Following the path of a sacred musical practice into the public sphere, this chapter explores the relationships between regional identity, nationalism, and the media.

Part One

Part Two

Mediated Sufi Singing and its Popularization in Pakistan’s National Culture in the Founding Years (1947-1979)

This chapter explores early 20th century efforts to distance the banjo from its African American roots to meet the demands of a rising market of women players, highlighting actress Lotta Crabtree's influential role in reshaping the instrument's identity.


Pickin’ In Petticoats: Lotta Crabtree and Women In the Elevation of the Banjo

 a state of experiencing (mis-)alignment with socially constructed roles, behaviors, expressions, and identities attached to categories of bodies delineated by a culture’s unique criteria. Gender may hinge on visible anatomy (sex), embodied practices, or other characteristics.

Gender is a category of experience that is both uniquely personal and heavily impacted by cultural contexts. It is a way of organizing human beings and bodies into alliances formed around the meanings, social roles, and characteristics (anatomical, hormonal, chromosomal, and behavioral) that attach to and demarcate genders within a particular culture. Gender is one of those slippery, elusive frames of embodied cultural knowledge. The ways we define gender, such as clothing, behaviors, or other means are not innately gendered: We give these symbols gendered meanings within our culture’s norms and belief systems. Though its meaning is thus culturally constructed, gender has profound cultural relevance. How gender is defined thus also varies between cultures.

Gender identity is the experience of gender and how a person makes their own space within or outside the boundaries of a socially legible gender category, such as “male” or “female”; this may involve creating alternate cultural spaces in which their gender identity can be meaningful. In contrast, sex is anatomy, hormones, and chromosomes. Gender may be based around sex characteristics; however, gender identity and sex need not map onto each other. Since the 1970s, gender-focused activists have worked through scholarship, legislation, and community action to dissolve these linkages. For example, my own work on LGBTQ country western cultural forms like dance and rodeo explores how these enable a greater diversity of queer people to create meaningful identities and empowered communities (see Alexander 2019).

Second Wave Feminism and Impacts on Research Methods

In the latter twentieth century, music scholars began devoting sustained attention to the ways that gender impacts musical phenomena and communities. Beginning in the 1970s, music scholars took inspiration from the social justice activism of Second Wave feminists, whose primary goals included greater equity for women in areas such as reproductive rights and pay equity. At the same time, those marginalized in America’s mainstream feminist movement, such as lesbian activists and feminists of color from many ethnic backgrounds, advocated for their own communities’ rights alongside women’s rights. These women faced homophobia and racism in addition to sexism and misogyny. Drawing on these new currents, ethnomusicologists initially sought to reveal how women’s experiences and roles as musicians differed from men’s in various cultures. In the 1980s, North American ethnomusicologists increasingly paid attention to gender (Sugarman 2019:71), and ethnomusicologists also began to recognize that male informants had long framed (male) ethnomusicologists’ understandings of musical cultures. They observed that this resulted in systemically gendered perspectives (Nettl 1983:334). The recognition that a researcher’s gender impacts their research offered opportunities to fill in previously undocumented aspects of gender within music cultures, such as musics performed only by women for women, as is the case of healing rituals in Islamic eastern Africa and the Arabian Gulf, such as Zār ceremonies.

Female ethnomusicologists initially addressed this gap by refocusing on women’s participation in musical cultures (Koskoff 1987; Moore 1988; Abu-Lughod 1990; Doubleday [1988] 2006; Magrini 2003). The scope of this work gradually broadened to consider the impacts of gender more widely, and no longer limited itself to the experiences of women (Roy 2019; Thorn 2019; Spiller 2019). Researchers increasingly highlighted the culturally constructed reality of genders and the systemic nature of gendered experience. For example, Jeff Roy explores third gender categories in India, known as 

(2019). Meanwhile, Henry Spiller’s investigation of cross-dressing performances in West Java examines how these performances reinscribe normative gender roles (2019). Scholars also considered intersectional experiences that include gender, producing a growing body of work that looks at how racial and gender identities together impact musical participation (Gaunt 2006; Keyes 2006; Wong 2006; Hayes 2010). In the 2000s, scholars produced a steady stream of edited collections encompassing a wide range of topics and issues surrounding women’s participation in musical cultures (Moisala and Diamond 2000; Magowan and Wrazen 2013; Bernstein 2014; Koskoff 2014).

