Political Dimensions of Knowledge Production;

This is an important and extensive line of debate in the philosophy of knowledge, so I will just stress here briefly its main claim that no intellectual enquiry is possible in itself apart from human interests forged through specific life histories, material conditions, sociopolitical contexts, and linguistic constraints, including translation problems, to mention just a few of the conditions involved.

Accepting this basic premise, the admission of biases against and constraints to notions of neutrality in the production of knowledge requires the addressing of issues such as knowledge for whom, produced by whom, for what purposes, etc.

2. Always Problematizing Public-Private Relationships

Interests in society are developed and shared along a continuum from the more narrowly private to the more encompassing or public ones tending to form conflicting sociopolitical pressure forces, according to their mutual commonalities. Institutions such as universities or research centers are of key importance in establishing the kind and degree of legitimacy some forms of knowledge may claim or not. Not rarely, however, each of the opposing forces in the public-private continuum may accommodate a considerable space for internal conflicts, contributing to the complexity of conflict mediation at any level or scope, from local to global.7

3. Interrelating Difference, Inequality and Exploitation;

As an offspring of the previous discussion, we have the relations between current policies toward difference and the aggravating patterns of inequality and exploitation, taking different shapes in each regional context of the planet. In the case of Brazil,

7 Here it is worth highlighting the debate on how and to what extent nation states today are able or not to carry out mediatory action on behalf of the public interest in times where the accumulation of income and power are globally structured and concentrated to a degree that weakens and often bypasses existing forms of compensatory local legislation.

this ranges from some indigenous peoples being forcibly removed from their ancestral lands in the rainforest previously guaranteed by law, and having to move into the shanty towns (favelas) in metropolitan areas, to the recent state coup orchestrated by several anti-public interests forming a successful lobby, despite its internal contradictions, against the reformist Workers' Party which, while in power from 2003 through mid-2016, elected income distribution as its main target, producing significant and globally acknowledged results.

4. Concretely Experiencing Knowledge Production From-The-Bottom-Up, Autonomy, and Praxis.

It is beyond the aims of this paper to adequately summarize the close relationships of the Workers' Party in Brazil and other successful electoral efforts by reformist political parties and fronts in Latin America from the late 1990s onwards with the praxis resulting from innovative alliances between academics and bottom-up social movements ranging from indigenous and black rights activist groups or rural workers' unions to industrial workers' unions and LGBTQ activist collectives. This innovation largely resulted from experiments which had been in the making since the 1960s struggles against imperialism, internal military dictatorships and oligarchical political regimes, such as the participatory action-research and dialogical pedagogy mentioned above. These currents had a precious musical attribute as a converging aspect, a deep, affective and sensitive listening to the oppressed sectors of distinct national societies, identifying through horizontal dialogue how this experience of the oppressed led to relatively autonomous concepts, codes, knowledge and practices (let us not forget musical ones) contrastingly distinctly with and often contradicting top-down ones. Their methodologies also shared common approaches such as: 1- the idea of action-research as a collective praxis based on participatory decision-making processes, encompassing the definition of issues to be prioritized in the research, developing into the choice of approaches to be applied in seeking for answers to research problems, and also into singular forms of application and diffusion of the work done; 2- the constitution of unorthodox collectives and institutions comprising academics and non-academics; and 3- deep immersion of all researchers, including the academic ones, into the reality being more closely investigated, encompassing not only participant observation but, more importantly, reflexively outspoken cultural and political activism on locally important matters.

## *Politico-Epistemological Dimensions in the Ethnography of Music-Making*

The preceding discussion and its suggested implications present a further, twofold challenge. First, to call into question ethnomusicology as an interdisciplinary field focused on phenomena and ideas related to music and sound, whatever definition or genealogy we may attribute to such a field, leading towards too many and not necessarily similar intellectual dialogues pursued by either individual researchers or research groups in distinct socio-historical contexts. The second is a long-standing and pervading issue in the field, namely the pertinence of the object "music" itself. As posed by Alan Merriam (1964), among others, such a notion might not be as universal as many people in the field might think, but, on the contrary, the term "music," even in its broadest sense, was not quite fit to be applied to most sound-based social phenomena, oftentimes in inseparable association with other sensorial phenomena studied by ethnomusicologists the world over and in contexts which may be hardly comparable to one another.

In other words, "music," a term so many people still use today as universal, might be a context-specific and oftentimes precarious Europe-derived translation, imposing different degrees of conceptual violence on other practices and forms of knowledge, leading to a reduction of given cultures, perceived as subaltern, to the terms of other cultures viewed as "superior" or "dominant." Consequently, even the apparently generous semantic expansion of the term "music" to allow applications to a broad range of sound phenomena not only implies mistranslations, but eventually and more seriously aids the establishment of value hierarchies and even the intellectual and material erasure of significant differences between social groups of all sorts and their respective worldviews, in a process established by force, even if eventually travestied through language and masked by largely unquestioned dominant perspectives.

The negative legacy of this erasure of different worldviews has been, therefore, a theme in ethnomusicology since its infancy, even if not perceived or acknowledged as such by researchers. Today, however, problematizing the ethics of ethnomusicology in the face of the imposition and erasure of diverse worldviews has been made more than obvious in the field's increasing self-consciousness of itself as having been established and legitimized under varied kinds and degrees of both political and epistemological violence (Romero 2001, O'Connel and Castelo Branco 2010, Koskoff 2014, Rice 2014, Luhning and De Tugny 2016, LaMadrid 2017, Mapaya 2018). One blatant effect, by the way, of such processes of imposing and erasing is the silencing of the debate about this subject in academic forums, and particularly in the largest academic congresses, as well as through the silencing of attempts at articulating both training and research in ethnomusicology with extra-academic initiatives to conceive more negotiable and sustainable coexistence models on local to global scales.

The predatory effects of this triple silencing and erasure certainly resonate with events happening in many parts of the world. In the Brazilian case they are outwardly notable, as the opening case study above suggests, and I use them here as my point of departure to deal more narrowly with the training in ethnomusicology within and outside universities, integrating knowledge socially produced and accumulated by academics and extra-academic individuals and groups. Considering such a framework, this paper investigates what ethnomusicology's stance would be in the face of what some (and hopefully many) of us have pursued as the necessary construction of a socially just, democratic, and sustainable world, three adjectives which remain as empty words if they are not made thoroughly explicit and open to criticism in public debates. This is not meant, however, to present any sort of retrospective view of ethnomusicology's pathways in Brazil or elsewhere, but to offer a picture of contemporary problems in the field regarding politics and the various forms of struggle for the right to diversity today, issues which pervade what in the work of Grupo Musicultura has been termed sound praxis, i.e.:

[…] the articulation of interrelated discourses, actions, and policies concerning sound, as it appears, quite subtly or unnoticeably, in the daily experience of individuals, that is, for professional and amateur musicians, cultural agents, entrepreneurs and legislators, among others; for groups such as musicians' collectives and organized audiences; and for institutions such as school systems, corporations, labor unions, and both governmental and nongovernmental policy agencies. (Grupo Musicultura 2010: 219–220)

