Adelaida Reyes: Pioneer in the Field of Music and Forced Migration – A Review of Her Theoretical and Methodological Contribution

---

Less than a decade ago, Timothy Rice (2014) published in the Yearbook for Traditional Music of the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM) an article with the title “Ethnomusicology in Times of Trouble.” Originally presented as a paper on “new research” at the 2013 World Conference of the ICTM, this article drew the attention of the international ethnomusicological community to a new set of themes which were being increasingly studied among scholars, especially from the 1990s onwards. According to Rice, these themes constituted a “major break” with what had been considered typical ethnomusicological research over the first 50 years of the establishment of the academic discipline. What they had in common was that they all examined music in contexts marked by social, political, economic, and environmental crisis.

This shift of interest constituted a challenge for long-established trends in ethnomusicology, which had mainly focused on musical traditions of groups which were locally or ethnically defined, groups usually distanced from the home countries of the researchers and quite stable in their internal social relations (Rice 2014). Considering, however, that the people whose music ethnomusicologists were studying very often – if not always – already found themselves amidst rapid and sometimes violent socio-political and environmental transformations, the point of divergence that Rice noticed was actually linked to the realization by some researchers that the music-making of these people could become an expression of, or a response to these transformations. Such pioneering ethnomusicological approaches considered music in the context of violence and conflict, forced migration, trauma and disease, social discrimination and power asymmetries between dominant majorities and minority groups, and environmental change.

Studying people making music in troubled conditions not only demanded a reconsideration of older ethnomusicological premises, thus affecting the type of questions set, but also created the need for systematic examination and reconsideration of research methods, theories, and ethics. The creation within the ICTM of two study groups interrelated in their approach, one on Music and Minorities (1999, Hiroshima) and the other on Applied Ethnomusicology (2007, Vienna), can be perceived as a reflection of this necessity. If we finally consider the relevant research work, the conferences, the symposia, and workshops that have been taking place over the last twenty years, we can surely recognize that what was considered to be pioneering by Rice in 2013 has today become a widespread and influential branch of ethnomusicology.

Within this ever-expanding field of ethnomusicological research, conceptualized by Rice as “Ethnomusicology in Times of Trouble,” a newly emerging area of study has been that of music in contexts of forced migration, characterized in the post-WWII era by the increasing role of international bodies, such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and by stricter migration-control policies in various countries of refugees’ resettlement. Motivated by my personal ongoing engagement in ethnomusicological research with forced migrants from Syria in Europe, in this article I will explore the groundbreaking contribution of one of the pioneering figures in the general field of music and forced migration: that of the ethnomusicologist Adelaida Reyes.

While I was editing the final version of this article, I received the sad news of Adelaida Reyes’ passing away. A few months earlier, when I started writing, I had hoped that at some point this text would reach her. As this hope was not fulfilled, my aim remains to inform and inspire younger generations and new researchers, but also to keep alive the memory of an inquiring mind and committed ethnomusicologist.

I had the chance to first meet Adelaida Reyes at the joint Symposium of the ICTM Study Groups on Music and Minorities and Music and Gender in the summer of 2018 in Vienna. She had been involved in the activities of the ICTM Study Group on Music and Minorities from its inception in 1999 until 2020, when she retired from her position as Vice-President. Being myself at that time a new member of that international community – it was the first ethnomusicology-related conference I had attended – I was not yet really aware of her personal story and the extent and quality of her scholarly contribution. I started to get to know Adelaida Reyes in the months to follow, mainly through her writing and due to my personal decision to set up a dissertation project on music and forced migration.

About thirty-five years earlier, Adelaida Reyes was motivated by emerging refugee minorities and their musical expressions in New Jersey, New York, the city where she also lived. At that time, she became the first researcher to question whether there were special qualities in the refugee experience, within the general context of migration and resettlement, that should be taken into consideration by ethnomusicology. And she certainly found that there were. I will therefore try to sum up the theoretical and methodological contribution of Adelaida Reyes, hoping to provide a useful guide for new researchers. I will start by sketching the personal background of Reyes as it emerges from her own writings. I will then discuss the main positions that permeate her research approach, and present her main theoretical and methodological concepts in a systematic way, not necessarily in a chronological sequence. My goal is to encapsulate and present a framework that could be adopted and adapted in similar research endeavors. In the final part, I will examine Reyes’ contribution in relation to broader changes in ethnomusicology and provide a brief overview of current developments in contemporary ethnomusicological research with forced migrants.

An “Other” among “Others”

Reyes became involved with ethnomusicology in a country – the U.S. – and period – the end of the 1960s – of radical social and political change. A few years earlier, in 1964, the African American Civil Rights movement was counting one of its most important victories, the Civil Rights Act, which outlawed discrimination on the basis of color and ended the existing segregation laws. Protest against the war in Vietnam was widespread across the U.S., marking a period of increasing left-wing radicalism. The feminist movement, inspired by the Civil Rights movement, won important legal reforms towards gender equality. On a musical level, the 1960s was a period of remarkable innovation, experimentation, and engagement with politics.

In the mid-1960s, U.S. ethnomusicology had seen only a few years of institutional establishment in university departments.¹ The newness of its foundation and the need for scientific conceptualization generated intense debates, such as that between the advocates of an anthropological perspective for ethnomusicology and those of a musicological one (Nettl 2010). Moreover, founding members of the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), such as Willard Rhodes and Charles Seeger, openly advocated widening of the scope of ethnomusicology to include all musical aspects of human societies, without limitations of time or space. This was a divergence from the dominant mode of pre-war comparative musicology, folk-music studies, and anthropology, which focused on so-called non-western “primitive,” “oriental,” “folk,” or “exotic” societies and their music and culture. Another groundbreaking development of this period was the broad acceptance of fieldwork as the main method for the collection of ethnomusicological data. Considering this widening of the research scope of ethnomusicology, an extension of the possible sites for field research was also to be expected.

According to Reyes, the motivation behind her decision to get involved in ethnomusicology and to focus on ethnic and migrant minorities is related to a coincidence of personal and social factors. Her own background as a migrant was one of them. Reyes had moved from Manila, in the Philippines, to the U.S. at the end of the 1960s to pursue studies in music and music criticism at Columbia University, in the city of New York. In 1973 she continued her studies at the same institution, enrolling on a doctoral program in ethnomusicology.

As she pointed out in one of her articles, Reyes had first-hand experience of the transformative effects of “ethnic” labels thought up by certain public institutions and policy makers, and ascribed to the diverse “Others” – migrants or racialized groups – of the U.S. Finding herself in the situation of having to shift from the demographic label “Asian” to that of “Pacific Islander” helped her to understand the ways labels produced certain meanings and reactions, on an individual and on a collective level. She described this experience as a crucial point of departure for her later scholarly approach: “the category ‘Other’ eventually became for me the least problematic. It even became a comfortable place to be. It became a vantage point, a bias, that colored my vision and shaped my horizons” (Reyes 1999b: 202).

A second crucial factor of influence was related to Reyes’ direct social and musical surroundings. Reyes was fascinated by the avant-garde musicians of New York and their innovative spirit. According to her, each of those musicians “was also, in an important sense, an other in his or her own milieu” (Reyes 1999b: 204). Alongside musicians, Reyes also refers to mentors, such as the Californian music critic Peter Yates, who “understood boundaries (musical, locational or disciplinary) not just as closures but as thresholds” (ibid.). Finally, from her background as a pianist in Western classical music,² in which the voices of composers one could only “hear and love through the thick filter of history and interpretations” (ibid.: 203), Reyes moved enthusiastically towards the study, in ethnomusicological terms, of the music of her own generation and direct surroundings: those of the city where she lived – New York.