Reflexivity and the Role of the Researcher

Ethnography is a key method for generating research data in fields such as anthropology and ethnomusicology. Until the latter 20th century, “good” ethnographic research was marked by its presumed objectivity—meaning that the researcher was impartial in gathering data, something which is valued in the empirical sciences. Social sciences like anthropology attempted to replicate this idea of objectivity as much as possible. One of the most sustained impacts of a feminist approach is the rise of “reflexivity,” meaning the ability to interrogate one’s own subject position, biases, and motivations. Early twentieth century research attempted to remain objective and did not analyze the role of the researcher; however, later scholars questioned whether such research was as impartial as it claimed or whether it instead masked biases rather than acknowledging them. Reflexivity arose in the 1980s and became an expected praxis by the early 2000s (Barz and Cooley 2008:13). Through reflexivity, the fieldworker, or the researcher engaging directly with communities, explicitly recognizes that their body’s identities have cultural meaning. Further, they recognize that these identities impact the community they work in and consequently influence the research they produce. In short, the researching self is always a participant rather than someone separate or apart from the research. Researchers also began to recognize their place as agents of change who could impact the subjects of their research, and how research might in turn impact them (Hahn 2007; Wong 2008, 2019). To capture this complexity, practitioners of autoethnography—an ethnography that centrally includes the researcher’s experiences as a data source—work to thoroughly identify and unpack one’s place in a research site. This dissolves the idea that fieldworkers are neutral and interchangeable: Who we are matters for our work, methods, outcomes, and even safety. Autoethnography is a key method through which gender has become more accessibly documented, defined, discussed, and dissolved (Alexander 2019; Castro 2019).

Gender-focused ethnomusicologists broadly acknowledge the real impacts of gender, both as an analytical lens and embodied identity. Gender impacts epistemology (what we know), methodology (how we come to know it), and ontology (how we make sense of what we know). With these acknowledgements, once-canonical research methods were recognized as dependent on a scholar’s privileged gender identity rather than universally available to anyone. Fieldworkers increasingly acknowledge their gender—what they feel and how they are perceived by others—since ethnomusicology began to acknowledge its colonial background and work towards more ethical research practices and scholarship. For example, ethnomusicologist Veronica Doubleday demonstrates responsiveness to her field site and interlocutors by choosing to veil while working with women in Afghanistan ([1988] 2006). Similarly, Carol Babiracki directly addresses the impact of her gender identity, assigned gender roles, and interlocutors’ expectations of her based on her gender during her field research in India and on her subsequent representation of that research in writing (1997/2008). She ultimately finds gender neutrality impossible, a conclusion that challenges the belief held by earlier generations of predominantly white, male scholars that they were neutral observers. Nicole Beaudry likewise chooses to downplay her “feminine identity” during her field research but questions this decision, recognizing that her belief in equity between men and women—which perhaps undergirded her enforced gender neutrality—is not shared by her interlocutors. This leads her to consider a series of ethical quandaries. Rhetorically, she asks, “is gender a matter than can ever be left aside?” (1997:82; 2008:243). Other authors, like Timothy Rice, note the ways they are distanced from a tradition by their male gender identity, and how their gender is (dis)empowered in particular field research contexts (1997:107; 2008:48). This marks a significant change from earlier generations’ assumptions that the male experience was universal, or at least sufficient to understand a culture’s music making.

