Hannah Snavely

University of California, Riverside

Garrett Groesbeck

Wesleyan University

We are excited to share with you the second issue of Rising Voices (formerly SEM Student News). The recent renaming of our publication speaks to our desire to center the needs, concerns, and perspectives of students in Ethnomusicology and related disciplines. We chose the theme of “ethics, values, and commitments” for this issue with the hope that it would allow a broad range of approaches to crucial contemporary issues facing students in the field today. We believe it is paramount to highlight student voices: recent protests on college campuses and the responses from administrators have taken center stage in North American news media, and these events speak to the crucial role students have often played in moments of crisis and social change. The Rising Voices editorial team is in support of students and faculty who seek to use their position to challenge systems of oppression, discrimination, and violence, while also recognizing the complex ways in which “student” status is entangled with other potential areas of dis/advantage: citizenship, economic background, access to education and language study, and the ability to travel, among many others. 

In this issue, we are happy to present a diverse variety of student contributions: five articles and five sensory prompt responses. From the articles, three colleagues foreground questions relating to the issue’s theme in research methodology and writing strategies: Taees Gheirati’s contribution on anonymizing research subjects is timely given the increasing prevalence of institutional review boards and the potentially fraught ways in which they might shape research and writing. Associate Editor Hermán Chávez considers how decolonial feminist scholarship may inform approaches to competing commitments in ethnomusicological research, particularly to family, scholarly institutions, and oneself. Argyrios Kokoris focuses on the ways in which silence and censorship shape the written record, particularly in print media and journals. Other contributors highlight the importance of the issue’s theme in relation to pedagogical approaches: Nilles details the ways in which international travel affects the teaching of the pandeiro in Brazil, while Childress argues for a more historically- and culturally-informed approach to wind ensemble works that have been adapted for North American contexts. We are excited by the diverse approaches, backgrounds, and perspectives of these authors, and by the complementary ways in which they approach considerations of ethics, values, and commitments in their own work. 

We are also invigorated by the ongoing enthusiastic response to our sensory prompts, and our selection committee greatly enjoyed reading all submissions. The authors provide rich sensory details sure to resonate with readers: the engrossing experience of internalizing a melody or a choreographed sequence; the ways in which speech, music, and sometimes food variously catch a writer’s attention while participating in events; feelings of nostalgia, familiarity, or displacement while among crowds at a protest or a party; each of these speaks to the types of knowledge we attempt to capture and convey through our writing. 

This issue includes three Dear SEM contributions from senior scholars, which complement the student submissions and shed light on the ways in which the issue’s theme remains deeply relevant to broader conversations in the field. Kristi Hardman details the ways in which accountability shapes her pedagogy, highlighting the diverse backgrounds and perspectives of students and the continual reimagining of what music theory can be and who it can serve. Sidra Lawrence wrestles with silences, particularly for women, in ethno/musicology, challenging readers to listen otherwise as a part of broader commitments to feminist, ethnographic solidarities. The authors of the co-edited volume At the Crossroads of Music and Social Justice, which was awarded the Bruno Nettl prize and the Ellen Koskoff prize, contribute a co-authored submission that urges for a justice-oriented ethnomusicology, particularly in light of current events. We are grateful for these submissions and encouraged by the points of convergence they have with our student contributions, especially the focus on a long-term, continuously reflexive, and solidarity- and coalition-focused approach to questions of ethics, values, and commitments in ethnomusicology scholarship. 

With gratitude,
Garrett Groesbeck and Hannah Snavely