Reflections on the BFE Conference 2011

Jonathan McCollum (Washington College, USA)
David Hebert (Grieg Academy, Norway)

It was a great pleasure to attend the 2011 conference of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology, which was held at University College Falmouth, incorporating the former Dartington College of the Arts. From the beautiful seaside community of Cornwall, the 2011 BFE conference conjures up many delights as we ponder such a stimulating experience. With a legacy of over a century, this institution, with roots in the Falmouth School of Art, has played an important role in the field of arts education in the UK. Indeed, the recent restructuring of higher education in the UK has caused significant job losses in the arts of late. Despite being a rather complicated time for the arts faculty in Cornwall to host a conference, everything proceeded splendidly at BFE, apparently with no major difficulties of any kind (at least known to us guests). As Americans, we were at the time both traveling to the conference from “across the pond,” although one of us now works in Europe. We attended BFE as part of a small delegation from the Historical Ethnomusicology special interest group of the Society for Ethnomusicology (see photo below) in which there is great interest in forging stronger collaborations with European scholars.

 

Back and Standing (left to right): Irada Ganieva and Elnora Mamadjanova (attendees from the State Conservatory of Uzbekistan, Tashkent) Front and Sitting (left to right): David Hebert, Jonathan McCollum, and Ann Lucas (SEM Historical Study Group Panel Members, USA)

The conference was very well-organized by its gracious host Trevor Wiggins and his remarkable team, and we were so pleased to see that several highly prolific scholars were in attendance, including Keith Howard, Henry Johnson, David Hughes, and Georgina Born, to name but a few notable examples. Having never had the pleasure of previously attending a BFE conference, we supposed the meeting would closely resemble the Society for Ethnomusicology meetings that have, for the most part, been an annual track for us for at least the past decade. While there were some similarities between BFE and SEM, there were also positive differences. SEM, although international in scope, is still primarily linked to North America, though typically there is a large international delegation. In addition, SEM meetings are usually quite large, which makes the diversity of papers interesting, thought provoking, but also somewhat overwhelming at times. The extraordinary variety makes it almost impossible to attend everything one would like to, but this is to be understood given the relatively short length of the conference, usually about five days. In contrast, the British Forum for Ethnomusicology conference, being much smaller, offered a chance to not only meet scholars whose works we knew, but also time to discuss and familiarize ourselves with a different way of thinking about ethnomusicology.

Attending the conference broadened our horizons of ethnomusicological inquiry, particularly highlighting the subtle differences of methodological approaches. For example, although the Historical Ethnomusicology Special Interest Group of SEM (which we represented at BFE) enjoys a wide and varied membership, everyone on the panel immensely enjoyed the inquisitive nature of the questions asked following our panel at BFE in Cornwall. As our panel centered chiefly on methodological issues in historical ethnomusicology, the variety of questions helped to better situate the sub-discipline in the context of a broader ethnomusicological way of thinking. The shear size and breadth of topics of the annual SEM conference does not always allow for such thoughtful discussion. At BFE, Dr. McCollum was also fortunate to chair a panel on autoethnography, which stirred great discussion among the attendees. Indeed, as a frequent participant at International Council for Traditional Music conferences, Dr. McCollum found something reminiscent in the general feeling of the BFE conference. There is a lot to be said about having the time to sit and simply chat with colleagues from around the world!

One of the most impressive and memorable sessions at the conference was a lively discussion of the development of the organization’s refereed journal Ethnomusicology Forum (formerly “British Journal of Ethnomusicology”), from the time of its inception through its recent blossoming with the support of Routledge. Within our group, we have long been discussing the need for a special issue of an ethnomusicology journal on the topic of historiographic methods, and were inspired by the BFE conference experience to propose this idea to Ethnomusicology Forum. Overall, we found the BFE to be a welcoming and stimulating environment, and will highly recommend it to our North American colleagues. Such an experience is certainly worth a trip to the UK, even from distant continents. Our panel would like to personally thank the BFE for hosting the Historical Ethnomusicology special interest group of SEM and express our thanks to the generosity of the conference hosts and attendees who made our experience so positive – what a lovely, invigorating conference!