From New York to the Refugee Camps in the Philippines: Developing New Fields of Research

Adelaida Reyes completed a doctoral degree in ethnomusicology in 1975 at the University of Columbia. Her dissertation was entitled “The Role of Music in the Interaction of Black Americans and Hispanos in New York City’s East Harlem.” Rejecting the choice of a distant place to do fieldwork, as ethnomusicologists used to, and on the contrary choosing to do research in the city she was living in, at a location where there was no such thing as “distinctive music,” was perceived at that time by Reyes’ colleagues as unwise or even just odd. Her research approach constituted an anomaly in the general landscape of ethnomusicology in the U.S., in the sense, as Reyes explains, that it violated paradigm-induced expectations (Reyes 1999b).³ For early ethnomusicologists (from the 1950s until the 1960s), whose main focus was the study of the music of so-called simple societies¸ the assumption that these were homogeneous, self-contained, and relatively static constituted an expectation which was not to be disputed. Reyes, in contrast, aimed to study music in heterogeneous, complex, and intensively transforming environments, firstly in a city and later in contexts of forced migration.

In a later article, Reyes interpreted the implicit assumptions in early ethnomusicology as an expression of nation-centric and western-centric beliefs which then prevailed among scholars. These beliefs further impacted the theoretical and methodological tools used for the conceptualization and analysis of music in culture:

The cultural homogeneity of the nation-state was projected onto the musics ethnomusicology studied; they were assumed to be territorially bounded and governed by a unitary musical system which served to explain all the musical activity that took place within that territory (Reyes 2007: 19).

Reyes also criticized the trend among ethnomusicologists to treat music as a sonic object with meaning embedded in its form, irrespective of its context: an approach extensively influenced by the example of western musicology. Departing from this, Reyes not only embraced an anthropological approach that insisted on recognizing the interrelation between musical meaning and context, but also, by introducing and theorizing the city as a distinguishable field, widened the theoretical and methodological perspectives of ethnomusicology as a whole into what has been usually referred to since as urban ethnomusicology. The challenging considerations emerging from the analysis and understanding of the music of ethnic or racialized groups within the complexity and heterogeneity of a cosmopolitan city such as New York, finally led Reyes, throughout the 1980s, to turn her focus towards another emerging and unique group of “Others:” that of refugees from Vietnam in New Jersey.

Foreseeing potential ethnomusicological challenges in the emergence of the social and demographic category of refugees, Reyes decided to examine in depth whether, and in which ways, the experiences of Vietnamese refugees could have an impact on their music traditions in the context of the U.S. Reyes not only posed music-centered questions, such as what happens to music, and music traditions, but also asked whether and in which ways refugees could be viewed as special groups for ethnomusicological research in general (Reyes 1986; 1989; 1990). Although seemingly simple, her questions opened up whole new unexplored areas in ethnomusicology. She attempted to define the specific qualities that differentiate the refugee experience and context from those appertaining to the general category of migration, as defined by anthropological studies on refugees, and to further examine in which ways these qualities affect musical meaning and function. Refugees’ traumatic experiences of extreme violence and forced flight; the institutional label “refugee” itself ascribed by international organizations; specific refugee policies and aid measures, such as the creation of refugee camps; attitudes of host societies or governments; asymmetrical intergroup relations of power, which usually imply discrimination and marginalization. All these factors, Reyes assumed, render refugees a special category, with an ensuing impact on their music.

A way for Reyes to find answers to her questions was to travel back along the refugee journey and to visit two refugee camps in the Philippines where Vietnamese people spent a long period before their relocation to other countries, and particularly to the U.S. She then compared her findings with the musical expressions previously documented in New Jersey and later in Orange County in California, the most popular destination among Vietnamese refugees. This was the first known ethnomusicological field research in refugee camps and the first attempt at bridging the gap between ethnomusicology and refugee studies. Detailed research findings were published in the form of an ethnographic monograph, under the title Songs of the Caged, Songs of the Free: Music in the Vietnamese Refugee Experience (1999a).⁴

Reyes described her shift of research focus from the city to the refugee camps as a logical corollary of the ways she initially approached music in the urban setting, both theoretically and methodologically (Reyes 1999b). To show her train of thought, and before embarking on any deeper analysis of Reyes’ theoretical and methodological concepts in respect of music and the refugee experience, I will attempt to enlarge upon three basic axes in reference to which she elaborated her premises, methods, and theories throughout her inaugural research in New York. These axes were attuned to the basic definition of the anthropology-orientated ethnomusicology of the early 1960s, that is: the study of music in context, social, cultural, and historical; the study of the music of all kinds of human groups; and the study of music through the collection of empirical data by conducting fieldwork (Nettl 1964). Although she challenged these theoretical and methodological principles in various ways, Reyes remained committed to their utility and interdependent application. Through this commitment, she created and maintained intellectual cohesion and continuity within the discipline of ethnomusicology.

Context and Interdisciplinarity

Attempting to sum up Reyes’ approach, I would suggest that the notion of context, perceived as essential to musical meaning, holds a core position. As we saw, this was in any case one of the necessary components of post-war ethnomusicology. It was actually Reyes’ commitment to this basic tenet that drove her to introduce the city – the urban setting – as an additional context for ethnomusicological research. To do so, however, Reyes also had to answer the question of what constitutes the city and what consequences this knowledge would have for ethnomusicology. The key for this was the employment of theoretical concepts stemming from other disciplines.

To develop a theory for urban ethnomusicology that would serve her research in New York, Reyes turned to sociology, anthropology, and sociolinguistics. As she put it in one of her articles: “a perspective from outside of ethnomusicology became necessary to see more clearly what could not be seen from within. . . . urban ethnomusicology is by definition interdisciplinary” (Reyes 2007: 18). Here, it should be made clear that ethnomusicological research in the cities was already being conducted in the same period when Reyes started her fieldwork in New York (e.g., Nettl 1978). However, as Reyes pointed out, this research was restricted by using the tools of early ethnomusicology: ethnic groups were perceived as closed entities, isolated from their wider environment, and thus their music was studied as an expression of monolithic social relationships and ethnically bounded cultural behaviors (Reyes 2009). Methods and theories were employed similarly, if not identically, to those for the study of rural or remote native music, largely ignoring the complexity, heterogeneity, and transcultural interactions that cities manifested. Even when migrant groups were under ethnomusicological scrutiny their music was considered as an object transplanted from the place of its origin to the new environment, insulated and autonomous, without any connection with the larger whole (Reyes 2007).

In her article “Urban Ethnomusicology: Past and Present” (2009) Reyes explains in detail how interdisciplinarity helped her to approach music and the city in completely innovative terms. First of all, she perceived the city as a unique system of diverse social, cultural, and political forces, and not as a mere collection of ethnically identified groups. The urban context was shaped by relations driven by interests and power, and thus relations that enable or limit certain possibilities for action. That premise drove Reyes to take into consideration the human agency expressed in the city and the power of the city itself: it was the people who created their cities, but the cities and their complex dynamics created their people as well. Secondly, on the basis of sociological and demographic data Reyes adopted the tenet that the population of cities is largely made up of successive migrations rather than internal growth. This realization gave prominence to the concept of migration as a determinative human behavior in contemporary social and cultural development, creating a bridge to her later research. Finally, although in the urban context groups could express themselves or be categorized by institutions as distinguishable from each other, at the same time they interacted with each other in various ways within spatial, institutional, functional, cultural, and political networks. The cultural and musical expressions of these groups, as Reyes (2009) suggested, could not be approached irrespectively of these interactions.

