International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance (ICTMD)

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    Today Has Been Hard: A Sonic Account on the Simultaneous Fall of Human Rights in Finland and Norway
    (Department of fine arts, University of Kelaniya Sri Lanka, 2023) Renzi, Nicola
    25 February 2023 has been hard to the Sámi indigenous peoples of northern Fennoscandia and Russian Kola. In fact, it will be undoubtedly remembered as one of the toughest days in Sámi recent history. On one side, a group of young Sámi activists (NSR) occupied the Oil and Energy Department, in Oslo, as more than 500 days passed since the Supreme Court concluded that the colossal windfarm in Fosen (Norway) violates Sámi human rights. Despite declaring the power plant illegal, the turbines were left operative thus hindering reindeer husbandry and the related indigenous stewardship of the land. Simultaneously in Helsinki, on the other side, the Sámi Parliament Act – which after decades of struggles and governmental stall would have ensured unprecedented self-identification and self-determination rights to the Sámi within Finnish law – was once more rejected. Based on primary material collected during fieldwork or retrieved from extensive social media review, the paper recounts the sonic and musical build-up to the mentioned date in order to capture and map sentiments, values and resilient acts of refusal articulated by Sámi artists and activists around the respective struggles. Through binaural recordings of rallying cries, audiovisual cues in live concerts, individual and collective joik performances, and many other modes of sonic demonstration, a series of histories of listening will be presented to advance an analysis of the controversial and fragile political status of the Sámi, as well as to address the most recent violation of fundamental human rights of a “minority on its own land” in the colonial European North.
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    Belonging in the Mix: Indigenous and Minority Popular Musics in the Hip Hop Mainstream
    (Department of fine arts, University of Kelaniya Sri Lanka, 2023) Przybylski, Liz
    Whose sounds fit in the nation-state? Always a politicized question, an exploration of popular music that enters the mainstream offers one way into interconnected questions about belonging. In Canada in particular, a recent history of racial and ethnic minority pop musics influencing mainstream sounds shows how artists and media professionals respond to histories of not-listening. What does it take to sound Canadian? And how do Indigenous groups who live in what is now Canada interact with the nation-state while still maintaining sonic sovereignty? This presentation delves into questions of racialized belonging by exploring expressions of Black Canadians, linguistic minorities, and Indigenous people in Canada through hip hop music. Musicians’ experiences of minority or Indigenous status differ and converge in instructive ways. As Canadian hip hop was coming into its own in the early 2000s, Indigenous hip hop artists told stories with sonic and visual markers that trope Blackness in a particular way. These were heard alongside Black Canadian hip hop, which fought for airtime in a national context whose radio waves have often sounded whiter than the nation itself. This presentation traces histories of erasure, building on Rinaldo Walcott’s theorization of intelligibility. It then listens to musicians in these sometimes-overlapping groups, notably Kardinal Offishall, Webster, and Winnipeg’s Most, to hear how minority and Indigenous groups express belonging and sovereignty, respectively. In so doing, the presentation opens into discussion of how national belonging forms and reforms over time and across minority and Indigenous groups, raising questions relevant across particularities and borders.
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    Claiming Indigenous Sovereignty Online: Ponay’s Yuan (Indigenous) Style Cover of Mandopop Songs on YouTube
    (Department of fine arts, University of Kelaniya Sri Lanka, 2023) Tai, Chun Chia
    Since the 2010s, the younger generations of Taiwanese Indigenous musicians developed a new online musical space via Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube to present, argue, and celebrate their Indigeneity. In regard to internet, Indigenous studies scholars argue that the more egalitarian technologies provide Indigenous people a space to present themselves, while also being aware of the fetishism and commercial modernity that might misrepresent their Indigeneity (Tan 2017; Duarte 2017). To respond to this discourse, I argue that Taiwanese Indigenous musicians are gaining more power on the internet to self-define their Indigeneity and even refuse the fetishism by challenging the colonial-musical aesthetic to claim their sovereignty. My case study focuses on the Indigenous singer, Ponay and his YouTube channel Ponay’s Yuan (Indigenous) Style Cover to discuss how his Mando-pop covers demonstrate the lineage of Taiwanese Indigenous music— from pre-colonial era, the Japanese and Han-Chinese colonial era, to the contemporary popular music scene— to celebrate their Indigeneity. Unlike other Mando-pop cover singers who imitate the original version, the sound of Ponay’s keyboard accompaniment reminds the audiences the Indigenous cassette culture, and his vocal style also turns Mando-pop songs into a tribal karaoke style. As such, Ponay unsettles the discourse of power which is dominated by the Han-Chinese aesthetic in the Mando-pop music industry. While it has a long history of fetishizing Indigenous culture, I believe, Ponay’s covers take back the power of interpreting and representing Indigeneity in colonizer’s music, which is an action of claiming sovereignty in the online and the offline world.