It seems appropriate to articulate such a notion here with a seminal essay by Celso Furtado, world renowned economist and former Culture Minister of Brazil, titled "Cultural creativity and dependent development," originally written in the 1970s (later republished as a chapter in Furtado 2012). In this paper Furtado presents an impressive synthesis of the Brazilian socio-historical saga, couched in a continuous while necessarily imprecise emulation of European industrialization models. He locates the center of this lasting mismatch between local history and imported socioeconomic models in the submission of alternating Brazilian ruling classes' projects of society and culture to an emphasis on what Max Weber termed once "the logic of means"—in other words, rational, quantitative dimensions of human knowledge—to the detriment of what the German sociologist termed the "logic of ends"—i.e. sensitive, qualitative dimensions sensitive to public interest. This situation, as argued by Furtado, may have not only reinforced the more-than-evident domination of the socalled hard sciences and technology over the arts and humanities under the framework of capitalist relations. Its more pernicious effect, suggests Furtado, has been subsuming every societal project or alternative human identity to notions of productivity anchored in the superiority of the so-called "male-white-Christian rational being in command," leading invariably to domination, violence, and human, intellectual and environmental devastation. It does not require great effort to realize that the bulk of what Furtado classified as dominance, violence and devastation are moving vectors in the current neoliberal drive being imposed on both social and political life in Brazil and elsewhere. A quick look at daily national newspapers will reveal the aggression and murdering of "dysfunctional" sectors of society both in the cities and in rural areas, from individual to mass killings. The most perverse aspects of such processes are certainly the systematic attempts to delegitimize and annihilate some of these sectors' respective lifestyles and worldviews, particularly when they are seen to present any resistance to the generally racist, fundamentalist, hetero-normative ideals of "progress," or to offer forms of resistance to or threaten the approval of legislation which may be humanly and environmentally harmful, to measures in favor of speculation and to measures conducive to the concentration of land ownership by big businesses of many sorts, in all cases guaranteeing the privilege of the few at the expense of the criminalization and even decimation of many.

In the historical experience accumulated by humanity in different times and places, continues Celso Furtado, this somber scenario only offers one way out: the exercise, as intensely as possible, of politics, understood here as both micro and macropolitics, and consequently the debate of ideas, a fundamental source of human creativity, and of socio-economic development. On the one hand, politics, debate, reflection, and action; on the other hand, domination, violence, and both human and environmental devastation. Here we seem to have a good—albeit quite challenging—demand for new forms of training ethnomusicologists in the study of sound praxis in the sense stated above, as well as a good script for not only new kinds of conferences and symposia but also for establishing other forms of dialogues both within the field of ethnomusicology as well as with other academic and extra-academic knowledge-producing individuals and groups.

In a previous paper (Araujo 2014), I highlighted with a more optimistic undertone not only ethnomusicology's long history of more horizontal dialogues between researchers and their interlocutors, but also joint political activism in favor of the interlocutors' aspirations, all of this generating groundbreaking scholarship (see, for instance, the case of Alice Fletcher in the 19th century US) way beyond the due and commendable respect for other knowledge and worldviews.8 In the same paper, I also commented on the growing number of intercommunication channels available today among relatively specialized areas of academic knowledge and public administration institutions and agents in areas such as education at large (elementary, high school, special needs etc.), public health, human rights, communications and even relatively surprising ones such as production engineering or urban planning, a few of which

8 See, for instance, Fletcher and LaFlesche (1911), Fletcher (1994 [1893]), Ellis (1994), Shelemay (1988), Londoño Fernandez (2000), Lassiter (1998), Impey (2002), Hemetek (2006), Rodgers (2012), Wood (2018a, 2018b).

have gone through some degree of relativistic turns in their approach to their respective subject matters, particularly taking into account not entirely measurable variables such as human satisfaction, health standards etc., seeking dialogues with—why not? music scholars.

However, this path leads us simultaneously to critically reconsider how far and how alienated training programs in ethnomusicology have been from these new emerging realities, and also from the new types and standards required of productive dialogues with other academic fields of knowledge, with public sector institutions and agents, and particularly with extra-academic knowledge-producing individuals and social groups. The much acclaimed emphasis on interdisciplinary studies, for instance, still privileges objects (such as "music"), very narrowly defined in terms of themes, modes of production and validation of knowledge which is still conditioned and controlled by the academic milieu, reflecting age-old Eurocentric and colonial values still seen as hegemonic despite decades of critique of this kind of centralization of power emanating from within and outside the academic environment. The defense of conventional and pro-status quo views about the particularity and necessity of a knowledge-producing social field relatively immune to social, economic and political pressures, understood by some as the privilege of the academic milieu, usually rests on ideals, and quite often not more than ideals, of distancing, neutrality and objectivity, today profoundly called into question by several post-currents (Marxism, structuralism, modernism, colonialism), as well as by feminism, lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender studies and several other theoretical stances.9

On the other hand, and this is one central purpose of this paper, ethnomusicologists in many places—if not everywhere—are developing or seeking to develop new research frameworks, such as the one exemplified by Musicultura, involving different manners and degrees of horizontal collaboration, sometimes involving joint activities in formats other than conventional participant observation models, co-authorship with or full authorship by their extra-academic interlocutors. Regarding the formats, a parenthesis should be open here, recasting how many times ethnomusicologists have taken advantage of the non-verbal aspects of sound praxis to create new notions of fieldwork rarely if ever available to ethnographers working in other domains.10 Such processes allow the repositioning of immemorial issues in the field such as, for in-

9 It is interesting—though highly problematic—to see that the conservative viewpoints just mentioned emphasize the distancing from the socio-economic-political pressures of everyday life precisely at a point in time in which the academic field as a whole, and the world over, is increasingly being pressured to accept interference from private interests and private research funding ever more conditioned by market-dictated productivity parameters to which many if not all of us here are somehow subjected.

10 See, for instance, Hood (1960), Nettl (1987), Seeger (1988), Turino (1993), Slawek (1998), Sautchuk and Sautchuk (2014), Justice and Hadley (2015), Graber (2107).

stance, the divide between particularity and universality, since these processes benefit enormously from a profoundly accumulated knowledge on local processes paralleled by their filtering through a common, open-ended and often enduring dialogic process in which differently originated knowledges are contrasted, negotiated and co-produced.

In this sense, the field of ethnomusicology, but also other fields of music scholarship, have an enormous task ahead of them in confronting the persisting dominance of Europeanized conservatory models and self-reproductive myths of origin which still affect music training in universities as well as perceptions of music in other fields of knowledge. Even so, in my view (but also as illustrated by other colleagues in Brazil; see Luhning and De Tugny 2016), the training of researchers, teachers and other professionals with reference to some sort of ethnomusicology in Brazilian academic programs has taken promising steps. These have involved deeper levels of self-criticism toward the issues raised above and toward the necessary social commitment to engaging in new forms of dialogues among different and not exclusively academic knowledge-producing individuals, social groups and institutions, more finely tuned with a world that demands solutions to coexistence beyond blind obedience to unilateral forms of rationalism and ideals of progress dictated by the socio-environmentally predatory self-reproduction of capital at the expense of everyone and everything.

