Hers, Theirs, Ours, Others: Women’s Stories and the Global Ethnomusicological Moment

Authors : Philip V BOHLMAN

Pages : 71-89

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Publication Date : 2021-12-30

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :Following two streams whose confluence forms global ethnomusicological moments, this essay examines the critical role of women, both as scholars and as exemplary musicians, in the narratives that form the intellectual history of ethnomusicology. The women's stories in the essay begin with the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition, at which the first concerted collection of world music was recorded on wax cylinders. The nine recordings of what was called "Turkish music" revealed both diversity of sound and cosmopolitanism in global representation. Similar cosmopolitanism characterizes the recordings of the great women singers dominating the twentieth century with an Eastern Mediterranean sound, the subject of the closing sections, including reflections on the "Turkish music" of Sezen Aksu. If women singers form one stream, women ethnomusicologists are treated here as the second stream, among them the foundational scholars of Indigenous music and the nestor of Eastern Mediterranean ethnomusicology, the Israeli Edith Gerson-Kiwi. The historiographic concept at the center of the essay expands upon the concept of the global moments with which we represent the history of ethnomusicology, a history in which the presence of women is of singular importance.
Keywords : Chicago World, Eastern Mediterranean sound, gendered stories, global ethnomusicological moment, intellectual history of ethnomusicology, women, Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, Eastern Mediterranean sound, gendered stories, global ethnomusicologica