From its early days, one of the main purposes of ethnomusicology was “to understand people through music, and to apply the result towards lessening international tensions” (Merriam 1963:210). This laudable endeavor has successfully taken place primarily in academic institutions and to some extent in public-facing settings (museums, festivals, non-profits, etc.). Yet in today’s information-driven world, the use of technology in ethnomusicology (and as we will see at the end of this essay, the use of ethnomusicology in technology) continues to be an accessory and peripheral to these efforts. We produce a book with a website as a companion; less often the website is our primary focus, even though an online presence would potentially reach a broader audience. Additionally, the nature of our training is one that seems to be divorced from concepts such as marketing and revenue. Technology and the use of mass media to connect and convey a message (usually with an emotional attachment) is intrinsically linked to marketing. Our understanding of how these interact and converge is crucial in developing a tone suitable for a general public that would expand the relevance and sustainability of ethnomusicology. Anthony Seeger reminded us of the importance of writing for non-academic venues:
“Some of my best writing has been in genres as small as letters to the editor and memoranda to the Brazilian secret police, but I have also written for popular journals and for small specialist audiences. I believe ethnomusicologists need to reach out consciously to diverse audiences through their writing (and interviewing on radio and television). Certain kinds of publishing are required for academic advancement, but that should not be coextensive with the writing we do. I recommend that we think about what we can contribute through the knowledge we are privileged to have had the opportunity to learn” (Seeger 2006) [my emphasis].
The question of what we can contribute, as I read from the previous quotation, is one addressing a larger scope in culture and social life, one that takes us out of “music exceptionalism” and the double bind that this creates in ethnomusicology (Beaster-Jones 2014). How can a broader approach to music and/in/as culture and society help ethnomusicology foster relationships with producers, impresarios, and politicians, and contribute to the socially responsible use of music in mass media, advertisement, film industry and beyond? Responding to this question would of course be a monumental task; however, the answer or answers to this hold the key to a sustainable discipline.
The work we do as ethnomusicologists sits at the forefront of gathering engaging, relevant content related to musical expressions. Yet most ethnomusicologists are ill equipped in delivering their findings to a broader audience through the use of new, emerging and even well-established media. This is partly due to current academic paradigms and the outputs required for career advancement (i.e. academic journal publications and monographs) but also due to the fact that shifting the paradigm towards a more expansive and a broader approach would require developing skills in conversing with “mundane” concepts such as marketing, profit, and revenue. Though stand-alone instruction in developing these skills is plentiful, in this essay I present a bird’s eye view of the convergence between information technology, marketing, content production, and/in ethnomusicology. My aim is to re-evaluate and nuance skills that we have acquired in and outside of our academic work, from producing fieldwork recordings for a dissertation to producing featured pieces on online publications; from writing a book chapter or article to developing educational materials for a broader audience. I do so by sharing more than twenty years of experience as an Information Technology (IT) specialist and consultant and more than a decade navigating simultaneously the realms of IT, marketing, and ethnomusicology. I focus on several projects founded during my tenure as a producer at Smithsonian Folkways; Folkways Magazine and the World Music Pedagogy Lesson Plans. In exploring these case studies, I introduce the concept of conversing, the idea behind which is to illustrate the need and usefulness of proficiency in communicating with people from a wide array of fields as well as developing a tone to reach out to broader audiences…
Full version available in Voices of the Field: Pathways in Public Ethnomusicology (Oxford University Press)