For those who missed my Oxford presentation at the British Forum for Ethnomusicology, I have uploaded my slides and talking notes from my Oxford presentation.

Today was the first day of the conference, and I was participating in the “Online Exchanges” panel, one of many concurrent panels that kick started the conference. My panel mates were Thomas Brett from New York’s Bard High School Early College, and Fiorella Montero-Diaz from the UK. Both presenters addressed issues that I have an interest it. The sharing of knowledge in the culture of electronic music, as well as issues of identity and power with indigenous cultures both highlighted the need for ethnomusicologists to engage in more collaborative work with specialists in other social science fields, information science being one of them.

The planetary session was absolutely wonderful. As each speaker as well as the chair shared their thoughts on “Ethnomusicology, Musical Knowledge & Theory”, I got progressively excited as each of them touched on topics that I could relate back to information science directly.

Georgina Born from Cambridge University addressed music knowledge with a clear understanding of the big picture from which modern understanding of information and knowledge is drawn. She sketched out the philosophical inspiration from Foucault, Feld and Bourne, and described music knowledge has having dimensions such as content, social processes, fields of power and aesthetics. Her expert discussion of the ramifications of organizations such as the pirate bay on the dissemination of music knowledge would easily put her at an information science faculty, while her discussion of the Embodied Generative Music research initiatives probably resonated more with the crowd.

Marcello Sorce-Keller is a Swede gentleman who is currently at the Mediterranean Institute in Malta. His talk was a disarmingly casual yet rigorous discussion on forgotten or disconnected knowledge, even as far as describing ignorance as a cultural product. It was a poetic lament on the loss of knowing Beethoven’s laughter, and a gentle but pointed critique of the institutional biases inherent in defining what is worthy, legitimate and even prestigious knowledge.

I was very happy to hear of Suzel Reily’s ethnomusciological research based in The Queen’s University of Belfast, which draws heavily from Lave and Wenger’s concept of community of practice, something that I myself draw heavily on. I cannot exaggerate how useful their 1991 publication is. I actually still can’t fathom why I don’t have a copy of my own covered in highlights and underlines and notes in the margin.

Martin Clayton raised casually the question of classifying knowledge. At such a conference such as this, what kind of music knowledge are we talking about? He proposes, for the purpose of discussion, implicit, practical and embodied knowledge. He also raised the issue of method, observing that the evolutionary approach to understanding music (i.e. music grew from the primitive in ancient cultures to sophistication in western music) should not have lasted as long as it did in the late 19th and early 20th century. Are ethnomusicologists happy to just report happenings? Or do they want to be recognized as a science?

Pavlos Kavouras from Kapodistrian University of Athens chaired the panel, and had some intruiging final thoughts before it was opened up to the floor. He gave an expansive definition of musical knowledge: first at the level of a musician’s knowledge of music, then the written words of people who produce writing about musical knowledge, followed by those who write about musical knowledge in the context of other disciplines. Finally, there is the interdisciplinary knowledge that facilitates discourse and collaboration between all these different layers. I cannot quite remember, but I think he was at my presentation, but what he described echoed almost exactly the way I feel about the different layers that needs to be teased out in defining what we mean by music knowledge.

I wanted to have a field day with all of the panelist in one room, and address each and every single one of their concerns, and see whether the approach that an information scientist would take might interest them. Being in this conference made me realize how practically driven information science is (not having enough theories and models is our problem!), and forced me to recognize that the only thing practical ethnomusicologists are really concerned about is conducting their fieldwork.

Call this a bit of fly-by-night information seeking behaviour research if you will, but in order to engage a particular group in successful collaboration, you have to understand what is at stake for them, and to appeal to that which they value in order to draw out the rich potential for interdisciplinary collaboration.