Groups, Ethnic Identities, and Relations of Power

Throughout the research of Adelaida Reyes there is an all-pervading feature that is also the second axis in her ethnomusicological approach. She studied the music of groups of people. However, from the very beginning of her engagement with ethnomusicology, Reyes called into question deeply rooted premises that took for granted the definition, and intellectual construction, of the groups under study as “ethnic” and thus as entities of single (ethnic) cultures. Again, it was her inter-disciplinary perspective that led her to certain considerations and re-conceptualizations of the relationship between ethnic labels, group identifications, and music.

In one of her earlier articles, entitled “Ethnic Music, the Urban Area, and Ethnomusicology” (1979), Reyes put forward profound criticism of the ways in which ethnic groups were conceptualized by early ethnomusicology, and she then suggested certain ways to overcome emerging dangers such as the essentialization of cultural difference, implied by the framing of ethnic groups as isolated and self-contained cultural units. Reyes employed theories derived from the field of U.S. sociology and anthropology, which in the early 1970s already theorized cultural differences and identifications between groups as mere expressions of group interactions and usually unequal power relations, and not as a simple outcome of intrinsic cultural or other observable characteristics. The production of difference and that of identities stemming from it, such as ethnic identity, was perceived as a relational process. It involved what Reyes, following the work of the sociologist Richard A. Schermerhorn, calls diacritica – the markers of difference, as well as processes of ascribing identities and labels by the members of a group to themselves, by outsiders to a group, and by one group to another group (Schermerhorn in Reyes 1979: 4).⁵

Reyes insisted that there is nothing inherent in the culture of a group that could render it automatically distinctive in ethnic terms. If a group chose to be ethnically identified, and to use culture as a marker of difference, that would be an outcome of its interaction with similar or dissimilar and equal or unequal others, alongside strategies internal to the group, employed in situ and in relation to past experiences and present interests. There was nothing predetermined in this process. Reyes tried to test this theory on the study of groups of people who until the end of the 1970s were categorized as “ethnic” by many ethnomusicologists: the various migrant and racialized groups that shaped U.S. cities.

Contesting the premise that cultural forms and music traditions linked to the pre-migration past of a group would necessarily become a mark of ethnic difference, Reyes opened the way for a wider understanding of the role of music in contexts of migration, from rural to urban environments and from one country to another. At this point, the question of what are the factors that lead migrant groups to certain music choices, interactions, and identifications could be answered with an even deeper theorization of the urban system as a system of power relations.

Reyes came back with more concrete concepts on the issue of power relations about twenty years later with an article entitled “Music, Migration and Minorities: Reciprocal Relations” (2001),⁶ in which she attempted to feature them as a very significant variable in the conceptualization of migrant groups and their music. She suggested that the existence of asymmetrical power relations between migrant groups, which usually hold weaker power positions, and dominant-majority groups or the wider society, can be an influential factor in the musical development of the migrant group. She perceives the dominant-majority group as that which has: “the power to specify grounds for differentiation, to assign value or significance to difference, and to translate such grounds and such assignments into acts or behavior, musical and otherwise” (Reyes 2001: 38).

Reyes saw in the increase of migration movements an increase of power asymmetries – and thus an increase of minorities – within larger contexts such as cities. Marks of difference and cultural and musical forms employed by minority groups could be then studied and explained as responses to certain experiences of social and institutionalized discrimination, stigmatization, oppression, and/or marginalization. The concept of minorities/majorities and the focus on intra-group relations and power dynamics inevitably had an impact on the methods used by Reyes.

Rethinking Fieldwork Methods

Urban ethnomusicology paved the way for a more careful and meticulous ethnomusicological approach to music in relation to migration. The theoretical, interdisciplinary conceptualization of the context within which the music of a group is studied, and of the particular social and political processes that render groups distinguishable from each other, became a substantial necessity. Migrant and minority groups and their cultural and musical behaviors began to be studied as parts of a heterogeneous and complex system rather than as isolated units. Pre-migration cultural and musical traditions were no longer perceived as bearing unchanging, inherent meaning and this led to new, more flexible approaches to musical tradition and innovation. It was this theoretical shift, reinforced by Reyes, that brought about consequent effects on methodology, and led to basic inextricable questions in ethnomusicological research, including: where (or what) is the context; which groups are included in it; and in which possible spaces/venues for musical expression do we seek to collect empirical data? Do we start with the group, or do we start with the city as whole? What if the group consists of members across cities or even countries? Which are the venues of musical performance, are they private or public, and where are they located? How are all these questions translated practically into fieldwork methods?⁷

When Reyes started her research, she had to face the lack of a concrete methodological frame for studying the music of cities. She had to invent one. The need to articulate the urban context, alongside the question of the definition of groups under study, rendered the task of locating the site (or sites) of fieldwork very complicated. It could be delineated as a neighborhood, a city or more than one city, a whole country or more than one country, such as the homeland or countries where a group of the same origin is dispersed. Considering the multiplicity and complexity of factors that form social groups in urban contexts, Reyes attempted to locate (ethnic) groups according to their population concentrations in one city. However, even this approach proved risky to some degree:

Musics of particular ethnic groups may be concentrated in certain localities – Chinese music in Chinatown, Arabic music in the Atlantic Avenue section of Brooklyn – but these do not hold the totality of those particular musics in New York. . . . population concentration as a primary methodological consideration in the study of ethnic groups and their music in cities is being effectively challenged by population dispersal and distribution (Reyes 1979: 11).

But Reyes faced even more challenges in defining the location of music and the groups to be studied. These were related to the complex articulation of group interactions on the basis of ethnicity, neighborhood, age, religion, or even shared media, such as radio broadcasts that actually served both inter-group and intra-group needs. Considering logistical issues and backed by demographic and sociological data, Reyes finally decided to conduct her first fieldwork in one district of New York, East Harlem. She studied the music of the district as a whole and thus the musical interaction between the two major groups living there: Hispanos and African Americans. At that time, it was more logical and easier for her to adapt her method according to the population concentration of the groups she wanted to study (Reyes 1979). Her approach of involving two groups in one study was nevertheless completely innovative.

At the end of the 1970s, Reyes started to be interested in a single and unique group, newly emerging within the heterogeneous population of New York: that of Vietnamese refugees. She somehow saw an opportunity to examine what happens to music traditions within an ongoing migration movement, which apart from being such also manifested special qualities which had never been studied before by ethnomusicology: those related to both the label and the experience of being a refugee.

Music, Forced Migration, and the Refugee Experience

Reyes elaborated her theoretical and methodological framework for the study of music in contexts of forced migration in many articles and one book, all published over a period of about thirty years. These publications cover her decennial research with Vietnamese refugees in the U.S. and the Philippines (see Reyes 1986; 1989; 1990; 1999a; 1999b; 2001; 2014; 2019) and her later shorter research project with refugees from Sudan in Uganda, conducted in 1998 (see 2007; 2010). Reyes drew on her previous experience in the developing field of urban ethnomusicology, within which she suggested an innovative transdisciplinary approach with respect to the definition of the so-called socio-political context, of the specific characteristics of the groups under study, and of the methods to be used for data gathering. On this basis, she finally managed to develop a whole new theoretical and methodological approach for the study of music in the experience of forced migration. I will try to elaborate this interdependency in an orderly way, starting with the way Reyes regarded the label refugee and the context of forced (or involuntary) migration, and then proceeding to specific theoretical and methodological points with respect to the study of music.

