Editorial

Abstract

We complete the 30th volume of Ethnomusicology Forum following another year living with the COVID-19 virus. As the year ends and we see the rise of another variant of concern, the editors reflect on the impact of the Omicron variant on borders and their closure. As Omicron migrates and spreads, borders have been shut and connections with southern and western Africa in particular have been impacted. Many borders between parts of the Global North remain open, however, despite rising numbers of cases in these locations. Why are certain governments so quick to stop movement from some of the poorest regions of the world, but retain unrestricted movement with close neighbors with whom they share economic might? And at the same time, as booster vaccines campaigns in the Global North kick into high gear, closed-off countries of the South struggle to get first doses to their populations. Borders generate inequity, and whilst the British Forum for Ethnomusicology alongside the editors of Ethnomusicology Forum hold no sway over UK political decision-making, we can offer ways to open virtual borders and encourage conversation between scholars caught on different sides of government-imposed divides. During the autumn one-day conference – which actually took place over two days online in mid-November – the program committee brought together scholars at many different stages of their careers from North America, South America, Asia, Australia, and Europe to discuss ‘Ethnomusicology in 2022 and Beyond’. This year marked the first time that the BFE Executive Committee hosted the conference via the Zoom platform, enabling ethnomusicologists across disparate time zones to share ideas. On the Ethnomusicology Forum editorial team, we further seek to tear down borders with a new initiative to appoint four copy editors who will assist in the preparation of scholarly pieces written by those who have English as a second or third (or fourth!) language. We look forward to hearing new voices in the pages of our journal, so please send in your articles for peer-review! In this issue, we are very pleased to present six stand-alone articles of original research. We open with two articles that engage with folklore and folk revivals in Europe and South America. First, Felix Morgenstern investigates the fascinating presence of Irish music in East Germany during the last two decades of the Cold War as a way for musicians to foreground anti-colonial and anti-imperialist sentiment during an East German folk revival. Deploying Svetlana Boym’s term ‘sideways nostalgia’, Morgenstern explains how German bands adopted Irish rebel songs as a way to rebuild a sense of cultural identity and ‘lost German national pride’ in the fraught and contentious post-war period. Secondly, María Bernardita Batlle Lathrop evaluates the life and work of Violeta Parra, a Chilean singer and folklorist who popularised rural musical practice in urban Chile and further afield during the middle of the twentieth century. As a cantora (singer) and cantautora (singer-songwriter) she composed many new tunes with themes related to social justice and carved a new place for women’s performance in Chile. Both Morgenstern and Batlle Lathrop introduce and analyse a number of powerful tunes of potential interest to readers both for their own listening and for teaching exercises in the classroom.