In a national context such as Brazil's, it is crucial to come to terms with situations such as the systematic killings of indigenous peoples and the systematic disrespect of age-old indigenous rights, a situation of ethnocide which is mirrored in all the poorer sectors of society or among groups perceived as dysfunctional in or threats to the hegemonic models of wealth accumulation both in rural and urban areas (and let us not forget that these are the sites of most if not all of our research). Likewise, it is important to notice here the important role that can be played by academic societies such as the ICTM or the Brazilian Association for Ethnomusicology in mobilizing academic knowledge beyond actions of recognition and valuing of diversity toward more impactful institutional actions to ensure the right to coexistence of worldviews. In order to accomplish that, an academic society will certainly find too many obstacles in its way. But on the other hand, it may find here and there accumulated experiences, such as conceding space to these discussions in different formats and forums, establishing special interest groups to increasingly define as well as publicize issues relevant to societal discussions perceived as crucial, to launch or co-participate in campaigns with other societies and similar organizations. Obviously we will not be reinventing the wheel, but let us hope that the ideals of struggle, emancipation and change (the logics of ends) which have been recently animating real life in Brazil and other parts of the world will prevail over the subsuming of all living forms to the sole objective of increasing the prosperity of capital accumulation.

After the first frustrated attempt by Grupo Musicultura members to rehearse the song mentioned at the beginning of this paper, the occurrence of an intense and relatively prolonged conflict between the two rival parties disputing the control of illegal activities in Maré stopped Musicultura from meeting for a whole week. As soon as the regular biweekly meetings resumed, rehearsing the song was established as a priority. When it finally happened, more or less ten days after the first attempt, the difficult memories of the gunshots and bombs were still fresh among participants. The head arrangement had, however, become somewhat clearer and the group progressed a bit further. A triangle, played by a local video maker and volunteer in the group, was added from the start, the solo electric guitar seemed a bit more comfortable, while another vocalist (a social work major) attempted to follow the singing of the non-lexical sounds. The first strophe of the text could be finally and precariously sung by the songwriter for the first time, eventually accompanying himself on a five-string guitar, as a way of making the different sections clearer and teaching the harmony to the bass player (a high school student who regularly played that instrument in a Pentecostal church he attended) as well as the right beat to the bass drummer (with a similar background but who played the trumpet in church services). Significantly, he does not play at all on the second beat, the stylistic heartbeat of samba performance, and keeps playing on the first one, which, in a more idiomatic sense, should remain silent.

The Latin roots of the term culture stem from the memory of collective work in agricultural fields, a sign of the imposition of human needs and rationality on resistant matters such as the soil, pests etc., colonized for such purpose. Cultivating the land and consequentially its resultant culture tends to be conservative in favour of the maintenance of the status quo in terms of early European notions of private property, but in most cases due to either ignorance or fear of alternatives. Therefore, the processes, results and memory of cultivation, which inherently amount to the configuration of a culture, simultaneously comprise the imposition of and resistance to a rational order, in other words, violence and conflict.

Musicultura's political activism, in a continued but tense dialogue with the academic field, is perhaps more clearly defined by this complex praxis, continuously negotiating and not always resolving conflict and disjuncture between sonic referents. These may range from speeches, sounds and music to gunshots and bombs, always involving the reciprocal relationships those sonic realities maintain with the reflexive effort that pervades the group's activities as well as with the different and not rarely contradictory macro-political and institutional goals and practices impacting the group's praxis. Such examples may be challenging to ethnomusicology's standard research principles and protocols of non-interventionism. On the other hand, if there is a positive legacy in ethnomusicology and its multifarious, far from linear development, such legacy will have to be sought in something embedded in the experience briefly analyzed here: its continuous self-questioning on deeper and deeper grounds, and mainly in its rethinking of and re-engagement in a real world demanding increasing socio-political awareness to contend newer, more sophisticated and ever more predatory forms of dominance, exploitation and decimation.

*References*

\_\_\_\_\_\_\_. 2014 "Dimensiones político-epistemológicas del diálogo intercultural. Patrimonios de conocimiento y luchas sociales." In *El valor del património: mercado, politicas culturales y agenciamientos sociales*, M. Chaves, M. and M. Montenegro, eds. Bogotá: ICAHN, 359–386.

### *Abstract*

Debates on social justice have highlighted the difficult and sometimes irreconcilable tensions inherent in public-private relationships, whatever the respective definition for each of the terms may be. In an assumedly reductionist perspective, some of the major forces at play nowadays are, on one hand, issues of worldwide dimensions such as the growth of resource privatization, the commodification of social life, and a structural job crisis, all of which are generating more social inequality plus an unprecedented level of concentration of income and, consequentially, of power. On the other side of this equation, as argued by Fraser (2002) among others, rests the need or urge for effective responses by bottom-up collective action in defense of the public interest in both local and global arenas. Half way from both sides and mediating such disputes are state policies ideally aimed at maintaining a balance between private and public demands, in not a few cases hindered by the power of capital in dictating the destinies of politics worldwide. Music, soundscapes, and imaginaries around them are, as they have been in previous sociohistorical contexts, an integral part of this process, constituting a rich field of enquiry aimed at political action in defense of concepts of public interest and social justice against the more somber prospects of deepening socioeconomic inequality.

Since 2003, and having to cope with many of these issues on a local level, a small academic unit based on the School of Music at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro has been carrying out action-research initiatives jointly conceived with residents of Rio's second largest favela area, Maré, home to a total population nearing 150,000 people, as well as the site of a high degree of both institutionalized and criminal violence. Since the beginning, the residents' participation in these activities has differed from conventional roles usually defined in the social sciences as informants or collaborators, terms that usually signal a limited, if existent at all, interest on the part of the subjects in the aims and results of the research, usually defined and controlled by outsiders to the contexts under investigation who are positioned in the academic field. In this long-term experience—based on principles derived from fields such as dialogical anthropology/ethnomusicology, critical pedagogy and participatory action-research—the residents, as majoritarian members of this heterodox research collective (self-named Musicultura), maintain autonomous control of the goals, methods, and forms of diffusion of the research results. All of these steps have taken shape in regularly held open discussions leading to a consensus through some sort of agreement or, under the most difficult circumstances, vote.

This article critically reflects upon the work of the Musicultura collective, addressing the potentials of and obstacles to participatory initiatives not only in redefining goals and strategies in the political struggles around the public-private continuum, but also in radically redesigning the contexts of knowledge production beyond the academic/extra-academic dichotomy.

## Bridging the Racial Divide in Malaysia: Crossing Borders through Research and Process Theatre

This essay is a reflective account about my journey as a scholar activist, one who conducts rigorous research with the intention of bringing about socio-political and cultural changes in society. Activist research is an offshoot of Participatory Action Research (PAR), an approach that emphasizes the participation of communities in the processes of research. PAR was created by non-government organizations, mainly in the Global North in the 1970s, to help solve development problems such as poverty, public health and education in the Global South. Nevertheless, these PAR projects have been criticized for moving in a top-down manner from the First World to the Third World, from the developed to the underdeveloped, and from the university to the local people (Reason and Bradbury 2008). Latin American scholar activists such as Fals Borda (2008) stress that PAR undertaken by many universities are top-down and often detached from the political issues that affect the local communities. The collaborations in these vertical approaches are often unequal, as the research subjects are treated as research assistants, and their local knowledge and concerns are not given priority.

 Consequently, scholar activists such as the anthropologist Charles Hale (2004, 2006) and his colleagues have called for the direct involvement of ordinary people in every step of the collaborative research projects that academics undertake, including the formulation of objectives, collection of data, analyses and dissemination of data. This type of collaboration not only gives us a better picture of the grounds for the injustices and inequalities that occur in society, but empowers ordinary people to find ways to bring about transformation in their society. In this regard, the collaborative project conducted by Samuel Araujo and students from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro Ethnomusicology Lab, together with young people of the Grupo Musicultura, has been inspirational. The latter is an NGO created by the residents of Mare, a slum area in Rio de Janeiro where problems pertaining to violence, drugs and joblessness occur. The university researchers devised collaborative methods with the residents to document the music of Mare and its meanings. The process of research and the creation of a local music resource centre led to increased self-esteem among the youths involved, as well as new knowledge in music and other related performing arts in the area (Araujo and the Grupo Musicultura, 2006).