Reyes’ first interaction with Vietnamese refugees was in New Jersey in 1981.⁸ She had the chance to attend the Tet, the Vietnamese New Year’s Eve celebrations. She was expecting to document traditional Vietnamese music, but what her preliminary fieldwork showed was that Vietnamese music in this festival was full of Western elements in musicological terms. Reyes also observed that the musical expressions of Vietnamese people in New Jersey were directed on a large scale towards certain inter-group and intra-group goals associated with expectations for integration on the one hand, and ethnic representations to the wider society on the other. She wrote in 1986:

the Vietnamese in New Jersey had chosen not just to make their own private or individual arrangement to celebrate the holiday. Rather, they deliberately chose to re-schedule and re-design its celebration to make it communal and public. . . . The New Jersey celebration was a statement of distinctness, even as it was, verbally in the speeches and musically in the Western elements of the repertoire, an acceptance by the Vietnamese of the larger society within which it must now adapt and function (Reyes 1986: 97–98).

Reyes initially presumed that the western element in the Vietnamese music was a strategy for the refugee group to integrate into the society of the United States. Her intellectual curiosity, however, drove her to pay attention in her fieldwork, and to a particular account by her Vietnamese hostess, referring to the time when these songs became popular in Vietnam. This was prior to 1975, the point at which the Communist government seized power and banned the songs for reasons of political control over artistic production. The singing of these types of songs by the refugees Reyes met in New Jersey could have therefore also constituted expressions of certain political and ideological positioning related to the conflict in Vietnam, and not only to the socio-political context found in the U.S. This empirical data, alongside the fact that before their arrival in the U.S. the refugees had undergone a longer or shorter period of living in refugee camps, as well as the bureaucratic procedures designed by the refugee policies of the UNHCR, drove Reyes to look for theoretical frameworks that could cover the totality of the refugee experience, and thus provide the context for her research. To do so, she turned to refugee and forced migration studies, which by the beginning of the 1980s had started to become a distinct – interdisciplinary – field of study and policy analysis, involving legal scholars, anthropologists, and other social scientists.⁹

Refugees – International Humanitarian Policies and the Experience of Forced Migration

From the very beginning of her research with Vietnamese refugees, Reyes stressed the importance of defining the term refugee. She did so by adopting the definition agreed between the states that participated in the 1951 U.N. Geneva Convention for the Status of Refugees and that of the Protocol of 1967.¹⁰ UNHCR, the most renowned international institution for the protection of the rights of refugees, also started its activities in 1951. Considering the increasing numbers of refugees, Reyes not only looked at the label of refugee as describing an emerging demographic category, but also realized its larger legal, political, and institutional implications as well as its consequences for the realities of the refugees themselves (Reyes 1986; 1989; 1990). This approach demanded the clarification of certain factors with respect to the interaction between UNHCR and local implementations – shaping the context within which Reyes conducted her research – and the experience of forced migration in general.

First of all, not all migrants forced to leave their countries under the fear of persecution have access to the humanitarian protection guaranteed by UNHCR and to the status of refugees. The decision to grant this protection very often involves international diplomacy and political debate in the countries that attract forced migrants. The political priorities of powerful states with interests in ongoing conflicts – such as the military involvement of the U.S. in the relations between South and North Vietnam – also play a role in the decisions taken by international organizations. As Reyes puts it:

The strong political component in the definition of a term which many, realistically or not, associate only with humanitarian concerns has inevitably complicated its definition. Economics, altruism, foreign policy and ideology trip over each other as they jockey for position in the definitional arena (Reyes 1990: 11).

Secondly, international legislation on refugees is interpreted and applied in diverse ways in different countries, dependent on the proximity of the host country to that of the forced migrants; on the political ideologies and transnational alliances of local governments; on the sentiments of host societies and very often on the needs of labor markets. For example, the majority of the Vietnamese people who sought refugee status in the U.S. were ideologically positioned against communism, and that drew alliances with the U.S. government which had undertaken the military campaign against the Vietnamese communist army. Reyes realized very soon the importance of this factor in the musical choices among the Vietnamese with whom she conducted research. Their repertoire was divided between communist and non-communist elements (Reyes 1989; 1999a).

Thirdly, forced migrants appealing for access to the international humanitarian programs for refugees as asylum seekers usually endure lengthy administrative procedures without necessarily experiencing positive outcomes as regards the granting of their refugee status. These procedures might demand the temporary settlement of asylum seekers in refugee camps or reception facilities, managed in most cases jointly by UNHCR, local governments, and a variety of NGOs, with various interests and providing various services. This proved to be the case for many of Reyes’ Vietnamese research partners, who before their arrival in the U.S. went through the experience of refugee camps and bureaucratic procedures.¹¹

Finally, besides an analysis of refugee realities through the prism of policies and the international institutional framework, studies on forced migration have provided an alternative perspective that focuses on the experiences and narratives of the people who appertain to the category of refugees as well as to those developed by host societies with reference to refugees. Reyes (1999b) bases her theoretical approach to some extent on this analytical framework, and particularly on the premise that there are specific events and layers of experience that render the refugee experience distinguishable from the general notion of migration. These relate to experiences of political conflict, extreme violence, persecution, or discrimination in the refugees’ homeland; to the often risky journey itself; to their interaction with international institutions: the labeling process, the bureaucracy, and their experiences in the refugee camps; to the process of settlement and adaptation in a new country; to the (im)possibility of return. Finally, they relate to possible emerging transnational links between refugees in one country with those left behind, or with members of the same ideology, ethnicity, religion, or nationality dispersed around the world.

By documenting musical expressions of people who have undergone such extreme conditions, Reyes paved the way for an understanding of refugees not only as a demographically and legally defined group, but also as agents in the creation of their own social and cultural conditions. However, she did not proceed to suggest possible policies or interventions in the field, such as those elaborated in many cases at that time by anthropologists and other scholars following a newly emerging spirit of a “dual imperative” which sought to combine research and action.¹² It seems that she preferred to limit herself to theoretical concepts on music, perceiving refugees’ music-making as an adaptive response to the abrupt discontinuity and ambivalence of their experiences. She finally suggested that for a comprehensive study of the processes of the reconstruction of musical meaning among refugees, ethnomusicological research should take into account, alongside institutional frameworks, those features and varying contexts that emerge throughout the refugee experience. These are theorized as threefold: those related to the pre-departure (pre-migration) period; the departure-related; and finally, those related to resettlement (Reyes 1990).

Contextualizing Forced Migration: A Threefold Approach

The pre-departure or pre-migration features are related to the daily life in the refugees’ homeland before the conflict and their flight. For Reyes, the study of music in that context appears to fall within ethnomusicology’s traditional domain: “It draws from a descriptive account of the music of a particular culture, its historical and sociocultural context” (Reyes 1990: 16). Besides that, it is important to understand the reasons that force people to leave their country, and thus to understand the conflict and the possible role of music in it: “The centrality of the political element in contemporary refugee phenomena cannot be underestimated” (Reyes 1999a: 173). In the case of Vietnamese refugees in the U.S., as we already saw, anti-communism was a constituent value prevailing in refugees’ musical expressions. In Reyes’ (2007; 2010) research with Sudanese refugees in Uganda, it was the refugees’ experience of persecution because of their religious beliefs and ethnic characteristics, and thus their experience of being a minority in their homeland, that played an integral role in their later musical expressions as refugees. Reyes conceptualized the society that refugees left behind, which might constitute the reason for their flight, with the term “shadow majority” (2001: 38). This majority has a long-term effect in all the subsequent contexts, as we will see later.