Women’s music is still considered in ways that reflect contemporary feminist scholars’ interest in highlighting cultural specifics rather than cross-cultural universals, and showing how large-scale structures like laws or gender norms impact women’s lives. Trying to understand a music within its own cultural norms pushes against the “righteous indignation” (Sarkissian 1999) felt by scholars projecting Western feminism’s empowering, even anti-patriarchal ethos, onto women’s experiences in other cultural contexts. Lila Abu-Lughod (1986, 1993) and Virginia Danielson (1997) laid early groundwork to decenter Western gender expectations of Arab women’s music-making. Similarly, Jessica Roda (2024) identifies the culturally legible protections of women’s agency in some North American Orthodox Jewish communities that, from a mainstream feminist perspective, are overshadowed by patriarchal structures. Structural gender systems and women’s negotiations of them are also considered in Central Asia by Tanya Merchant (2015) and Razia Sultanova (2022). Merchant offers a comprehensive view of Uzbek female musicians’ landscape of musicality, while Sultanova considers the impacts of the Taliban on women’s music-making.

The impacts of queer theory on gender-focused scholarship is growing. Gregory Barz and William Cheng’s collection 

Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology 

includes gender-diverse scholars. Throughout the collection, authors consider gender in myriad forms, including the impacts of gender identity on their production and presentation of knowledge, engagement with field sites and subjects, and constructions of the scholarly self (2019). For example, I use autoethnography and reflexivity to reflect on how my gender identity was frequently misidentified in Cape Breton’s Scottish social dance halls. This gender ambiguity presented challenges for inclusion in the dances, which have clearly defined roles for men and women (2019). A body between the binary was not so easily understood. Queer theorists’ work helps interpret these moments of ambiguity; it highlights how identity is mapped onto bodies, and how both bodies and identity are the product of cultural meaning-making.

In summary, gender-focused ethnomusicologists reveal the ways that gender functions in a wide array of musical cultures, and in the field of ethnomusicology itself. Though the “different social and cultural understandings of gender and music” have not allowed for easy cross-cultural comparison or broader theorizing (Cusick 2014), the enlisting of queer theoretical models to decenter and deconstruct normative and universal ideas of gender, the rise of autoethnography, and an awareness of individual and structural biases may lessen the drive for universals. Instead, these models offer opportunities to decenter Western cultural gender norms.

How does approaching gender as a cultural construction, rather than a biological given, impact your understanding of the world around you?

In what ways might a focus on gender aid your ability to understand new musical contexts?

How do you react to writing in which the author’s bias or perspective is clear? Do you think it is possible for a scholar to have true neutrality on a subject? Do you think reflexivity helps reduce bias in writing?

Butler, Judith. “Judith Butler: Your Behavior Creates Your Gender | Big Think,” YouTube video, 3:00. Posted by “Big Think,” June 6, 2011. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo7o2LYATDc

Spiller, Henry. 2014. “Introduction: Music, Movement, and Masculinities.” 

Engendering Song: Singing and Subjectivity at Prespa Albanian Weddings

. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society

. Berkeley: University of California Press.

­­­——. 1990. “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women.” 

Alexander, Kathryn. 2018. “Politely Different: Queer Presence in Country Dancing and Music.” 

­­­——. 2019. “Straight to the Heart: Heteronormativity, Flirtation, and Autoethnography at Home and Away.” In 

Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology

, edited by Gregory Barz and William Cheng, 291-306. New York: Oxford University Press.

Babiracki, Carol M. 1997. “What’s the Difference? Reflections on Gender and Research in Village India. In 

Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology

, first edition, edited by Gregory Barz and Timothy J. Cooley, 121-138. New York: Oxford University Press.

­­­——. 2008. “What’s the Difference? Reflections on Gender and Research in Village India. In 

, second edition, edited by Gregory Barz and Timothy J. Cooley, 167-182. New York: Oxford University Press.