Even so, activist research can take many forms and approaches so as to cater to the needs of the specific communities that researchers work with. In the developing countries of the Global South, where large sections of the population still live in poverty and authoritarian rule occurs, research on music and musicking often intersects with the struggle for basic rights such as indigenous identity, equality, peace, health, education, housing, land, and other issues. This has led many activist scholars in the Global South, including the author, to be engaged in social action research that is practice-related (Reason and Bradbury 2008). This paper focuses on a kind of practice-based collaborative approach that uses musical theatre in efforts to create a more inclusive society in the racially polarized nation of Malaysia.

In that respect, I have been influenced by the practice of 'theatre for development' or 'process theatre'. As the names suggest, theatre for development aims at the personal growth of the participants as well as the development of the community; process theatre implies the making of drama, dance and music by the participants themselves, where the process of making theatre is as important as the final product. This type of theatre evolved about 50 years ago as a dialogical method for educating communities in Latin America, Africa and Asia regarding the development issues affecting them (Eskamp 2006, Van Erven 1992). Collaborative research and the use of various media such as music, drama, visual arts, photography, or video, provide avenues to initiate discussion and promote the understanding of critical issues. In Southeast Asia, theatres for development groups have created their own participatory methods to address issues in relation to conflict resolution, peace building, gender sensitization, social inequality and heritage conservation; they also help children and adults cope with trauma caused by war or natural disasters such as the tsunami. Some of the exemplary theatre for development groups in Southeast Asia include the Philippines Educational Theatre Association (PETA) and the Philippines Theatre Network, Teatre Arena and Studio Puskat in Yogyakarta, Maya and Makhampom in Thailand (see Tan 2013).1

I have also been moved by the 'interventionist' approaches and strategies for community music-making in peacebuilding contexts that have emerged in the United Kingdom and Ireland (Higgins 2012). These interventionist approaches promote the advancement of musical skills as well as the personal growth of the participants. As a case in point, the cultural activist Bill Mullen (2018: 5) has shown that community music-making workshops in Ireland provide safe spaces for musicking and developing 'friendship', 'trust' and 'respect' among participants who are in conflict. In these workshops, music making is made available to all participants. Consequently, by gen-

1 See van Erven's (1992) seminal study on the Philippine, Korean, Indian, Indonesian, Thai and Japanese theatre for liberation networks in the 1970s and 1980s. Based on research in these countries, he wrote about the practitioners, methodologies and content of the theatre for liberation workshops and the scripts of plays performed by the prominent groups in these countries in that period. According to van Erven, the impact of these theatre programmes has been so powerful that theatre practitioners in some countries have been threatened with guns and even imprisonment.

erating their own styles of music, the participants experience a sense of collective ownership of the music created.

The activist researchers that I referred to above stress that regardless of the approach used, there is a need to recognize that political convictions and social positioning affect our work. It is within this context that I share these visions and strategies in my attempts to build bridges among ethnically segregated young people in Penang, Malaysia, where I was born, live and work. I collaborate with and train young people in Penang to conduct their own research on the history of cultural interaction in Penang, to learn their traditional art forms and to present their findings using contemporary and local forms of theatre, music or movement. Specifically, recreating local musical theatre that investigates cultural multiplicity, cross-cultural identities, and the fluidity of cultural boundaries can offset state policies that emphasize cultural homogeneity and exclusivity.

The article begins with a personal honest reflection on how I have been socialized politically and culturally in Penang and how this has guided my academic research and writing. This is followed by an explanation of why crossing borders and collaborative approaches in process theatre can help to promote intercultural interaction. The final section explicates some practical and methodological lessons that can be drawn from this.

## *Socialization in an Ethnically Divided Nation*

Situated along one of the major sea routes in Asia, Penang attracted Chinese, Arab, Indian, European and other traders from the region from the sixteenth century. The formation of a free port by the British in the late eighteenth century saw the arrival of a greater diversity of people including the Siamese, Burmese and Achehnese. In the late nineteenth century, Chinese and Indians landed in large numbers in Penang before they moved to other places to work in the tin mines, rubber estates, farms or to run businesses. By then, Penang had become a cosmopolitan city.2 In many of my research publications, I have shown that the people of Penang (and Malaysia) were and have been open to outside influences; folk theatre and social dance music such as the *bangsawan* and *ronggeng* and Peranakan Chinese music were inclusive of the diverse cultures of the Malay archipelago, China, India, the Middle East and Europe.

2 Malaysia's population of 28.3 million comprises 67.4 per cent *Bumiputera* (translated as 'sons of the soil' consisting of the Malays and other indigenous groups such as the Orang Asli, Kadazan, Bajau, Bidayuh, Melanau, Penan, etc.), 24.8 per cent Chinese, 7.4 per cent Indian, and 0.7 per cent Other (including Arabs, Eurasians, Thais, Burmese and Indonesians [Department of Statistics, 2010]).

Performers in these syncretic theatre and musical forms were ethnically mixed; they adapted stories, dances and music from different parts of the world to attract multiethnic audiences (Tan 1993, 2000, 2016).3

As a local-born Hokkien Chinese living in multicultural Penang in the period after the British granted independence in 1957, I also crossed cultural and ethnic borders in the early days of my childhood. I interacted with children of other races in my neighbourhood and spoke the localized Penang Hokkien (the Hokkien dialect from Fujian Province mixed with Malay and English words) with my family and friends. I communicated in Malay with the Malay and Indian street vendors who passed by my house daily to sell ice cream and cakes. Some of these vendors also spoke Hokkien to me. My grandparents took me to watch Chinese Opera, Malay *ronggeng* and other parades during the various religious street festivals where we interacted with friends of different races. We delighted in the multiethnic cuisine available in the coffee shops and visited one another during Malay, Chinese and Indian festive occasions such as Hari Raya (celebration marking the end of the Muslim fasting month), the Chinese New Year (celebration of the first 15 days of the Chinese lunar calendar) and Deepavali (festival of light marking the beginning of the Hindu new year).

This moving in and out of cultures and languages was disrupted when I went to primary school in the 1960s. This was a period of transition when the different races experienced the complexities of independence, nationhood and the search for a national identity and culture. The nuns at the Convent Light Street, the earliest missionary school for girls set up in Penang in the nineteenth century, taught me to speak, think and write in English. I was also introduced to western classical music and was fortunate to have a cousin who gave me piano lessons at a discounted rate. Even though English education and European musical training distanced me from the local mixed cultures, they provided the avenue to further my studies overseas and the tools to conduct in-depth research on the local cultures when I was older. For this I am thankful.