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    Preserving Minority Music Through Intellectual Property Rights: An Integrative Approach to Ascertain a Common Global Mindedness
    (Department of fine arts, University of Kelaniya Sri Lanka, 2023) Lekamge, Upul Priyankara
    The power and the beauty of minority music have never been questioned as the cultures of the world come into contact irrespective of westernization, or globalization. With the advent of the internet, minority music has never been restricted to the specific community it owns. Scholars and fans around the world had been researching and enjoying these creations. But the status that minority music enjoys in the global music industry had not always been beneficial for those minorities themselves. The research issue investigated was the way intellectual property rights [IPRs] protect minority music against the numerous malpractices that have been taking place. The objectives were to examine the IPRs that are coded to protect minority music, to assess how far these rights are practically implemented, and finally to provide a framework to facilitate the protection of minority music in each context. The method used was document analysis where the published journal articles, textbooks, and official websites of international organizations had been perused for updated information. It was revealed that minority music had been a contested definition against the context. The international and national level bodies have had many legal procedures to protect the rights of minority music. But the dilemma arises is how protective are these when the minorities are unaware of the power of the rights against their traditional cultural heritage. The dissemination of the legal procedures to such communities and the level of knowledge and understanding needs to be addressed. The recommendation is to devise a tripartite strategy where international organizations, local authorities, and minority communities get together to empower the IPRs to save the fundamentals of minority music around the globe.
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    The Reality of Practicing Performing Arts among Ethnic Communities Living in Chittagong Hill Tracts Area: Post 1997 Peace Accord Context
    (Department of fine arts, University of Kelaniya Sri Lanka, 2023) Sayeem, Rana
    Although a relatively small country, Bangladesh is inhabited by almost fifty different ethnic groups having their own cultural identities. The current paper focuses on the reality of practicing performing arts among ethnic communities living in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) area - a hub of different ethnicities in Bangladesh. Prior to the peace accord of 1997, the area was almost unexplored by researchers due to the conflicting relations between the government and the rebels. Moreover, inter-ethnic conflicts seemed also a problem for people living there. Consequently, having a snap regarding their cultures was out of scope. Nevertheless, the said CHT Peace Accord brought a light of hope for harmonious cohabitation and an opportunity for researchers to explore local performing arts as well as barriers to practices aimed at keeping traditional values. It is found that the peace accord has clearly emphasized the significance of retaining the traditional cultural values of ethnic communities addressing their utmost expectation. Nevertheless, there is a debate about whether the terms and conditions featured in the peace accord are properly implemented or not. The current study aims at feeling this lacuna.
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    Sonic Activism: Naga Song Responses to Political Conflict
    (Department of fine arts, University of Kelaniya Sri Lanka, 2023) Poske, Christian
    How have songs aided the efforts of Nagas to establish a nation-state whose intended boundaries conflicted with those left by the British Empire? How have Nagas responded with their songs to colonial and postcolonial conflicts in their lands? As racial, ethnic, linguistic, and religious minorities, numerous culturally distinct Naga peoples reside in the Indian states of Nagaland, Assam, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh, and neighbouring northern Myanmar. Since 1832, these Naga homelands have seen profound change through British colonial subjugation, Christian proselytisation, and Westernisation. In 1947, the collapse of the Raj created the nation-states of India and Burma, tearing apart transborder Naga communities. Nagas reacted with a six-decade-long struggle for a sovereign state encompassing Naga-inhabited territories, which failed because of Indian and Burmese military superiority. In India, the army killed Naga civilians and torched villages, making their inhabitants refugees at home and abroad (Iralu 2009; Sanyü 2018), while the administration silenced protests through censorship and oppressive legislation in the form of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (1958) that persists till today. Naga performing arts responded with stylistically and thematically diverse songs about anti-colonial freedom fighters, army massacres and counterattacks, and the underlying national-cultural selfdetermination issue defining the Naga question. Drawing on theories of colonial trauma (Mitchell et al. 2019) and internal colonialism (Pinderhughes 2011), I discuss the musical responses of Naga communities to colonial and postcolonial conflict, arguing that prolonged suppression of political dissent has made the ambiguous blending of religious and political themes a frequent characteristic of Naga political songs.
