Keeping Track of Writing Projects -- end of 2023

Robert Winslow Gordon, founder of the Archive of American Folk Song, c. 1923, examining an archeological artifact in California. Courtesy of the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress

An update to keep track of my writing projects has become an annual event. Since my last update, on Dec. 28, 2022, which writing projects have progressed, which have been published, and which have seemingly stagnated? On my academia.edu page and also in my twitter (now X) profile @jefftoddtiton I suggest that readers who want to know the answer to the question “What research and writing are you working on?” come to this blog to find out. Several projects that I'd been working on for years were published in 2023, while one more is in press, and another has been completed but must go through further stages before publication. Here is the list:

1. I’d finished a short essay on musical icons, introducing a section of a book entitled Social Voices: The Cultural Politics of Singers Around the Globe, edited by Levi Gibbs, in 2021.  That book was published in September this year by the University of Illinois Press.

2. I’d completed the chapter “Eco-trope or Eco-tripe? Music Ecology Today” in 2021 for the book  Sounds, Ecologies, Musics, edited by Aaron S. Allen and myself, which was published in September of this year by Oxford University Press. Aaron and I also co-wrote the first chapter, “Diverse Ecologies for Sound and Music Studies.” The book contains fourteen essays written by scientists, scholars, environmental activists, and musicians, each concerned with music, sound, nature, culture and the environment in a time of environmental crisis.

3. In 2019 I’d completed my section of “The Sound Commons and Applied Ecomusicologies,” an article co-authored by Aaron Allen, Taylor Leapaldt, Mark Pedelty, and myself, for The Routledge Companion to Applied Musicology, edited by Chris Dromey. The book was published in 2023.

4. “Ecojustice and Ontological Turns: a Response to Marshall and DeAngeli.” This was part of an E-seminar that the Ecomusicology Review has been conducting in the fall of 2021 within the ecomusicology Google Group. Kimberly Marshall and Emma DeAngeli wrote an essay to which Sebastian Hochmeyer responded, whereupon they wrote a rejoinder. Mark Pedelty followed with a second response. Aaron Allen asked me if I too would respond, and so I wrote a brief response, starting with my reaction to a disagreement between Marshall and DeAngeli on one hand, and Hachmeyer on the other, over the relevance of the so-called ontological turn in anthropology to the project of social justice. Rather than take sides, I proposed that ecojustice would resolve the disagreement by including social justice in the larger framework of relationality and by extending reciprocity and respect to all living beings, not just humans. This is congruent with the writings of Indigenous scholars such as Robin Kimmerer and Zoe Todd in past dozen years or so as well even though they don’t use that term. Whether these essays and responses and rejoinder will be published in Ecomusicology Review, as Aaron Allen had intended at the time, I don't know.

5. In early 2022 Robert Baron, on behalf of the Fellows of the American Folklore Society, invited me to contribute an essay to a forthcoming issue of the Journal of American Folklore, to be derived from my 2021 oral presentation on folklife, heritage and environment for an American Folklore Society webinar. I completed the essay in October, 2022. Its title is "Folklife, Heritage, and the Environment: A Critique of Natural Capital, Ecosystem Services, and Settler Ecology." This 10,000-word essay is in the proof stage now and is scheduled for publication in the Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 137, no. 543, pp. 61-84, sometime in the spring of 2024.

6. In January of 2023 Ross Cole invited me to contribute a chapter on “Observing and Collecting” for The Cambridge Companion to Folk Music. Other prospective authors included Phil Bohlman, Rachel Mundy, Peggy Seeger, Caroline Bithell, Dave Harker, and Jake Blount. I haven’t often accepted invitations to write on assigned topics, but this one interested me and, as Ross and I discussed why he’d asked me, and as I thought about what I might say about the history of observation, collecting, and fieldwork in folklore, folklife, and especially folksong studies, I decided to see if I'd find the writing congenial. As I began I found myself with quite a bit to say. I completed a draft over the summer, then revised it a little in November to bring it within the 7000-word limit. It contains the swashbuckling illustration, which stands atop this blog entry, of folksong collector Robert Winslow Gordon, who in 1928 established the Archive of American Folksong at the Library of Congress. Ross was happy with the chapter and has it now. After he gathers up all the chapters for the book, I assume it will go through an external review process, then further revision, and finally it will be published, I'm guessing sometime in 2025 or 2026.

Among the lectures and seminars I gave during this past year was a webinar lecture for the Society for Ethnomusicology. The title was “Applying ethnomusicology: from the study of people making music to the study of beings making sound,” and it was broadcast on May 4 and 11. The lecture contrasted my 1989 definition of ethnomusicology as the study of people making music, first presented in 1989 at an ethnomusicology conference and later published in the 3rd edition of Worlds of Music (1993), with my shifting interests in this century toward the study of beings making sound. I've put the text of the lecture in the section on conference presentations on my academia.edu page.