Like everyone else in the school, I had to choose one of the following racial identifications: Malay, Chinese, Indian or Others. Before this, I was oblivious of the meaning of these racial categories and of race. These ethnic boundaries had been demar-

3 *Bangsawan* is a type of commercial popular theatre that emerged during the British colonial period. To attract multiethnic audiences, it incorporated stories, dances and music from Europe, the Malay Archipelago, China, India and other parts of Asia. *Bangsawan* engendered the first popular music and Malay orchestra in the Malay Peninsula. *Ronggeng* is a form of Malay social dance-music genre that incorporates syncretic music such as *asli, inang, joget* and *dondang sayang*. Dancers move to the singing of quatrains without touching one another. The Chinese Peranakan are local-born Chinese who have acculturated to Malay and other forms of local cultures and language. They are known for intercultural mixing particularly in their food, performing arts, costumes and language. See Matusky and Tan (2017) and Tan (1993 and 2016) for descriptions of the various forms.

cated by the British colonialists in their attempt to 'divide and rule' and were later absorbed into postcolonial politics. The official categories of Bumiputera (literally meaning 'sons of the soil' comprising the Malays and indigenous peoples of Sarawak, Sabah and Malaysia), Chinese, Indian and Others imposed strict racial, religious, cultural and language borders and allowed for the implementation of a political system that privileged the indigenous Bumiputera (particularly the Malays) (Kahn and Loh: 1992). Mixed cultures that had occurred in Malaysian history from cross-border interactions, specifically those of the Chinese Peranakan (meaning 'local-born') and minority cultures had accordingly been marginalized. In school, we were taught to emphasize our differences rather than blur the boundaries as we did in our daily lives.

The introduction of racial categories and the privileging of the Bumiputera in the 1960s led to an increase in racial segregation and the conflict that broke out in 1969 in the country. Affirmative action policies that were introduced in the 1970s for the purposes of restructuring society and the inculcation of loyalty to the nation further resulted in racial anxieties and compartmentalization. The non-Bumiputera felt that the New Economic Policy introduced in 1971 to restructure society discriminated in favour of the Bumiputera (comprising Malays and other indigenous people) with regards to admission into universities and public service, scholarships, the issuing of licenses for operating businesses and so on.

In addition, the National Culture Policy of 1971 that called for the formation of one national culture based on cultures indigenous to the region, the incorporation of elements from other cultures, and Islam as an important element, reinforced the polarization of the performing arts into separate Malay, Chinese and Indian streams. The policy saw the implementation of state intervention in the arts and cultural production that resulted in the recreation and streamlining of selected forms of Malay dance, music and theatre and some forms from Sabah and Sarawak. A special culture ministry was set up to implement the changes in all the states and schools (Tan 1990). Other so-called 'non-indigenous' ones that included the Chinese, Indian, Siamese, Burmese and Peranakan forms were not only sidelined, but were not given any funding or promoted. In turn, for fear of being assimilated, the non-Bumiputera communities began to promote their own art forms; they played to audiences that were divided ethnically. For instance, Chinese music, dance and theatre were staged for the Chinese-educated, Malay forms for the Malay-educated and Tamil ones for the Tamil-educated (see Tan 1990, 2000).4

4 The national culture policy created much controversy among the minority groups, in particular the Chinese who formed the second largest ethnic group in the nation. To many Chinese, the policy was assimilationist and would lead to the demise of those cultures which the government identified as 'nonindigenous'. Chinese cultural groups consolidated further to preserve their culture and to assert their

When I received scholarships to study music for my BA and MA degrees at Cornell and Wesleyan Universities respectively in the late 1970s, like the rest of Malaysia, Penang society with its blending of cultures that I once knew as a child had been divided by politics. Nevertheless, ethnomusicology programs in the American universities challenged me to cross borders again; I began to study and perform the cultures of the world. Doctoral research at Monash University in Australia in the 1980s on the syncretic *bangsawan* theatre showed that before the creation of national borders and policies, people of the Malay Archipelago were open to mixing cultures and interacting with one another (Tan 1993, 2016). I myself was exposed to the blending of cultures before I went to school.

When I returned to work in Penang in the 1990s, another national culture narrative had emerged. Government leaders emphasized that "culture cannot be imposed but rather it has to be adapted, adopted and practiced. Multicultural diversity is the country's strength" (*New Straits Times,* 8 Sept. 2002). However, the state's multicultural events focused on spectacular dance and musical performances, particularly for the National Day Celebrations, Visit Malaysia campaigns, Citrawarna- Colours of Malaysia, and the Malaysian Festival of Arts. They superficially juxtaposed stereotypical music and dances that were representative of the different ethnic groups that catered to the tourists. Light and firework displays accompanied the parade of hundreds of performers donning colourful multiethnic costumes with scarves, fans and hats. While the expression of multiculturalism appears to be promoted by the State, the kinds of cultural differences that can be portrayed are defined by cultural administrators (Tan 2000). As Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998: 65, 72, 77) writes, through these cultural shows "diversity is harmoniously integrated" but issues of "conflict and marginalization" are suppressed. These shows have a "neutralizing effect of rendering difference (and conflict) inconsequential."

To sum up, national policies regarding culture and rights have caused intense racial divide in the country. The non-Bumiputera including the author felt a sense of injustice about not being treated equally with the Bumiputera. Racial categories have been woven into the fabric of everyday life so that they influence how people conceive their identities, which in turn perpetuates stereotypical assumptions about culture and religion. Although an opposition coalition has taken over the government since mid-2018, no new policies have emerged.

Chinese identity. They held on to their Chinese music, dance, opera, and festivals as symbols of ethnic identity and promoted their own cultural associations despite the lack of government support (Tan 1988, 2000).

## *Bridging the Racial Divide through Process Theatre*

In the past three decades, I have actively advocated for change in the socio-political and cultural systems in Malaysia. Together with other non-governmental groups, I have spoken out and written about how cultural centralization, the national culture policy and shows for tourism have homogenized and standardized the performing arts. But this was to no avail.

What can ethnomusicologists do to ease the ethnic anxieties in society, especially since ordinary people do not have the power to change national policies, and conventional methods of speaking and writing are not effective? How can we use our research findings, performance skills and resources to mediate intercultural dialogue so as to promote racial harmony? In an attempt to bring young people of different ethnicities together, I turned to process theatre. I searched for and initiated alternative participatory methodologies to empower young people to bridge intercultural gaps and learn their multiethnic traditions that are crucial for the development of a more inclusive Malaysian nation. Like the community music facilitators in other parts of the world, I believe that racial harmony will emerge when ordinary people, including the younger generation who are separated by race, begin to work and communicate with one another in the safe space of the music and theatre workshop.

Based on the multiethnic traditions of Malaysia and promoting inter-cultural dialogue and ensemble work, this type of process theatre can provide appropriate platforms for performers to engage with issues of race. By crossing stylistic and ethnic boundaries, the performers develop perspectives that are more inclusive; they also challenge the prevalent narratives of ethnicism. Moreover, audiences can also watch the complexities of ethnic relationships on stage.

Additionally, by learning the traditional performing arts with veteran artists, the participants can help to revitalize the traditions that are being neglected by the government, national institutions and universities. They also begin to pose questions and suggest alternatives to the State's version of performative multiculturalism that emphasizes the production of stereotypical ethnic performance styles.

## *Process Theatre as a Method*

Process theatre is based on the ideas and pedagogy of Brazilian educator Paolo Freire. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire criticised the Western pedagogical principle that he called "The Banking Concept of Education," in which knowledge is "a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing" (Freire 1972: 164). For Freire, a pedagogy for liberation requires a new kind of teacher who believes in the creativity and knowledge of the oppressed. By analogy, a theatre of liberation also requires a new kind of actor/facilitator who activates the inherent creativity of his or her target group. Freire also emphasized that communication in the form of dialogue between teachers and the students is crucial in empowering the latter to be in control of their own development. His concept of "conscientization" is widely used in participatory development and community theatre to refer to the process of raising awareness though collective enquiry, dialogue, and action that can lead to social change and justice.