Beaudry, Nicole. 1997. “The Challenges of Human Relations in Ethnographic Inquiry: Examples from Arctic and Subarctic Fieldwork.” In 

, first edition, edited by Gregory Barz and Timothy J. Cooley, 63-83. New York: Oxford University Press.

­­­——. 2008. The Challenges of Human Relations in Ethnographic Inquiry: Examples from Arctic and Subarctic Fieldwork.” In 

, second edition, edited by Gregory Barz and Timothy J. Cooley, 224-245. New York: Oxford University Press.

The Hamadsha: A Study of Moroccan Ethnopsychiatry

Cusick, Suzanne. 2014. “Out in Left Field/Left Out of the Field: Postmodern Scholarship, Feminist/Gender Studies, Musicology, and Ethnomusicology, 1990-2005. In 

A Feminist Ethnomusicology: Writings on Music and Gender

, edited by Ellen Koskoff, 168-179. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

“The Voice of Egypt”: Umm Kulthum, Arabic Song, and Egyptian Society in the Twentieth Century

Three Women of Herat: A Memoir of Life, Love and Friendship in Afghanistan

­­­——. 2006. “The Frame Drum in the Middle East: Women, Musical Instruments, and Power.” In 

, edited by Jennifer C. Post, 109-133. New York: Routledge.

Three Women of Herat: Afghanistan 1973-1977

Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop

Sensational Knowledge: Embodying Culture Through Japanese Dance

. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Songs in Black and Lavender: Race, Sexual Politics, and Women’s Music

Keyes, Cheryl L. 2006. “Empowering Self, Making Choices, Creating Spaces: Black Female Identity via Rap Music Performance.” In 

, edited by Jennifer C. Post, 97-108. New York: Routledge.

Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective

Magowan, Fiona and Louise Wrazen, eds. 2013. 

Performing Gender, Place, and Emotion in Music: Global Perspectives

Music and Gender: Perspectives from the Mediterranean. 

Women Musicians of Uzbekistan: From Courtyard to Conservatory

Moisala, Pirkko and Beverley Diamond, eds. 2000. 

Rice, Timothy. 1997. “Towards a Mediation of Field Methods and field Experience in Ethnomusicology.” In 

, first edition, edited by Gregory Barz and Timothy J. Cooley, 101-120. New York: Oxford University Press.

­­­——. 2008. “Towards a Mediation of Field Methods and field Experience in Ethnomusicology.” In 

, second edition, edited by Gregory Barz and Timothy J. Cooley, 42-61. New York: Oxford University Press.

Digital Age. New York: New York University Press.

Roy, Jeff. 2019. “Con/Figuring Transgender-

Music and Dance through Queer Ethnomusicological Filmmaking.” In 

, edited by Gregory Barz and William Cheng, 163-184. New York: Oxford University Press.

Sarkissian, Margaret. 1999. “Thoughts on the Study of Gender in Ethnomusicology: A Pedagogical Perspective.” 

Spiller, Henry. 2019. “Going through the Motions: Transgender Performance in 

, edited by Gregory Barz and William Cheng, 198-216. New York: Oxford University Press.

Sugarman, Jane. 2019. “Theories of Gender and Sexuality.” In 

Theory for Ethnomusicology: Histories, Conversations, Insights

, second edition, edited by Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone, 71-98. New York: Routledge.

Afghanistan Dispossessed: Women, Culture and the Taliban

. Yorkshire and Philadelphia: Pen and Sword History.

Wong, Deborah. 2006. “Taikoand the Asian/American Body: Drums, ‘Rising Sun,’ and the Question of Gender.” In 

, edited by Jennifer C. Post, 87-96. New York: Routledge.

­­­——. 2008. “Moving: From Performance to Performative Ethnography and Back Again.” In 

, second edition, edited by Gregory Barz and Timothy J. Cooley, 76-89. New York: Oxford University Press.

This article provides an overview of critical issues and scholarly developments pertaining to music with gender.