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    To Participate or to Present: Dance as Embodied Knowledge / Specialized Skill
    (Munsi Urmimala Sarkar (2023), To Participate or to Present: Dance as Embodied Knowledge / Specialized Skill, 12th Symposium of the ICTMD study group on music and minorities with a joint day with the study group on indigenous music and dance, Department of fine arts, University of Kelaniya Sri Lanka, 2023) Munsi, Urmimala Sarkar
    This paper aims to analyze the educational potential of community dances exhibited as ‘tribal’ dances in festivals such as Hornbill (Nagaland) and Sangai (Manipur). Such annual congregations are occasions for the exhibited staging of traditional ensemble experiences of moving together among communities – involving sensory processes of proxemic interactions. Within everyday community spaces, such ensemble practices enable auto-transfer of knowledge from one body to another through intense proxemic and sensory experiences. This specific category of dance forms is identified as "folk", and described in many academic writings as repetitive, simple, and learned not as a skill from a master teacher, but as an easily imitable structure that can be passed on from one body to another through shared muscle memories or through familiarity born out of membership of a particular community. This explanation in itself hierarchizes knowledge, by way of putting one form of knowing over another. Assuming community dance knowledge to be lower in skill, aesthetic, intellectual, or bodily capability compared to the specialized dance knowledge required for classical dances from the same geographical region, legitimizes a list of standardized aesthetic expectations that all dances must fulfil in order to be actually considered as dance. This paper compares two basic communicative principles - the ‘participatory’ (community dances) and ‘presentational’ (specialized classical dances) as different motivations for dancing – to critically analyse such hierarchizations of embodied knowledge systems.
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    Tribal Music of Sri Lanka: A Qualitative Research on the Singing Style of the Dambana Indigenous People
    (Department of fine arts, University of Kelaniya Sri Lanka, 2023) Tilakaratna, Dasith Asela; Weerakkody, Iranga Samindani
    Indigenous people (Ādivāsi) are usually an isolated community with a specific language, culture and way of life belonging to generations, endemic to each country or region. While indegenous communities are the inheritors of the earliest history of a country, those in Sri Lanka are referred to as the“Vedi”community (Veddahs). Posessing a unique language, culture and lifestyle, they have coined the term “Vanniyalæththo” (forest dwellers) to refer to themselves. The purpose of this research is to identify the music of the DambanaKotabakiniya Ādivāsi community and to examine the characteristics of their music in an ethnomusicological manner. This is qualitative research conducted through the use of audiorecorded interviews, field observations, informal discussions as well as written literature to collect data. The basic features of chanting can be seen in the Vedi chants of the Ādivāsi folk while reflections of man’s first attempts at singing a line of words can be gleamed at through Vedi songs. Vedi Daru Nalavili (indigenous lullabies) in the Dambana region are a prominent source in the study of ethnomusicology in Sri Lanka. This research also focuses on finding the unique identity possessed by Ādivāsi music through examonation of the notations and tonality in the music.
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    The Impact of Colonization, Urbanization, and Trans-Cultural Diffusion on Vedda People’s Music and Dance from the 17th to 21st Centuries in Sri Lanka
    (Department of fine arts, University of Kelaniya Sri Lanka, 2023) Guruge, Nadeeka
    Vedda people are considered the earliest inhabitants of the Island of Sri Lanka. Historical records from the 17th century disclose that the Vedda community has been subjected to rapid transformation during the past three centuries, most notably from the 20th century onwards. Originally living a hunters and gatherers lifestyle, Vedda’s music and dance were integral to their life. Records from 1681 demonstrate their communal cultural activities such as rituals. As a result of colonization and geo-political dynamics, Veddas’ lifestyle was transforming from hunting and gathering to farming. Under the circumstances of deforestation and urbanization they had to be relocated from their hunting lands to settle down in villages among the Sinhalese and Tamil communities. While intermarriages and cultural integration slowly took part in initiating this transformation within the Vedda culture, the involvement of modern-day technology such as the radio, television, internet, smartphone, and social media in their day-to-day life play a huge role in the processes affecting their hereditary musical and dance traditions.
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    Impact of Cultural Tourism on the Music of the Sri Lankan Aboriginal Community Known as the Veddas
    (Department of fine arts, University of Kelaniya Sri Lanka, 2023) Alawathukotuwa, Manoj
    Among all Sri Lankan minorities, the Veddas are widely considered the last indigenous tribal community in the country. Majority of them are living in the forest villages in Eastern and Sabaragamuwa provinces with minimum facilities. Their sense of cultural identity is challenged by the fast growing industrial and other mass cultural influences, and they are struggling to safeguard and maintain their cultural values and lifestyle. Music of Sri Lankan Vedda people can be classified as a folk music tradition that closely fits their day-to-day life and accompanies them from birth to death. Their practices, including worshiping the demon gods with music and dance, are dramatically and in numerous ways affected by contemporary local and international cultural and musical traditions. Influence of mass media and cultural tourism can be seen as the main cause for this dramatic transition. The main objective of this study is to analyze the impact of cultural tourism and the mass media on the music of the Veddas, Sri Lankan aboriginal community. The research relies on both primary and secondary sources.