Process theatre has also adapted the participatory approaches of the Brazilian theatre director Augusto Boal (1979), who created 'forum theatre' as a place where the oppressed or disadvantaged can express their issues of concern about the unequal power relations in society. Boal drew from Freire's ideas of 'conscientization' or 'raising awareness' for change. In Boal's forum theatre, the community is invited to see the workshop performances and to discuss or even act out their problems.

In Asia, theatre for development usually combines contemporary theatre techniques and the traditional or popular music, dance, drama, puppetry and visual arts of the place where the workshops are held. Guided by the facilitators, participants collectively develop the plays based on issues that concern them. They use the characters, music, imagery, games, movements and props from their own diverse traditional performing arts. This way, the participants gain ownership of the process, content and the play itself. The plays are often performed for the community members, whereby a discussion about the issues raised takes place after the performance. With the advent of media technology, some groups have begun to use video and photography to advance certain community concerns (see Tan 2009).5 In a way, the workshop performances are akin to contemporary socially engaged plays that have emerged in different parts of the world. For instance, the American playwright Susanne Lacy uses participatory and collaborative methods in her plays that require interaction and exchange with the audiences (Schlemmer 2017).

 The process theatre projects in Penang cater to mostly teenagers and young artists andy usually last from three to five months. Facilitators comprise contemporary and traditional artists, university students, teachers, videographers and photographers. Games and group dynamic activities at all sessions help the participants and facilitators to get to know one another and establish a sense of ensemble. Participants undergo training in improvisation, role-play, mime, movement, voice, and visual arts as

5 As part of my research funded by the Asian Public Intellectuals (API) Award, Nippon Foundation. I studied some of the best practices of community outreach programmes in Southeast Asia and Japan. Two of the projects about peace building in Okinawa and the issue of forced marriages used video as the form of communication. For my report for the API, see Tan 2009.

well as selected traditional music, dance and theatre with the traditional artists of the area where the workshop is held. Creative exercises encourage participants to explore certain themes and experiences. Field trips to specific locations where the stories are based provide the participants with the opportunity to experience everyday activities, talk to others, observe the movements and listen to the sounds of people and the environment in those spaces.

The participants then put together what they have observed, learnt and collected from the field trips in the form of songs, music, movements and short stories that they create themselves.  Members of the community that the young people obtained their stories from as well as their parents and friends are invited to see the showcase. During the closure, feedback is obtained from the participants regarding the workshop (see Tan 2008, 2013, 2018 for descriptions of the methodologies for specific projects).

This essay stresses the importance of the crossing of all kinds of borders through the production of localized plays; multiethnic casts negotiate the stage using multiple accents, languages and performance idioms. By so doing, the play becomes accessible to all of the ethnic groups in the audience, as everyone can understand the languages and identify with the scenarios in their daily lives. Crossing boundaries and hybridity also helps participants to move beyond cultural and racial stereotypes and break ethnic blinders.

What are the different ways for crossing borders? I share some of the methods used in previous community musical-theatre projects that have been conducted in the past decade with young people, namely *Kisah Pulau Pinang* (The Penang Story, 2006, 2017, 2018), *Ronggeng Merdeka* (Independence Ronggeng Dance, 2007), *Kotai Penang* (Penang *Kotai* or Song Stage, 2009), *Opera Pasar* (Market Opera, 2008), *Wayang Chulia*  (Shadow Theatre about Chulia Street, 2015)*, Wayang Potehi* (Potehi Puppet Theatre, 2015–2016).

## *Strategies for Crossing Boundaries*

### *1 Collaborating with Multiethnic Artists, Stakeholders and Participants*

As the national universities are restricted by government regulations and policies, most of the advocacy work needs to be done outside. A group of concerned artists (including the author) formed a non-governmental organization known as Ombak-Ombak ARTStudio (Ombak in Malay means 'waves'); we are a collective of artists from different ethnic backgrounds who try to create cutting-edge performances with a Malaysian identity. We experiment with traditional and contemporary arts media to create relevant and accessible forms of theatre that can express the experiences of the local communities. We collaborate with other tradition bearers and community stakeholders of all ethnic groups. By working with an independent non-governmental organization outside of the university, we are not bound by State policies and authority.

Ombak-OmbakARTStudio runs community theatre projects (known as Ombak Muda referring to 'Ripples') that cater to children, teenagers and young adults who come from different class and ethnic backgrounds. The main objective is to educate a new generation of Malaysians who can appreciate the diverse musical and theatre traditions of all ethnic groups and to instil in the young the need to cross borders in order to break ethnic barriers. This is crucial, as the formal school education system promotes the essentialized racial particularities and cultural homogeneity as defined by the authorities. The university students who help out in these projects volunteer as facilitators so that they can gain experience working with the young people and communities.

We are also supported by other stakeholders: schools provide the students and teacher facilitators, cultural associations offer spaces for rehearsals and performances, banks and other companies give funding, and members of the multiethnic communities open their houses and shops to the young people and willingly share their personal stories and experiences.

The plays devised encourage crossovers by incorporating diverse adult facilitators and young performers. Audiences comprise young people and adults of all races, ages and social groups. For instance, *Ronggeng Merdeka*'s cast included three co-directors—a Malay dance choreographer, an Indian dramateur and a Chinese musician. A group of children of different ages and races played the scenes about children's lives during the Japanese Occupation and pre-independence periods. Another group of young adult university students re-enacted the lives and problems of the *ronggeng* dancers. In the past, these dancers attracted multiethnic audiences at their performances at the amusement parks, but were looked down upon by Malay conservative circles as they danced with men and worked at night.

Interethnic mixing is further encouraged during the workshop, as the participants from diverse ethnic and social backgrounds have to interact intensively with one another for 3–5 months and to negotiate with one another in the improvisation and learning process. If they had problems with one another, they had to resolve them so that the play could go on. Enjoyment in being involved in the production also helped to ease any tensions that arose during the rehearsals.

### *2 Learning by Experience, Observation, Research and Fieldwork*

Oral interviews, observing, recording, and executing the movements or playing the music of another ethnic group helped the participants to learn more about the 'other'. Participants were taken on field trips by adult facilitators and researchers who introduced them to the history and cultural background of the sites. They were also provided with research skills and taught how to interview community members using different languages. Following that, they went out to observe and interview community members about their festivals, crafts, rituals, performing arts, food and any socio-economic issues of concern. In *Kisah Pulau Pinang,* the apprentices interviewed the people about what Penang was like a century ago that is not found in the history books. Intercultural mixing occurred amidst the lively spice trade, street festivals, and pilgrims stopping by on their way to Mecca, secret society fights and entertainment for all at the amusement parks. In *Ronggeng Merdeka*, the young people questioned families about their experiences during the Japanese Occupation and their role in the journey to independence. In *Kotai* Penang, the participants found out that many families including craftsmen had to move out of their homes because of the sharp increase in rents after the repeal of the Rent Control Act in 2000.

