The European Journal of Musicology (EJM) is a peer-reviewed forum for critical analyses addressing cultural, social, economic, political, and religious aspects across the full range of what is understood as music, sound, and performance. Anthropological, ethnographic and music historical scientific traditions find their space here and are to be further developed into new methodologies and thematic areas. In doing so, the journal wants to contribute to the visibility and audibility of the transformative power of music, sound, and performance, and to likewise reflect this as political events.
We understand music, sound, and performance as elementary parts of the coexistence of humans and more-than-humans and thus also as political expressions of changing societies. The questioning of power relationships along social categories such as ethnicity, class, gender, and age in music cultures, but also the self-reflexivity of the researchers and their methodologies are status quo.
The concept of the EJM is shaped by cultural anthropology of music and the idea of an open historical musicology that examines music-, performance- and sound-related knowledge practices of different cultures and times. The EJM is based at the Institute of Musicology (University of Bern), which specifically focuses on music-, performance-, and sound-related knowledge practices from different cultures and times.
Current Issue
The recognition of music as an embodied phenomenon has a long history across musicology, with ethnomusicology one of the areas in which it has been most thoroughly explored as a theme. This issue of the European Journal of Musicology looks at the “Performing Body” through a selection of case studies. It engages with several aspects of music’s embodied dimensions with the theoretical, technological, and analytical tools at our disposal in the twenty-first century. In doing so, it contextualises research on the musical body within recent and current academic debate, including on the transnational circulation of music, migration, and decolonisation. This collection aims to take stock of the state of ethnomusicological research on the body in performance and to stimulate debate from a range of diverse, but complementary perspectives and research methods.
