Introducing Open Music Commons

About the Project

We conceived of Open Music Commons following the publication of Building Open Infrastructure at CUNY—a volume for which we were invited to provide a state-of-the-field overview of Open Educational Resources (OER) in musicology and ethnomusicology. In the resulting chapter—"OER Review: Musicology/Ethnomusicology (2019)—we concluded that, while OER and Open Access resources focused on Western art music were increasingly available online, it was relatively difficult to source quality OER dedicated to global music practices. This was especially true in the case of audiovisual materials.

At the same time, each of us—then pursuing our PhDs in ethnomusicology at the CUNY Graduate Center—had extensive experience creating original audiovisual materials during our own fieldwork projects. Indeed, many of our colleagues were producing outstanding audio and visual documentation of musical practices around the world. However, the format through which we were largely encouraged to share this fieldwork research was print publications that required us to transform dynamic audiovisual recordings into written descriptions and transcriptions.

We thus developed Open Music Commons to create a high-quality, accessible digital resource that would allow our colleagues to share their multimedia research with fellow students, learners, and researchers, while also expanding the corpus of Open Educational Resources available in ethnomusicology.

One of our main objectives in expanding this corpus is to ameliorate the current status quo that requires most university students to spend an exorbitant amount of money on print textbooks. Having both taught as adjunct professors at various campuses across New York City, we also understand that educators on the fringes of departments often end up purchasing access to materials they want to use in class (out of their own pockets), or else they spend hours upon hours searching for appropriate and quality audiovisual materials on YouTube (only to find later that the content has disappeared!).

As a prestigious and urban public university system, CUNY has been championing the development of Open Educational Resources for several years. The application you are using to access this digital textbook, Manifold @CUNY, serves as a free digital publishing platform for the CUNY community to create and share original research and custom versions of texts that are openly licensed or in the public domain.¹ We are deeply grateful to the CUNY Graduate Center's Teaching and Learning Center (TLC) for supporting the development of Open Music Commons with a grant. We are particularly grateful that this financial investment in the project ensured that we were able to offer each of our contributing authors a modest honorarium for their work—a practice that we hope to encourage in academic publishing.

About the Resources

Open Music Commons features nine multimedia essays written by current students or alumni from the CUNY Graduate Center's PhD program in ethnomusicology. Each essay is based on the author's original ethnographic fieldwork undertaken as part of their doctoral training, and all contributions went through a rigorous, double-blind peer review process.

We invite you to explore our author's contributions via the drop-down menu ("CONTENTS") at the top of this webpage; all chapters are designed to serve as teaching resources that encourage a critical approach to music and sound practices around the globe:

1. Brian E. Bond explores Muslim musical culture in Kachchh, with an emphasis on the ways in which Sindhi Sufi poetry and songs are central to the localized, vernacular expression of Islam in the region, as well as virtuosic instrumental music that demonstrates the skill and knowledge of the Laṅgā hereditary musician community.
2. Agustina Checa dives into the world of independent cassette production in Argentina to explore the role of “non-musical” materials in generating social connections and values around music.
3. Carlos Cuestas' chapter on son jarocho engages with legacies of race, colonialism, industrialization, national identity, and mass media to historicize the genre, and considers the relationships between music, community, and nature among jaraneros.
4. Taking a single Tibetan pop song as an entry point, Miranda Fedock's contribution analyzes how various meanings, nationalist and otherwise, are produced via interactions between song and listeners—and how such meanings can change based on spatial and temporal contexts.
5. Bradford Garvey focuses on razḥa—a participatory and collective dance form for Arab men in the Sultanate of Oman—to explore how such practices work to reinforce social norms and define social groups.
6. Brendan Kibbee's chapter offers both a close analysis and a broader perspective on griot traditions in West Africa, focusing on the activities of a specific griot family in Dakar, Senegal, and offering a wider overview of griot practices across the Western Sahel and Sudan region.
7. In his chapter on professional hereditary musicians in the Makran region of Balochistan, George Mürer delves into socioeconomic circumstances to highlight the ways in which these musicians are at once essentially servants under the command of their patrons and revered, highly skilled custodians of rarified knowledge.
8. Elaine Sandoval takes us into the world of music education institutions, exploring the processes involved in recent initiatives to integrate música llanera into Venezuela's national classical music education system, El Sistema.
9. Elise Steenburgh's chapter on Cambodian Living Arts' Arts4Peace tour in the United States explores the tensions inherent in developing traditional performing arts festival programming that speaks to both international and local audiences (and funding agencies).

Open Music Commons, and all the chapters within, are licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, which invites you to reuse, revise, and remix this resource in the spirit of encouraging a collaborative and democratized knowledge-sharing economy. Unless otherwise indicated, all materials should be credited to the author of the chapter in which they are included.

In many cases, the authors have provided discussion questions and/or have linked to related Open Access resources. Where available, we have also linked the social media accounts of various artists featured in these essays, and we encourage you to further explore and enjoy their artistic work through these accounts. Audiovisual materials featured in this resource are hosted on a variety of platforms at the authors' (and fieldwork participants') discretion, but we are committed to the longevity of their access via the links included within. Do let us know if you run into any issues with broken media links.

We wish you all the best in your studies and explorations of sound and music cultures. We welcome any future correspondence or feedback at OpenMusicCommons@gmail.com. We are especially interested in learning about like-minded projects and other Open Educational Resources in ethnomusicology or world music that you might like to share with us.

Natalie Oshukany and Elaine Sandoval, editors

2022

A Note for Teachers

On occasion, authors have used terminology that may be covered during lectures or other readings in an ethnomusicology or global music class. This includes musical terminology such as “antiphony” or “soundscape,” as well as social science concepts like “egalitarianism” or “nationalism.” Some texts include a short glossary of terms. Please review the texts prior to assigning them; you may wish to point your students to other resources that explore such terms and concepts.

Acknowledgements

• The authors, and the musicians featured in their texts
• CUNY Graduate Center Ethnomusicology faculty members: Eliot Bates, Peter Manuel, and Jane Sugarman
• Several anonymous peer reviewers
• The CUNY Graduate Center's Teaching and Learning Center, particularly: Matthew Gold, Laurie Hurson, Jojo Karlin, Robin Miller, and Luke Waltzer