Conference connections and my "Mixed Music" project

I spent most of the past week in at the Society for Ethnomusicology annual meeting in Mexico City, where I presented a paper and met with colleagues in the discipline. My paper focused on the music of Arnie Strynadka, “The Uke-Cree Fiddler,” a case study in my recent explorations of the musical legacy of encounters between Indigenous people and Ukrainian settlers on the Canadian prairies (research supported by Dr. Charity Marsh, Canada Research Chair in Interactive Media and Performance and the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Regina). I also attended numerous papers given by other scholars, including ones that addressed Native hip hop on the prairies - the subject also of Dr. Charity Marsh's research at the University of Regina - and Metis music culture. I was excited to learn that several of my colleagues who are based in the prairies are engaging in this research, many of whom are students of the University of Alberta Department of Music's graduate programme in ethnomusicology.

Conferences, I find, are wonderfully rewarding - for the feedback on research I present, and the opportunities to have more lengthy discussions with colleagues as well (and visits with good friends). For example, a more senior scholar, David Samuels, found time to talk with me one afternoon at the conference. Samuels is an ethnomusicologist best known for his book Putting a song on top of it: Expression and identity on the San Carlos Apache Reservation (2004). As noted in a review of this book, he uses “insights gained from both linguistic and musical practices in the community—as well as from his own experience playing in an Apache country band— [through which he explores] the complex expressive lives of these people to offer new ways of thinking about cultural identity. Samuels analyzes how people on the reservation make productive use of popular culture forms to create and transform contemporary expressions of Apache cultural identity.”

I had sent David a copy of a forthcoming publication I wrote about Arnie - and he generously offered me his thoughts and advice. I was pleased to note that this respected scholar of Native American music felt so strongly, as I do, that the story of “The Uke-Cree Fiddler” is a compelling and important one. I was encouraged by his words, and look forward to exploring Arnie’s story in the future, more in-depth. My research in this examines experiences of hybridity and intercultural relations in the context of a musical life story, and answers the call (in a recent scholarly article) of leading ethnomusicologist Tim Rice to conduct subject-centered musical ethnography. Whereas studies by Western comparative musicologists and ethnomusicologists have, more conventionally, invoked music as a symbol of national pride, cultural and national unity - this project looks to the ways in which people historically construct, socially maintain, individually create and experience music. My study of Arnie’s musical life story avoids reproducing assumptions and stereotypical representations of either Indigenous or Ukrainian music and practices on the prairies, yet it insists on the specificities of his experiences and illustrates the ways in which this one person has negotiated his mixed Indigenous and Eastern European immigrant heritage through music.