The Study of Music and Gender

As an identity category, gender frames our experience of the world. Gender is one of the many overlapping, intersecting identities any individual person holds. But, while we can each define our own gender identity, our cultures have already set the parameters for which genders are possible, what those genders look like anatomically, and how those genders act socially. We can think of gender as something that is built by a culture, rather than a biological given that stems from anatomy, chromosomes, and hormones. That gender is culturally constructed means that the guidelines for how to embody maleness, for example, are culturally specific and mutable, or capable of changing. What maleness means, or how individuals identifying as male are expected to look and act in one culture, differs from how those identifying as male are recognizable in another culture. The meaning, definition, and experience of gender varies substantially and differs across time, geography, ideology, and cultural context.

Broadly, a culture’s gender system is used to organize bodies and behaviors into recognizable and clear categories. In Euro-American derived cultures, for example, gender has historically been understood as a binary: male and female. In a binary system, females are socially women who are expected to adhere to specific behaviors and mannerisms. They also partake in other social activities that are recognized by the larger society as distinguishing them as “women” ––or separate from “men.” Euro-American society expects individuals to adhere to this binary system and creates incentives for individuals to conform to these categories. The often-fulfilled cultural expectation that boys become men is a kind of normativity; in short, it is normal, expected, and routine. Cultures often have gendered expectations of musicians that are based on a culture’s ideas of which behaviors and sounds are appropriate for which gender. For example, there is a persistent association of gender with Western orchestral instruments, leading to the fact that boys more often play brass instruments, while girls are encouraged to play wind instruments (Eros 2008). But this is just one gender system, one set of cultural scripts, that assigns some social and cultural roles to one gender and different roles to the other. The following examples explore various ways that gender influences music and how music reveals a culture’s understandings of gender.

A variety of vocal games exist amongst the different Inuit communities across North America’s Arctic region. Katajjaq, a type of traditional sonic game, is an Inuit practice of Arctic Québec and the south of Baffin Island (Nattiez 2016). It features the sounds of the body, specifically the throat, which is why it is often referred to as “throat singing.” Of the many interpretive lenses through which we could examine katajjaq (including Indigenous sovereignty and settler colonial oppression), gender pertains here in that the vocal games are played almost exclusively by women. In this community, life and culture-sustaining tasks are often gendered male or female, and katajjaq provides an example of this. Two women, standing in close physical proximity and often holding each other by the arms, interlock their voices. The two singers create a specific pattern of intonation as they alternate their breathing in and out, using voiced and unvoiced breath to make sound while inhaling or exhaling. A single sound might be repeated as a motif (a small musical idea). This motif usually consists of low and high-pitched components. The game begins as the motif is slowly varied by the singer who initiated the sound. The second singer must copy her sound in response, and the game usually ends in someone out of breath or laughing.

Two practitioners of katajjaq, Karin and Kathy Kettler of the sister duo Nukariik, report that these were games women played while men were hunting (Anchorage Daily News 2014); Nattiez adds that boys also learn these games but traditionally stop participating when they are old enough to hunt with the adult men (2016). This suggests that the cultural expectations placed on differently gendered people can change as they reach adulthood. In this instance, a behavior formerly appropriate for boys does not typically coincide with the gendered expectations of them as men (see Singh 2002). It also suggests that gender identities and the social roles attached to them are, in this cultural context, clearly defined, and that participation in (or avoidance of) katajjaq permits adults to indicate their gender identity and their social roles.

Hawai’ian hula is a dance and vocal genre in which “gestures of the upper torso and limbs interpret the semantic content of poetic texts called 

 tell stories of places, deities, genealogies, and histories, and are vocally recited while the dance unfolds. “Mood and feeling [are] conveyed through facial expressions, eye contact and with the hands,” and the dance is performed to the accompaniment of rhythms played on a variety of percussive instruments (Smith, with Stillman 2001). While tourism promotion campaigns, film and television, novels and comics, and other popular media have cemented the idea that hula is performed by women, hula is also performed by men. However, several elements distinguish male from female hula, including the movement vocabulary, adornments, facial expressions, and the stories told through dance. The Euro-American settler colonial conception that dance was feminine eroded the position of male hula from the early nineteenth century; however, this belief ignores that fact that the first dancers arriving with voyagers from Polynesia to the Hawai’ian Islands were male. Indeed, male dancers (kāne) were primarily responsible for chronicling historical events and genealogies through hula in traditional Hawai’ian culture (Dimple 2024).