The young participants also discovered how the communities in specific streets were connected historically to specific trades, many of which no longer exist today. Through the research for their stories, the young people discovered that Carnarvon Street was known for the funeral parlours and the making of paper effigies for funeral rites; Campbell Street was bustling with activities of an old wet market and shops selling jewellery, cloth and other goods; Chulia Street thrived on festival parades, bars where sailors went for entertainment, hawker stalls that lined the streets and the 'Cheapside' alley where cheap tools and house accessories were sold.

In an attempt to bring attention to the heritage market known as the Campbell Street Market that was in danger of being closed down, Ombak Muda participants put on a play called *Opera Pasar*. The young participants investigated the history of the heritage market, interviewed the market vendors about their lives and how they ran their businesses and put these stories into song and dance. Through this experience, the participants learnt to appreciate the wet market, as some of them had never been to one, as they do their shopping with their parents at the modern hypermarkets today.

In all the plays, the methodology of 'Music of Sound' that I pioneered was used. The children were taken to the different sites where the story was based to collect sounds and objects for making music as well as to observe the movements of the people. At the coffee shop, for example, they recorded dialogues in different languages that they heard, sounds of people cooking and making drinks, and combined them to create percussive movement pieces. At the market, they observed the movements and recorded conversations of people buying and selling things and the sounds of clogs that people wore to the wet market; they then created a movement piece from the materials collected.

Learning through research in local settings allowed the participants to experience reality outside the school and home; they could experience how local communities of different races communicated with one another and how cultural borders were blurred on the ground.

## *3 Analysis of the History and Concerns of all Ethnic Groups*

After collecting data from the communities, the participants came together to discuss their findings; they looked for ways to combine their interviews, sounds and movements with the music and theatre skills they had acquired to create short musical skits. The musical plays emphasized accessibility to all and sundry, as the content and forms were grounded on the lives of the local people and street performance genres belonging to the various ethnic communities. *Ronggeng Merdeka* highlighted the hardships encountered by the *ronggeng* performers of different ethnicities during the Japanese Occupation in Penang and the period leading to Independence. The multiethnic young participants in this play portrayed the challenges that children faced in the Japanese school that they had to attend.

Figure 1: At the Japanese School, a scene from *Ronggeng Merdeka.* Photo by Tan Sooi Beng, 2007.

Conversely, *Kotai Penang* highlighted the issue of traditional communities being moved out of the city because of the repeal of the Rent Control Act in 2000: they could no longer afford the high rents and were being replaced by modern cafes and boutique hotels. The displaced included craftsmen who stopped practicing their art forms when they lost their spaces in the heritage city.

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These plays allowed the participants to portray their understanding of historical and present-day issues in the multiethnic society and to cross borders in a variety of ways. First, the participants had to create new plays using the dialogues, movements and sounds of the multiethnic society. Second, they also built close relationships with people of other races, especially those they interviewed and the traditional artists they apprenticed with. Third, the communities shared their common experiences and learnt about one another through the multiple stories enacted by the young participants of the workshops. Fourth, the young participants began to experience the Other by playing the roles of the multiethnic people they interviewed.

The plays celebrated difference and diversity in everyday life in the past in Penang, as they allowed the various voices to intermingle with one another within particular historical contexts.

### *4 Mixing Languages and Musical Elements*

Malaysians have always mixed languages and switched codes in their daily conversations. In our musical plays, the newly-composed songs incorporated Malay, English, Hokkien, Cantonese and Tamil words. The following rap created by young performers about the streets of Penang in *Kisah Pulau Pinang* (2006) exemplified the mix of languages:

*Rap on the Streets of Penang* (*italics =* Malay; CAPS = Hokkien, ordinary font = English)

Penang ah Penang Banyak jalan banyaklah nama Itu nama mana datang? AH KONG AH MA brother sister kamu semua CAI EM CAI Dulu-dulu nama jalan diberi kerana nama bangsa orang-orang di Penang Malay Street, Acheen Street Bangkok Lane, Swatow Lane Yahudi Road, Burmah Road Ceylon Lane, Amoy Lane Kampung Jawa, Kampong Malabar. ANG MO LANG EH MIA pun ada King Street, Queen Street, Campbell Street, Victoria Street

Tan Sooi Beng

## Translation:

Penang oh Penang There are many roads with many names Where did the road names originate? Grandfather, grandmother, brother, sister, do you all know? In the past, many roads were named after the nationality of the people in Penang Malay Street, Acheen Street Bangkok Lane, Swatow Lane Yahudi Road, Burmah Road Ceylon Lane, Amoy Lane Village of Java, Village of Malabar. There were also European names King Street, Queen Street, Campbell Street, Victoria Street.

Figure 2: Chinese, Malays and Indians playing each other's instruments, *Ronggeng Merdeka*. Photo by Tan Sooi Beng, 2007.

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Moreover, the plays juxtaposed the musical elements of the diverse ethnic groups. Chinese and Malay melodies and modes were employed in the singing and instrumental music. Percussion was provided by Chinese, Indian and Malay drums played side by side. Yet the diverse sounds and styles were framed by rhythmic cycles and interlocking rhythms found in Malay, Chinese and Indian music. The music was eclectic and did not privilege any of the three main ethnic categories; rather it was Malaysian in content and form. For example, the melody of the folk song *Dayung Sampan* [Row the Boat] that was employed by the late Chinese pop star Theresa Teng in her hit song *Tian Mi Mi* [Sweet Sweet] was played by the *gamelan* players in *gamelan* style to accompany the Chinese migrants arriving by boat in *Kisah Pulau Pinang* (2006).

By crossing borders in the use of diverse musical forms, languages and instruments as well as returning to the particularities of multiethnic traditional musics of Malaysia, the new music embodied inclusion and challenged the official constructs of national identity that adhere to stereotypical ethnic, cultural and linguistic categories.

### *5 Recreating Traditions that Crossed Boundaries*

The participants also crossed borders by learning, performing and experimenting with the traditional cultures of other communities. *Ronggeng Merdeka* combined the *ronggeng* ensemble (comprising the Malay *rebana*, gong and western violin) with *gamelan* instruments, *wayang kulit* drums, and the Chinese *erhu* (two-stringed spiked fiddle), flute and lion dance drums. Wearing Malay, Chinese and European clothes, the *ronggeng* girls dance to the eclectic tunes and rhythms of the *joget*, *inang*, cha-cha-cha, and rhumba dances as they entertain the men in the amusement parks.

In 2016, Ombak Muda learnt the traditional shadow play (*wayang kulit*) to tell the stories of the people living on Chulia Street, one of the busiest streets in Penang in the past. New puppets representing the different races were carved by the participants for the show entitled Wayang Chulia. They included Indians celebrating *Thaipusam* (an Indian festival), Chinese watching the lion dance and Malays dancing *boria* (a type of Malay street theatre) in shadow form.

In 2017, a group of young people apprenticed with a professional *potehi* glove puppet troupe to learn the art of puppet manipulation, narration and music. Calling themselves Ombak Potehi, the apprentice group recreated *Kisah Pulau Pinang* ( 2017) using the traditional glove puppets dressed in local costumes, speaking and singing in the Penang dialects to tell the people's history of Penang. The premise here is that in order to conserve any culture or recreate it for multiethnic audiences, one needs to understand the roots of the culture.

Figure 3: New localized multiethnic characters set at the port of Penang in the Malay shadow play *Wayang Chulia*. Photo by Tan Sooi Beng, 2016.