Departure-related features were considered by Reyes to be those appertaining to the ways in which people fled their country and the conditions and events they met in the long and difficult interim period before their final settlement in a place where they could rebuild their lives in a secure and lasting way. This in-between period includes the process of being labeled as refugees and the implied individual and collective inclusion within the framework of international protection, or sometimes exclusion from it. The study of music in relation to departure-related factors that shape the refugee experience has been a difficult endeavor. Most challenging, in methodological and ethical terms, however, has been the access to the parallel universe of refugee camps. It was Reyes who first attempted to study this area, as yet unexplored for ethnomusicology, and, inspired by urban ethnomusicology, to further provide a theoretical frame for the study of music in reference to the sociopolitical context of the camp.

The cosmopolitan conditions artificially created in the camps, with the involvement in their management of a variety of local and international actors, as well as the asymmetrical power dynamics articulated between encamped refugees and local societies and institutions, render these camps an extremely complex social, political, cultural, and legal context, and refugees themselves easy victims of discrimination and often crime. As Reyes observed in her attempt to examine the role of music in the refugee camps in the Philippines:

Culturally, life in those camps means exposure to elements from the host country, from the diverse camp population, and from agencies from all over the world that provide services on contract from the United Nations, Western receiving countries, and donor countries (1989: 27).

In a later article she stressed:

Power relations between refugees, refugee camp authorities, the refugees’ country of origin, and their host countries are therefore highly asymmetrical. . . . In refugee camps, some of our assumptions about what makes for social stability are seriously challenged. . . . In refugee camps heterogeneity is the rule (Reyes 1999b).

Her theorization was informed by fieldwork data, and vice versa. While documenting the plethora of musical expressions and soundscapes in the refugee camps in the Philippines, Reyes simultaneously documented the socio-political conditions in these camps and all possible factors that could contextualize music. Here the location of the camp; its type and function; the surrounding society and its proximity or distance from the camp; the ethnic, ideological, religious, class, and regional positioning of refugees; the network of actors interacting in the camp’s life and the power and cultural dynamics among them; the daily activities in the camps; the spatial organization of public and private spaces; the media used among refugees as well as the employment of various symbols of collective identification: these all constitute substantial factors for the understanding of the role, function, and meaning of music. Reyes deemed that a thorough understanding of the refugees’ life in camps could lead to a better understanding of Vietnamese refugees’ music in the U.S. context, and in the cities where refugees rebuilt their lives. Under her threefold approach, these cities were considered as resettlement contexts.

Theorizing that the role of refugees’ past experiences in their homeland and during the interval between departure and arrival were equally important when studying their music in resettlement contexts, Reyes further applied the familiar analytical framework of urban ethnomusicology. This required in the first place the study of refugees’ music in its interplay with the larger host society and the consideration of power dynamics and cultural, social, and political interactions between groups. On that point, referring to the definition of minorities by the ICTM Study Group on Music and Minorities¹³ Reyes suggested:

Migration creates one of the largest human groups out of which minorities emerge. What migrants bring with them as capital for building new lives in resettlement depends on what they had and valued in the old life; the circumstances of their departure; and what, as a consequence they left behind. How they deploy their capital depends on their vision of the present and the future, but it is a vision encumbered by their particular past. The lives they create in resettlement are shaped by all these, but not by these alone. For once in a new environment, they must deal with an important new variable: a host society, inevitably a dominant one, within which, as minorities, they must now seek to be accommodated (2001: 38–39).

Apart from differences in attitudes, expectations, and power between forced migrants and dominant groups, it is also the previously mentioned “shadow majority” – the society that refugees left behind – that continues to play a role in the recontextualization of music in refugees’ new social environments. In some cases, as Reyes pointed out, when music from the homeland was performed at refugees’ community events, then the imprint of past conflicts tended to be prominent in terms of lyrical content and language, in choice of musical genres and idioms, and in the values expressed in them.

Reyes examined the relationship between “shadow majorities” and the musical expressions of refugee groups both in her research with Vietnamese refugees in the U.S. and with Sudanese refugees in Kampala, Uganda. In the first case, she interpreted the devaluation of traditional Vietnamese music among Vietnamese in the U.S. as being a result of its previous use in Vietnam for purposes of political propaganda (Reyes 2001). In the second case, Reyes explained the predominance of English in the ritual of the Catholic mass among Sudanese Christian refugees in Uganda – which was not the case back in Sudan where tribal languages were also used – as being a result of a variety of factors. For purposes of community building and survival in the urban context of Kampala,¹⁴ a heterogeneous group of refugees from southern Sudan employed certain tribal and religious affiliations, which nevertheless, as Reyes suggests, also reflected responses to the conflict in Sudan:

Tribal differences have given way to overarching commonalities. Together, Sudanese with different tribal affiliations (e.g., the Dinka, the Nuer) identify themselves as Africans to distinguish themselves from the Arab majority in their homeland. Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Orthodox Christians, Catholics and Seventh Day Adventists have given priority to their identity as Christians in contradistinction to the Muslims who dominate their country and whose heavy-handed treatment of the non-Arabic, non-Islamic minorities have caused them to flee (2001: 43).

Another factor could be the fact that the official language of Uganda is English, and refugees acknowledging themselves as such tried to find ways to accommodate themselves in a new environment where the general conditions were already harsh for them (Reyes 2010).

As we can see, past and present; the homeland left behind and arrival in the new one; old conflicts and potential new ones; the label of refugee and the existence, or not, of refugee policies; the experience of the interval between flight and relocation and of living in refugee camps; the power dynamics between refugee minorities and majorities, or intergroup relations, all these temporally and spatially variable contexts are ultimately those which constitute the general one: that of forced migration. As might be expected, Reyes’ theoretical insights certainly implied methodological consequences.

From one Locality to Multi-Sited Fieldwork

In this section, and due to the temporally and spatially restricted character of Reyes’ research in Uganda, I will primarily refer to her lengthy research with Vietnamese refugees. Lacking past ethnomusicological examples, as in the case of her urban ethnomusicological research with Hispanos and Black Americans in East Harlem, Reyes once again had to invent a pioneering fieldwork strategy:

Because the full story of the Vietnamese exodus is extremely complicated, involving huge numbers of people and many different paths to resettlement, and because critical differences between forced and voluntary migrants become crystallized in the interim periods between departure and resettlement, I chose to trace the Vietnamese journey along a trajectory that begins from a camp of first asylum, proceeds to a refugee processing camp, and ends with resettlement in the United States (Reyes 1999a: xv).

Between 1983 and 1984, Reyes arranged visits to two different types of refugee camps in the Philippines. Of course, these were not the only camps or the only country where Vietnamese refugees were initially hosted. The conducting of fieldwork in refugee camps had implications with governments and institutions such as the UNHCR, and thus certain difficulties emerged with respect to gaining access to them. Reyes managed to get this access only in the Philippines. She further organized her fieldwork data by relating all the context-related factors – those referring to refugee camps – to her documentation of musical instruments; performance contexts; spaces for rehearsal; informal and formal music-making; musical genres and idioms; repertoires; and, finally, patterns that came out of ethnographic interviews, such as the individual and collective evaluation of musical content and classification criteria for songs, based on accounts of residents of the camp (Reyes 1999b).