With colonial incursions into Hawai’i, European and Euro-American gender ideologies equating dance with femininity led to the belief that men who performed hula were effeminate. Equating dance with femininity is an example of how one culture imposed its own gender system onto another culture––in this case, Euro-American gender beliefs onto those of Native Hawai’ians (Kānaka Maoli). More troubling still is that this gender bias intersects with racial bias, serving to strengthen a racialized and gendered hierarchy that helped serve the interests of Euro-American colonizers at the expense of Native Hawai’ians. European and Euro-American men could thus be perceived as more “manly” than Hawai’ian men; in short, certain types of masculinity were more privileged than others. Intersectionality, meaning the compounding effects of identities in combination (see Crenshaw 1991), allows us to consider how privilege and its lack operate in fluid, but culturally-aligned ways: Though masculinity is usually privileged cross-culturally, here a particular kind of ethnic masculinity was diminished by Euro-American settlers as they enforced their own cultures’ gender expectations through religious, social, and economic structures.

We can think about these gender roles as “gender performativity,” another tool that can help us assess how gender operates in musical cultures. The idea that we each perform our gender suggests that we build our gender identity out of many signifiers that include mannerisms and clothing to present ourselves to the world on a daily basis. However, gender theorist Judith Butler uses “gender performativity” to mean something else. They suggest that when we perform our gender, that performance produces a series of effects (1990; 2011). Butler argues that we build our gender as we move through the world, and as we do so, others interact with, perceive, and make decisions about our gender. Sometimes these perceptions align with the gender we intend for others to understand, but other times, there are misperceptions. Gender is not inherent and internal: We are producing it constantly in reference to our culture’s implicit and explicit rules about which genders are possible and what these genders look, sound, or act like. Gender, in short, does not exist outside of the cultural scripts, including music, that make it real and relevant.

What does gender mean to you? Where does this understanding come from?

How is gender a factor in musical communities with which you are involved? This might be as a performer or a consumer of music.

Make a list of how your gender identity impacts your lived experience (for example, think through an average day). Considering one of your other identities (such as your ethnic, national, religious, political, or generational identity), how does your gender identity operate in relationship to that identity?

Ol Woman Blong Wota (The Women of the Water)

 by Sandy SUR, Ashley Burgess, Maeve McKenna, and Catherine Grant

Kettler, Karin, and Kathy Kettler. “Karin and Kathy Kettler – Inuit Throat-Singing Demonstration [Live at First Americans Festival 2004,” YouTube video, 2:40. Posted by Smithsonian Folkways, February 4, 2010. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IqOegVCNKI

National Museum of the American Indian. “The Story of the Lū’au: Hula, an expression of cultural understanding,” YouTube video, 16:13. Posted by SmithsonianNMAI, May 12, 2021.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=525Jn_7M0aA

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “The urgency of intersectionality | Kimberlé Crenshaw | TED,” YouTube video, 18:49. Posted by TED, December 7, 2016. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akOe5-UsQ2o

Woloshyn, Alexa. 2017. “‘Welcome to the Tundra’: Tanya Tagaq’s Creative and Communicative Agency as Political Strategy.” 

. DVD. Lehua Films and PBS Hawaii, 60 minutes.

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” 

Dimple. 2024. “Exploring the Artistry and Tradition of Male Hula Dancers in Hawaii.” 

https://www.hawaiiactivities.com/travelguide/male-hula

Eros, John. 2008. “Instrument Selection and Gender Stereotypes: A Review of Recent Literature.” 

