This special issue of Traditions of Music and Dance presents articles drawn from papers presented at the 48th World Conference of the International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance held at the Tākina Wellington Conference and Exhibition Centre, Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, from 9 to 16 January 2025. This World Conference had six key themes: “Indigenous people’s music and dance,” “Environment, place, displacement, and relocation,” “Translation, inclusivity, reception,” “Dance, movement, gesture, embodiment,” “Technologies of sound, music, movement, and dance,” and “Alternative approaches and methods to research, education, and knowledge dissemination,” (alongside “New Research”). The articles in this special issue present research that speaks across these themes, and we are pleased that the collection also includes works of both early-career researchers and established scholars. As the conference Programme Committee Chairs, we are delighted to serve as guest editors of this collection.

This article describes a ceremonial performance in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand of unique Indigenous song traditions from Australia and Amami Islands, Japan. We overview histories of sharing these traditions, provide background to the groups and their ceremonial song-dance traditions, and analyse the significance of those that they chose to perform through reflections from the ceremony leaders and performers. We argue that shared performances of Indigenous song and dance, like the Wellington Ceremony, reawaken and deepen connections between groups tracing back to Deep Time and in doing so strengthen community efforts to sustain important song-dance traditions.

The Tunisian–Libyan Maluf Slam Collaborative was a multinational group of musicians, poets, artists, educators, journalists, and stakeholders that created a series of music concerts featuring Tunisian and Libyan maluf in July 2019. Maluf is considered cultural heritage across eastern Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya and manifests with great variety between and inside each nation-state. Sourced from ethnography in Libya (2014) and Tunisia (2018–2019), this article documents the collaborative’s work, queries the dynamics of transnational traditions, and analyses musical modes and histories of Sufism in order to explain similarities and differences within performances of maluf today.

This study discusses the changing role of music informants in the printed collections of Greek folk music from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. The earliest collections do not even include the informants’ names, the focus being laid on the information (the ethnographic material) per se. Even in the early-twentieth century, we know little of the sporadically named informants, such as their education or experience. The transfer of information was often carried out with no official permission and financial returns. This study examines the stages of a transformation, from the informant’s anonymity to their moderate appreciation and final rehabilitation.

This article examines the role of Ukrainian music in resistance during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Focusing on popular music across homeland, occupied, and digital spaces, the study draws on social media platforms from war-torn Ukraine. It highlights how music becomes a tool for cultural resilience and political engagement. By situating Ukrainian sonic activism as resistance in contexts of military occupation, this article offers insights into the relationship between songs, displacement, and collective belonging.

In Tuscany, music is employed by park authorities, as well as cultural and conservation organisations, to attract visitors to natural and protected areas. This article examines the benefits of incorporating music performances within these natural settings, highlighting improvements in management, income generation for maintenance and conservation, increased visitor numbers, and enhanced environmental awareness. Through qualitative interviews and the analysis of four case studies, this article explores how integrating musical performances into ecotourism activities can foster a sense of place and stewardship among visitors and local communities.

Chinese orchestras have been active in Toronto since 1969, yet have been seldom documented. Even scarcer are studies of how Chinese-Canadian diasporic musicians navigate the musical and cultural spaces within their orchestras. Incorporating my personal experiences as a performer, this article offers an auto-ethnographic analysis of internal negotiations within two Toronto-based Chinese orchestras. Expressing identities and self-positioning through choices relating to musical notation, competence, membership, and social interaction, orchestra members negotiate, compromise, and cooperate in meeting the challenges they encounter in the orchestras. Detailed participant-observer analysis shows how Toronto Chinese orchestras serve as microcosms of social and cultural practices in diasporic communities.

Malta’s vibrant wind band tradition sees the annual composition of numerous festive marches. This article explores the politics of musical borrowing through Victory, a festive march by Vincenzo Ciappara (1890–1979) composed following the Allied triumph in the Second World War. The march’s trio was subsequently reworked in another march, adapted as the chorus of a Maltese-Australian football song, and later incorporated into a political song performed in Valletta and Pyongyang. The study contends that musical borrowing fosters engagement, enhances the familiar, blurs musical genres, and generates dialogues between the source and its (re)interpretations across cultural and political contexts.

Islam spread to the area of present-day northern Nigeria in the eleventh century and further southward in the nineteenth century. Some scholars claimed that although Islamic traditions appeared hegemonic, they did not completely supplant local music traditions (e.g., Trimingham 1959). Through a musical ethnography of two predominantly Muslim communities in Nigeria, our article interrogates this claim and explores specific ways Muslim musicians and community members contest Islamic orthodoxy and negotiate some form of liberalism. We argue that negotiating liberalism has been crucial to the sustenance of indigenous music traditions in the communities we studied in Nigeria.

This article addresses the gaps between ethnographic archives and community members who are often deprived of accessing their own materials. In reflecting on results from collaborative research with a Nepalese immigrant community in Alberta, Canada, where we created a Digital Community Archive (DCA), I draw attention to the benefits of combining strategies from applied ethnomusicology and Participatory Action Research (PAR). I propose a new model for archiving in ethnomusicology, the Community Collaborative Participatory Archive (CCPA). This model can improve ethnomusicological archival practice by focusing on collaborative, egalitarian, and grassroots participation, shared roles, and authority in the archival creation and development process.

On 16 March 2018, the Galician government launched a procedure to declare traditional Galician dance an Asset of Cultural Interest. The initiative sparked a wave of responses from the practising community, who questioned the legitimacy of folkloric associations as institutional representatives of living tradition. This moment of ontological agitation resulted in numerous counterclaims and the eventual withdrawal of the proposal. Drawing on this conflict, the article explores foliadas in contemporary Galicia as spaces of biopolitical dissent, where embodied knowledge, improvisation, and collective care resist normative frameworks of heritage and cultural representation.

Heritagisation of music proliferates as does the scholarly debate about it. By examining relevant journals, I interrogate the conceptualisation and construction of music heritage in relation to disciplinary boundaries in particular. The results suggest there is a prevalent dualism where critical heritage studies align with popular music, and the scientific approaches to heritage with European classical music. With respect to the disciplinary divisions in music research, it is more common to encounter reliance on ethnomusicology or popular music studies than musicology.

This dialogue begins with Egil Bakka’s proposal for a science-based definition of dance. Bakka identifies four principles to structure the definition which are (1) drawn on methodologies from studies of dance as culture, (2) informed by the natural sciences, (3) influenced by a relation-based approach adapted to computer science, and (4) based on methods used in constructing dictionary definitions. Following peer review, we solicited public responses to gauge scholarly receptivity to the initial essay. The result is a single-authored proposal by Bakka followed by four independent responses by Kunej, Sarkar Munsi, Savage, and López-Yánez, respectively, ending with a response to the comments by Bakka.