Ethnomusicology & Its Intimacies

Ethnomusicology and its Intimacies situates intimacy, a concept that encompasses a wide range of often informal social practices and processes for building closeness and relationality, within the ethnomusicological study of music and sound. These scholarly essays reflect on a range of interactions between individuals and communities that deepen connections and associations, and which may be played out relatively briefly or nurtured over time.

Three major sections on Performance, Auto/biographical Strategies, and Film are each prefaced by an interview with a scholar or practitioner with close knowledge of the subject that links the chapters in that section. Often drawing directly on fieldwork experience in a variety of contexts, authors consider how concepts of intimacy can illuminate the ethnographic study of music, addressing questions such as: how can we understand ethnomusicological and ethnographic research and performance as processes of musically mediated intimacy? How are the longstanding relationships we develop with others particularly intimated by and through musicking? How do we understand the musically intimate relationships of others and how do these inflect our own musical intimacies? How does music represent, inscribe, constrain, or provoke social or personal intimacies in particular contexts?

The volume will appeal to all scholars with interests in music and how it is used to construct relationships in different contexts around the world.

Stephen Cottrell is Professor of Music at City, University of London, UK.

Dafni Tragaki is Assistant Professor in Music Anthropology at the Department of History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology, University of Thessaly, Greece.

Stephen Wilford is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology, Popular Music and Sound Studies within the Faculty of Music at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Wolfson College Cambridge, UK.