Update: Applications of Research in Music Education

Kettler, Karin and Kathy Kettler. “Inuit throat-singing sisters from Canada,” YouTube video, 3:03. Posted by “Anchorage Daily News,” October 23, 2013. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLMlkjnYe0U&t=1s

Nattiez, Jean-jacques. 2016. “Inuit Vocal Games.” 

https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/inuit-vocal-games-emc

The Practice and Performance of Katajjaq: Culture, Identity, and Resistance

. Ph.D. dissertation. Toronto: York University.

Smith, Barbara. Revised by Amy K. Stillman. 2001. “Hula.” 

This chapter provides an overview of key concepts and terms for the study of music and gender.

Music and Gender

 is a new collaborative effort to create a free and broadly accessible resource for the general public, educators, students, and researchers alike. Its open collections of scholarly, peer-reviewed writing and multimedia materials focus on increasing access to underrepresented voices, writing styles, and audiences, all with undergraduate students and a broad readership in mind.

An online and open resource for teaching and learning ethnomusicology and musicology 

World Music

Textbook

​We are excited to announce the addition of new teaching materials to the World Music Textbook! These open resources include asynchronous modules, in-class lesson plans with activities, discussion ideas, assignments, and ideas designed to complement and enrich our existing chapters and case studies. While not exhaustive, they offer valuable tools to inspire and guide instruction.​

Additionally, we now offer a full sample course shell that utilizes the World Music Textbook. Instructors can link directly to these pages, adapt them to fit their needs, or make use of Canvas shell modules, which we are currently working on and will be available soon.​

This is part of our ongoing effort to make the 

 as accessible, adaptable, and instructor-friendly as possible. By sharing practical, classroom-tested resources and providing customizable materials, we hope to streamline course preparation and enhance teaching experiences. Your feedback is invaluable in this process—please reach out if you have suggestions or resources you'd like to share.

A full course shell, in-class activities, and other materials to help instructors considering adoption

New Teaching Materials using the World Music Textbook

We're excited to share that the editors of the World Music Textbook will be presenting a workshop at the upcoming 

, titled "From the Exotic to the Global: Perspectives and Reflections on Teaching World Music in the 21st Century." This event will take place from April 8-11, 2025, at Northern Illinois University (NIU) in DeKalb, Illinois. 

Our workshop will focus on the collaborative efforts involved in creating the 

, a free and accessible resource designed for educators, students, researchers, and the general public. We will discuss our strategies for increasing access to underrepresented voices and diverse writing styles, as we aim to broaden the audience for world music scholarship. 

The symposium will provide a platform for music educators, ethnomusicologists, musicologists, composers, performers, and interdisciplinary scholars to exchange innovative ideas about globalization in music practices in the 21st century.​ Please consider joining us to connect with fellow educators! For more details about the symposium, please 

We'll be sharing our project and some updates at a workshop outside of Chicago this April!

WMT at the Teaching World Music Symposium

We are pleased to share that we have been able to increase the honorarium funding available to authors who submit and publish on the World Music Textbook to $500 per piece. Our hope is that this will boost our submissions and fuel our growth as the project enters a new era. See the 

 and contact us at editors@worldmusictextbook.org with any ideas for contributions!

Increased Honorarium Funding Available

We are pleased to share the launch of our updated and streamlined website. Improvements include better functionality for phones and other devices, as well as a new look as we bring our project out of its fledgling state. 

 project, we have been focused on exploring best practices while carving a pathway toward sustainability. We knew that we wanted more flexibility than what most platforms offer, so we started building the site from scratch using familiar technologies that let us get running quickly. The site we are launching today is brand new, another build from scratch, but one that uses modern tooling and provides us with extraordinary flexibility to grow.