## *6 New Sites and Locations*

The performances were free of charge and located in neutral local sites where all ethnic groups met, such as a street in the city, a market place, or a park or open space. The communities from whom the stories were collected were invited to the shows. Audiences also crossed boundaries by going into other spaces outside their own. These plays emphasized the intertextuality of cultures in the daily lives of the communities and cultural encounters in the parks, at street festivals and in other public spaces in the city. Even though the *ronggeng* performers were of various ethnic origins, they interacted and worked together in the *tua se kai* (Hokkien term for the Great World Park), an amusement park that featured multiple types of entertainment such as music, theatre, dance and comedy, acrobatic acts and games for the general public in the past.

Sometimes, residents living in the selected spaces were able to make their grievances heard through the oral interviews and shows. For instance, in *Opera Pasar* (2008), Om-

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Figure 4: Performing to the market community in front of closed shop houses at Campbell Street Market.  The performance in front of closed doors was a statement in itself. The performers also added lines about people moving out of their homes and shops in the course of the play. Additionally, through the research and performance of *Opera Pasar*, there was increased interest in the heritage Campbell Street Market; the market has now been earmarked for restoration and will not be closed down.

## *7 Collective and Bottom-up Methods*

The facilitating team formulated bottom-up participatory approaches that emphasized dialogue, collective work and people-centred knowledge production. As in the projects in Brazil, Ireland and Southeast Asia described at the beginning of this chapter, dialogue among the members of the team and the workshop participants regarding the objectives and methods, activities and fieldwork was carried out from the beginning till the end of the workshop.

The members of the facilitating team worked as a collective (each one had a distinct task and networked with other community members). When one person was not available, another one in the collective took over the particular job. Through participation, the participants took possession of the outcomes that could be useful for their own development. They were empowered to question and voice their opinions about their own cultural development and transformation.

## *Evaluations and Lessons Learnt*

Evaluations carried out with the participants and audiences show that the Malaysian identity which is articulated in the process theatre workshops challenges the politics of the ruling elites. The plays do not fall into any of the country's official ethnic categories—they are not specifically 'Chinese, Malay, Indian or Others', but Malaysian. As one 16 year old participant says in her evaluation, "when we create the music, movement or drama, we focus on making the piece together; we do not think of the play as Malay, Chinese or Indian but something that we composed ourselves." A member of the audience told me that "the music and plays cross ethnic, cultural and stylistic boundaries. Local folk and popular Malay music using Chinese, Malay and Indian instruments embrace the cultural diversity of our multiethnic people."

In the process of constructing process theatre, the young participants learn to understand other cultures and lose any preconceived notions they have of those cultures. The plays, dialogues and song texts that they create disassemble stereotypes that each ethnic group is linguistically and culturally monolithic, and that one's identity is fixed and unchanging. As they blur the boundaries of race by blending languages, song styles, instruments or movements, and represent themselves in ambiguous ways in the musical productions, the performers began to appreciate that intercultural mixing takes place on the ground.

In fact, the performers were of the opinion that the whole process of making musical theatre "changed their thinking about other races" and their perceptions about Others. A 16 year old Indian girl stressed that, "interaction with others opened my mind. I learnt the music of other races that I never knew before." A 14 year old Chinese participant from a Chinese language school said, "This was the first time I entered a mosque and I learnt how Muslims pray." Another 17 year old Malay boy said, "I interacted with people of different ethnic backgrounds and religions with more confidence; my perceptions regarding the other races changed; this is because I did not know their cultures prior to the workshop."

By crossing borders, the plays promote intercultural mixing and help to generate bonds among the participants who come from different ethnic, social and gender backgrounds. They serve as alternatives to the communal divide that is the everyday reality. As another fifteen year old Chinese participant declared: "For the first time, I am able to mix with other Malays and Indians. In the Chinese school that I go to, I only mix with Chinese people. Through this workshop, I made new friends who have similar interests." The participants added that they could communicate with Others by making music together and interacting intensively in the workshops. They pointed out that the collaborative working style encouraged them to "exchange ideas with one another in order to create the music, scripts and song texts;" they "learnt to listen to other people's ideas;" and that "group work inspired creativity and understanding." The participants remain good friends and keep in touch with one another via social media and continue to meet one another after the workshops. Many have continued to join other similar workshops where they have gradually been given the tasks of facilitating by leading the smaller group activities. In this way, the multiethnic workshop team has been able to build capacities for future work.

By encouraging the multiple expressions of Malaysian culture, the performers underline that all creative forms and languages are equally valid. The young people learn to perform the diverse traditions and use them in their new creations. In this way, community musical theatre promotes understanding among the performers and audiences that difference is central to being Malaysian, that identity changes according to the historical and social contexts, and that multiplicity is inherent in all aspects of Malaysian life.

Nevertheless, after many years of practice, problems of sustainability persist. The numbers of young people taking part in the projects are small: twenty to thirty students a year. The young people today tend to multitask and have to attend many supplementary tuition classes outside of school so that they can no longer spend three to five months on a single project. Others seem to be glued to their computer and hand phone games. Funding for the projects is also scarce, as these projects are not part of formal education and are of no commercial value to corporate sponsors.

For the alternative theatre projects to be sustainable, much work remains to be done to convince education policy makers, schoolteachers and private corporations of the values of experiential learning in the field and the process theatre workshop as a venue for cultural interaction. The training of school teachers and the incorporation of the methodologies of process theatre into the school curriculum would be a great leap towards sustainability.

For me, being an ethnomusicologist means being an engaged activist researcher who not only conducts detailed ethnographic research or writes about how ordinary people use music and the arts to contest power structures and national ideologies, but one that dynamically advocates for change in the education and political systems. The methods of recording, archiving, performing and analyzing music and interviews with performers remain vital and are consistent with my personal vision. However, I strongly believe that we can no longer stay neutral in our research and shy away from politics if our research subjects are being marginalized, are divided by race or suffer from social injustice.

After twenty years of practising activist research, I have found process theatre, theatre for development or community theatre to be an effective educational tool that can stimulate change in society and individuals. As Goldbard (2006: 52), an advocate of community cultural development, suggests, "Culture is an effective crucible for social transformation, one that is less polarizing and creates deeper connections than other social change arenas."

What are the main principles and concepts in the methodology of theatre for development? As in other community music-making projects, particularly those for peacebuilding in Ireland (Mullen 2018), the workshop provides a safe space for the participants who are separated by ethnicity and class; it allows them to express their differences and similarities. To run the workshops effectively, it is important to create a cross-ethnic and inter-disciplinary team of facilitators who continually reflect on their individual identities, positionality and their roles as facilitators. Besides teaching skills in the various types of theatre and music, the facilitators should be able to engage the young people in collaborative activities that can lead to mutual respect and trust; they need to balance the needs of the participants while trying to achieve the objectives pertaining to social change. They must be flexible in adjusting their methods depending on the social and cultural situation. The facilitators also need to know how much to intervene in the creation of art works so that the outcome is of a certain quality.

The adoption of participatory and collaborative strategies is crucial in the conceptualization of this type of community theatre. Dialogue is generated through collaboration in research, reflection, analysis, evaluation and planning. Through dialogue and collaboration, different kinds of local knowledge can be ascertained and disseminated. This process blurs the boundaries between the facilitators/communities/ participants; it promotes inclusion among the multiethnic participants. In the peacebuilding context, making art together (which is seen to be a fun activity) allows the participants

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