In 1990, Reyes added to her fieldwork the region of Orange County, California, where the largest part of the U.S. Vietnamese community was resettled. There Reyes had the chance to follow up on some of the refugees she met in the Philippines. In the years until 1993, she revisited the camps in the Philippines, and she also managed to visit Vietnam.

Reyes’ ten years of research, from the urban context to the refugee camps and back, certainly widened the perspective of ethnomusicological research in methodological terms. It resembled to a great degree what George Marcus conceptualized in the 1990s as multi-sited ethnography:

Multi-sited research is designed around chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositions of locations in which the ethnographer establishes some form of literal, physical presence, with an explicit, posited logic of association or connection among sites that in fact defines the argument of the ethnography (Marcus 1995: 105).

In logistic terms, however, this type of research required demanding resources and thus substantial institutional support.

On a theoretical, methodological, and moral level, music research in refugee camps was a completely new field in ethnomusicology, and that could mean certain restrictions and a large amount of experimentation. In the face of all these difficulties, Reyes did not hesitate to proceed and to reveal new perspectives for ethnomusicological research.

The Relevance of Adelaida Reyes’ Work

Reyes’ pioneering role in the development of the key concepts of both urban ethnomusicology and ethnomusicological research in contexts of forced migration is recognized by many renowned ethnomusicologists. Bruno Nettl, even though he had conducted research in urban contexts prior to Reyes, refers to her when discussing the impact of urban studies on ethnomusicology, noting that “the special character of cities began to be taken for granted as an object of study” (2005: 286). In their introduction to the second edition of the book Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology, which constitutes a groundbreaking contribution towards a critical and post-modern ethnomusicology, Gregory F. Barz and Timothy J. Cooley also mention Reyes as being a pioneer of a “domestic urban-focused fieldwork” (2008a: 13) that paved the way for research “at home.” In the introduction to an issue dedicated to music and migration of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, John Baily and Michael Collyer (2006) describe Reyes as the herald of urban ethnomusicology and position her research with refugees as the first example in that field.¹⁵ Speaking as the editor of a special issue on music and migration of the Migrações Journal, Maria de São José Côrte-Real (2010) praises Reyes’ article of 1979, “Ethnic Music, the Urban Area, and Ethnomusicology,” as having had a great impact on subsequent research in urban settings as well as with migrants and refugees. Timothy Rice also refers to Reyes as one of the earliest scholars who delved into “the study of music in times and places of trouble” (2014: 193) and particularly in relation to war and displacement. To develop a theory for the study of music of minorities in Vienna, Austria, Ursula Hemetek (2015) drew extensively on Adelaida Reyes’ work, also recognizing her crucial role in bridging urban ethnomusicology and minority concepts.¹⁶

In her most recent article, “The Beneficence and the Tyranny of Paradigms: Kuhn, Ethnomusicology and Migration,” published in the collective publication Ethnomusicology Matters (Hemetek, Kölbl, and Sağlam, eds. 2019), Reyes refers to the importance of human agency in the production of knowledge, as well as in the maintenance or rejection of the scientific paradigms employed for that purpose. Certain shifts in scientific paradigms have resulted from specific choices made by scholars testing the validity of well-established theories and methods. Reyes’ decision to entangle herself in unexplored fields, first the music of the city and then music and forced migration, was an expression of her awareness of her own agency. By asking what happens to music within chaotic, complex, unstable, and heterogeneous social conditions – something outside the scope of early ethnomusicology – Reyes simultaneously asked whether ethnomusicology as a scholarly field can adapt in these conditions, and whether it can serve its declared purpose: to generate knowledge about music as meaning, sound, and human behavior in any given social and cultural context. She contributed in this way to a paradigm shift with subsequent intellectual consequences.

As Reyes proved through her work, urban ethnomusicology and research in contexts of forced migration demanded an intense intellectual exchange with other disciplines. Interdisciplinarity fostered alternative perceptions of ethnic, migrant, and minority groups and of the role of music in certain interactions, identifications, and socio-political goals. By basing their results on fieldwork methods, studies in sociology and anthropology showed that identities and cultural behaviors result from relational processes between groups and are not inherent characteristics. Asymmetrical power dynamics between groups also play a major role in the creation, attribution, and experience of labels. Musical meaning and musical identification, then, rather than emerging from stable cultural traits, started to be perceived as process, constantly shaped and reshaped within systems of relations and power. Ethnomusicological research in the cities also shed light upon the role of music in the experience of migration, which is acknowledged to be one of the most essential factors in the increase in urban populations. Drawing on refugee studies, Reyes further suggested that for the study of the music of migrants labeled as refugees, it is not enough to take an approach that perceives music merely as a cultural object transplanted from one site, the homeland, to another, the countries that accommodate those refugees. This brought about, on the one hand, a widening of research sites from cities to refugee camps, and on the other, the examination of certain musical factors with regard to their political implications for the refugees, internationally and locally. Reyes proceeded with multi-sited fieldwork, including refugee camps and cities where refugees rebuilt their lives.

Brimming with heterogeneity, the refugee camps became the sites where certain theories and methods of urban ethnomusicology could be further applied. Localities, the architecture of the camps, interactions between heterogeneous groups, psychological factors, political ideologies, and power relations were all variables that influenced musical responses by refugees. Through her empirical study, Reyes showed that the musical expressions of forced migrants are dependent on certain expectations, sentiments, and attitudes shared between refugees and their surrounding societies, as well as other minority groups. Power relations and experiences of discrimination were considered as crucial in informing musical identifications, innovation, and meaning in general. Reyes finally showed that what differentiates forced migrants from the general category of migrants is a constant negotiation with the conditions that forced them to leave, and with the society left behind – the shadow majority. Even when conflicts calmed down, as Reyes showed, imagined constructions of a longed-for homeland continued to find expression in music. These are only some of the insightful concepts Reyes offered to ethnomusicology with her committed and pioneering research. The extent to which this research – and paradigm shift – had a broader influence or was influenced by parallel developments in ethnomusicology is nevertheless a subject of further discussion.

Reyes’ Scholarly Work and the Critical Turn of Ethnomusicology

During the 1980s, the decade Reyes developed her fieldwork with Vietnamese refugees, a new wave of critical thought around ethnographic disciplines emerged within the humanities and social sciences in the U.S. Influenced by post-colonial and feminist studies, as well as by the philosophical trend of phenomenology, this critical turn, known as the crisis of representation, put established theoretical and methodological ethnographic concepts under scrutiny as reproducing colonial and other oppressive structures (see Barz and Cooley 2008b). Ethnomusicologists were called to recognize themselves as being power holders, not only due to their academic positions and their access to and support from western knowledge systems, but also due to the social and of course gender identities and ideologies they applied while carrying out research with people with less power, or different systems of knowledge.