A blog-like news section that makes online sharing and social media updates more consistent and cohesive;

And a hosted server—which we can use for improved control of our content, mailing lists, and other things that you don't necessarily see—that we can expand in the future for potential features like custom 

The site is built on open technologies and run using free services. All are standards in modern web development and well documented. The rest of this post includes technical details about our change for anyone who might be interested or considering a similar open project.

In building a fully custom site that does what we need, we made use of a host of technologies. With so many options, it can be difficult to know where to start. As we move to version 2, here is an outline of what we are using. If you have questions or want to talk about how these (or other) approaches can help make your project idea happen, reach out to us at 

Knowing that websites can come and go, we wanted to ensure that contributions to this one are properly archived and accessible forever. The standard way to handle this is using DOI records, but these can require expensive memberships. To keep everything free (an important part of project sustainability), we host our PDF files through 

Bowling Green State University's library system

. With the push toward open educational resources, many libraries can offer use of their DOI access, it is worth asking library staff about potential options.

We wanted full control over what our site could be and do, which meant that standard no- or low-code site generators like WordPress were not flexible enough for our needs. Many also charge fees for hosting and ad-free sites. We opted to build the site using standard web development tools. Our first version used 

, which serves the purpose well. It builds 

 from easy-to-edit markdown files and allows developers to customize themes more easily than systems like WordPress.

, a library that offers a number of benefits, in part because it is based on React, an industry standard for web development. Among other things like faster load times, Next.js combines the benefits of static site generation with an API system for server-sided work. Right now, we use this to improve our mailing list signup and other simple tasks, but it opens possibilities related to site users being able to log in and save their work. Think building custom 

 course schedules and reading lists or saving online course content and integrating it with resources from within and outside of this project.

All of these are free and open code libraries. We store our code in open repositories at 

. Each of these has free or free-for-education tiers. Most importantly for our goal of sustainability, however, is that if the pricing were to change, this is all just code with no vendor lock in: we can change services with minimal trouble. On the downside, this kind of distributed system requires a great deal more web development knowledge than fully integrated services like WordPress.

One reason for our recent change from Jekyll to Next.js is content management. We previously had to hand-code and update any new material. The new site integrates into a content management system (CMS) called 

. This is another open source project with a free community tier and it allows for any of our editors to easily add and edit any of the text on the site. It's also impressively customizable and has been a pleasure to learn and use so far.

That's all on the digital side. We use Pandoc with LaTeX to create print journal-quality PDF files of every contribution. 

You can see our templates and processes in this repository on GitLab.

Other stuff that we're trying out includes 

 for educators for our own internal record keeping; 

 for very basic analytics that don't collect any identifiable personal data; and Discord for communication and custom bots that notify us when you sign up for the mailing list, suggest a resource, and so on.

Taken together, this collection of tools and services has afforded us a free, open, flexible, and powerful way to collaborate and build a dependable and sustainable 

. If you have any comments, suggestions, or questions—or you are considering creating an open resource and just want to toss some ideas around—let us know! And, of course, if you want to be a part of this work, 

Some notes about our new and improved look

World Music
Textbook

Recently published chapters

Mediated Sufi Singing and its Popularization in Pakistan’s National Culture in the Founding Years (1947-1979)

Pickin’ In Petticoats: Lotta Crabtree and Women In the Elevation of the Banjo

The Study of Music and Gender

Music and Gender

News and Updates

New Teaching Materials using the World Music Textbook

WMT at the Teaching World Music Symposium

Increased Honorarium Funding Available

Website redesign

World MusicTextbook

Recently published chapters

Mediated Sufi Singing and its Popularization in Pakistan’s National Culture in the Founding Years (1947-1979)

Pickin’ In Petticoats: Lotta Crabtree and Women In the Elevation of the Banjo

The Study of Music and Gender

Music and Gender

News and Updates

New Teaching Materials using the World Music Textbook

WMT at the Teaching World Music Symposium

Increased Honorarium Funding Available

Website redesign

World Music
Textbook