According to Barz and Cooley (2008a), the reaction by ethnomusicologists to these theoretical and political insights was multifarious. Some of them developed self-reflexive approaches. They started to represent themselves critically within the cultural contexts they studied – as social actors among other actors – and to reflect in their writing not only on music but also on their social and epistemological positions. Secondly, there was a gradual shift towards the study of musical realities “at home,” with researchers studying their own communities or conducting research in familiar settings as natives. A third reaction dealt with the problem of the partiality of the researcher’s direct experience and perception of reality. The response to this was the inclusion of collaborative and dialogic research methods, research participants becoming active interlocutors not only during fieldwork but also throughout the process of the transcription, analysis and classification of the ethnographic data. Finally, to answer the ethical and political questions that emerge within research with people facing discrimination, poor living conditions, a lack of healthcare, social insecurity, war, and other traumatic experiences, there has been an attempt by some ethnomusicologists to use the channel of applied ethnomusicology. This ever-growing branch of today’s ethnomusicology proposes that the knowledge produced, and the relationships built within collaborative fieldwork, should be “applied” in the form of music-centered interventions within society, towards fighting structural injustices and solving concrete social problems (Pettan 2015). Did Adelaida Reyes’ scholarly work play a role in all these recent ground-breaking transitions?

Adelaida Reyes was not overly concerned with conducting self-reflexive ethnography. In her research with refugees, we rarely encounter references to her own positionality, except that of being an academic-ethnomusicologist from a migrant background living in the U.S. Second, although her historical, theoretical, and fieldwork accounts of Vietnamese refugees’ music are very descriptive and analytical, revealing power relations and hierarchies between groups in reference to their musical and cultural expressions, the subject refugee appears most of the time as being gender-neutral. We learn about gender, class, and other classifications mainly through the employment of demographic data, rather than through critical ethnographic discussion. Third, even though Reyes’ urban ethnomusicology was a herald of contemporary ethnomusicology at home, this was not developed by her in reference to broader critical reflections on the colonial legacy of ethnomusicology. Certain ramifications of this legacy, though, such as the treatment of migrants and other minority groups as not native to the urban context, and exclusively linked to rural-folk musics, were recognized by Reyes (2009) with respect to methods and theories applied in urban research prior to her own. Finally, even though Adelaida Reyes (1999a: 2–3) found possibilities for empowerment and psychological relief in the music-making of forced migrants, her research projects did not seek to apply the knowledge produced in socio-political interventions.

Reyes belonged to a generation of ethnomusicologists who were more concerned with improving the received intellectual tools of their discipline rather than submitting them to a fundamental critique in the light of the so-called crisis of representation. Though she challenged various aspects of the approach established by the founding generation of SEM, she did not question it as a whole. Her employment of Kuhn’s approach to the shifting of scientific paradigms is a signifier that until her recent article Reyes was not interested in disengaging herself from a scientific approach to ethnomusicology, as other ethnomusicologist were doing, especially from the 1980s on. The shifting of paradigm in her scholarly work takes place, then, within a wave of thought that precedes the critical turn of ethnomusicology. Reyes was a pioneer scholar in the sense of pushing the modern premises of ethnomusicology – the study of music in a cultural context, the study of the music of any group of people, and the study of music using fieldwork methods – to their limits. Today, ethnomusicological research in the cities has become a commonplace, and this we owe largely to Reyes’ pioneering approach, while her research with refugees addressed a huge range of theoretical and methodological issues, so that her work today is an essential reference in any similar ethnomusicological endeavor.

Ethnomusicology and Forced Migration at the Turn of the Century

Between 1975, the year of the publication of Reyes’ dissertation, and 2019, when her latest article on the shifting paradigms in ethnomusicology was published, there was a period of forty-four years of constant presence in academic journals, in conferences and other public events, in groups of international scholarly exchange, such as the ICTM’s Study Group on Music and Minorities, where Reyes was a leading member, and at various academic departments in the U.S., Europe and Asia where she offered lectures.¹⁷ Reyes continuously persisted in developing her concepts, fleshing them out with new insights, reaching a point where she could ask: “Will ethnomusicology take the forced migration crises and the inevitable (re)creation or (re)construction of musical life no longer as an extravagance that we can do without, but as an occasion for much-needed retooling” (Reyes 2019: 48)?

Throughout these years, the statistics show that the numbers of forcibly displaced people around the world have increased.¹⁸ In response to aid needs, whole new sectors of the economy have emerged in various host countries. In many cases, refugee movements have become a matter of political manipulation, and people’s needs are very often used for geopolitical interests.

In the EU, particularly after the mass migration movement of 2015, refugees became a daily topic in the media. The pictures of the dead bodies of refugees that were displayed ever more frequently did trigger humanitarian and other collective responses by civil society, but they also started to become commonplace. They were lost in the flux of information. Right-wing politicians gained power by promoting threatening narratives around refugees, thus fostering existing xenophobic attitudes within society. In countries such as Greece, refugee camps are deliberately kept in a miserable condition by local authorities, so as to discourage new forced migrants from crossing the borders. Finally, although not a homogeneous group, refugees are so marked by border policies and violence, institutional labeling, and aid policies, by social and political attitudes and media representations, that even when some of them are technically no longer labeled as such, the label and its consequences haunt them forever.

Within this reality, many ethnomusicologists around the world have faced a variety of problems. Researchers have had to leave areas where they conducted fieldwork because of coups or the eruption of wars. In order to continue their research, they had to follow the trajectories of musicians who had also become refugees (Baily 2017). Sometimes ethnomusicologists had to leave their own countries because of conflicts, or they returned to conflict zones to try to find ways to combine ethnomusicological research with confronting hate and ameliorating the suffering caused by war (Pettan 2015). In other cases, ethnomusicologists were just confronted with the fact that partners in their research projects were themselves arriving in their (the ethnomusicologists’) own countries within the mass refugee movements (Rasmussen et al. 2019).

Research in refugee camps and research in cities and countries where refugee groups are resettled became inextricable in some respects. Ethnomusicologists not only started to be ever more interested in the emerging refugee realities in ethnomusicological terms, posing questions about music and forced migration, but also looked at what was happening to the refugees themselves. The harsh realities in refugee camps and the difficulties met throughout the process of refugees’ resettlement further raised moral implications that ethnomusicologists were called to answer. At the end of the 1990s, the newly emerging branch of applied ethnomusicology began to produce some tangible results (Pettan and Titon 2015). Applied research with refugees contributed in many instances towards shifting racist narratives, counter-balancing power dynamics, providing moral and psychological support, and creating a more fertile ground for the mutual integration of newcomers and host societies into new cosmopolitan urban realities.

Certain research projects had cross-cultural interactions and growth in mutual understanding as an outcome through the sharing of ethnomusicological knowledge between refugees and the societies of their new environments (Hemetek 2015; Pettan 2015; Sweers 2015). Other research projects on music in relation to border and migration policies involved activist intervention for the improvement of refugees’ living conditions, free movement across borders, and active citizenship (Shao 2016; Caruso 2017; Impey 2019; Christidis 2020; Western and Al Kabbani 2020). Some researchers entered refugee camps or reception centers as volunteers, trying to contribute with their music, listening and fieldwork skills to psychological relief (Willson 2019; Pistrick 2020), while others employed fieldwork results to confront hegemonic, xenophobic, and Islamophobic political discourses (Kölbl 2018; Präger 2018) or to provide data for policy making and/or social adaptation processes (Prieske 2018). In other cases, research goals and the political and cultural goals of refugee communities overlapped (Posada 2016). Finally, collaborative methods of research and writing (or recording) together with refugees brought into the open, besides certain functions and meanings of music, the refugees’ experience of border violence and institutional oppression that remains invisible to the wider (academic) public (Da Lage and Hassan 2020; Frischkopf 2018).

The emphasis on interdisciplinarity is constantly vindicated. Anthropological refugee and migration studies, political science, diaspora studies, globalization studies, media studies, and gender studies play an even greater role now in the conceptualization of musical practice in contexts of forced migration. Today, in ethnomusicological research with (forced) migrants, the power of mass and digital media to enable intense circulation – and commercialization – of music, and to connect people around the world, often offering them the possibility to directly express themselves in translocal public spheres, can no longer be overlooked. Furthermore, debates around the theoretical application of labels to various types of migration are still ongoing (if not intensified). On that point, ethnomusicological research in countries where international refugee aid policies are not applied through the UNHCR framework has paved the way for a better understanding of the role of labels, local policies, and types of migration in the musical strategies employed by migrants (Öğüt 2020). Issues raised by refugees themselves with respect to their active representation in their wider – local and global – socio-political environments and networks subsequently raised questions among ethnomusicologists as to what might be the role of music in the establishment of informal models of citizenship for those excluded by the formal ones.¹⁹ Finally, the classification of gender in its relation to forced migration is perceived in contemporary research as being as important as any other, be it class, nationality, ethnicity, religion, race, or age. In music’s contribution to negotiating power, social identities, and the sense of belonging in new social environments, diverse social, class, gender, race, age, and ethnic experiences overlap and create different musical responses from different (forced) migrants (Bartulović and Kozorog 2017).

Multi-sited methods are still considered important in studying the music of dispersed groups. However, today, because digital media create ever more sites for human interaction, online fieldwork methods have become even more embedded in ethnomusicological methodology (Christidis 2020; Kölbl 2018). Moreover, the logistical issues in carrying out multi-sited field research, such as those Reyes experienced, can be surely solved by combined translocal research projects or systematic research exchange among ethnomusicologists working with similar questions in different places. The newly formed ethnomusicological study group on Music and Syrian Migration (Spring 2021), with its international orientation, is an endeavor of this kind.²⁰

In 1990, in the special issue “Music and Forced Migration” of the journal The World of Music, the first to feature forced migration as a special area of ethnomusicological research, Adelaida Reyes, the editor of the issue, wrote: “The world of refugees and those it touches – in the sending and receiving communities and in the regional and world bodies that respond to it – is rife with sentiment; and sentiment is a powerful force that gets translated into human behavior” (1990: 9). Reflecting on the applied and activist direction of today’s ethnomusicological interest in forced migration, it seems that, in general, contemporary research has become much more sentiment-driven than Reyes’ intellectual approach. If our main method, which is fieldwork, with the relationships and musical interactions inherent in it, is meant to reveal “the human face of ethnomusicology,” as Helen Myers (1992: 21) wrote, then approaching music within refugee experiences would imply, besides intellectual adaptivity, a challenging of our own emotional worlds: a transformation of our own behavior as researchers. This would mean being receptive to immersing ourselves in uncomfortable and troubled settings, taking intellectual and practical risks, reflecting on our often privileged positions and underlying misconceptions and, throughout our research, trying to find ways to document, publish, and confront injustice. In the complex and elusive world of refugees, an emotional reaction to people’s suffering can widen academic perspectives towards action and social change. However, precisely because of this fluidity and complexity, intellectual cautiousness and coherence within ethnomusicological research are equally crucial. It is in this respect that the theoretical and methodological contribution of Adelaida Reyes to a more comprehensive understanding of the role of music in the troubled conditions of forced migrants has proved priceless.

Acknowledgements

This study was produced as part of Christidis’ research at the Music and Minorities Research Center, funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): Z 352-G26.

---

1. The first graduate program in Ethnomusicology was established by ethnomusicologist Mantle Hood at the end of the 1950s, at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).↩︎

2. Motivated by her family, Reyes started to study the piano in her early childhood. In 1951, she graduated as a Bachelor in Music at St. Scholastica’s College, Manila, Philippines.↩︎

3. The term “paradigm-induced expectations” is extensively elaborated by Thomas Kuhn (1970), whose criticism of scientific intellectual constructions was adopted and further applied by Adelaida Reyes.↩︎

4. Reyes’ book Songs of the Caged, Songs of the Free: Music in the Vietnamese Refugee Experience (1999a) was given an award in 2000 by the U.S. Branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music.↩︎

5. Apart from the sociologist Richard A. Schermerhorn, other scholars quoted in Reyes’ article of 1979, who shared processional and interactional approaches to boundaries and group identifications were the anthropologists Fredrik Barth (1928–2016) and Abner Cohen (1921–2001) and the sociologists Nathan Glazer (1923–2019) and Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927–2003).↩︎

6. The article is included in the publication Glasba in manjsine / Music and Minorities (Pettan, Reyes, and Komavec 2001), which features the proceedings of the 1st international Symposium of the ICTM Study Group on Music and Minorities, that took place in 2000, in Ljubljana, Slovenia.↩︎

7. Today two more questions would necessarily be included: Why do we collect this data and how do we relate with the people whose music we study?↩︎

8. According to Reyes, the population of Vietnamese in the U. S. began to increase after 1975, that was the year of the unification of Vietnam under communist rule. This population was very heterogeneous on various bases, such as ethnicity, religion, class and educational status, among others. Additionally to that, there were distinctions among Vietnamese related to the different times they left Vietnam, something that corresponded to different experiences of forced migration and legal statuses (Reyes 1999a). Particularly after 1978, numerous Vietnamese started to flee Vietnam using boats. This increasing number of forced migrants and the death rate among the so-called “boat people” led UNHCR to declare an on-going humanitarian crisis and to undertake specific measures.↩︎

9. In her earlier articles on music in the Vietnamese refugee experience, Reyes draws on Egon F. Kunz’s (1973) article entitled, “The Refugee in Flight: Kinetic Models and Forms of Displacement,” which for the time it was written constituted a new and widely recognized approach to the phenomenon of refugees. In later articles by Reyes, among her references we can find the names of two important scholars of forced migration, those of the prominent Cuban-American sociologist Rubén G. Rumbaut, and of legal anthropologist and founder in 1982 of the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford University, Barbara Harrell-Bond (1932–2018), a very influential scholar in this field.↩︎

10. According to UNHCR, a refugee is someone who “is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion” (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees 2010: 3). The UN definition of a refugee for its member states is contained in Article 1 A (2) of the 1951 Geneva Convention, as amended by its 1967 Protocol (see UNHCR 2010).↩︎

11. UNHCR developed the idea of camps as part of a temporary protection strategy in an unavoidable emergency, especially for cases of mass flight from conflicts. Local governments and their existing or non-existing commitment to international refugee legislation play a crucial role in the types and functions of camps and in the living conditions there. In many cases around the world, however, such camps were transformed from temporary facilities to permanent makeshift towns, governed sometimes by forces autonomous from the countries in which they were built, or excluded from the legal system and system of rights applied to the general population in the wider territory of the camp. There are children born in camps who do not know any other life than that of the camp and who have no nationality. For those who exit camp life there are different possibilities according to localized contexts. Some countries offer the possibility of citizenship to refugees after some years – thus gaining full civil and political rights – while others, often under the pressure of xenophobic movements, organize repatriation campaigns to the refugees’ country of origin, even in cases where extreme violence has not abated.↩︎

12. The editors of The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies recognize Barbara Harrell-Bond as a pioneering scholar in introducing a “dual-imperative” of promoting action which is policy- and humanitarianism-directed alongside academic knowledge in the sense that: “research about refugees should be used for refugees, to uphold refugees’ rights and agency throughout processes of displacement” (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh et al. 2015: 2–3).This academic shift towards action also appeared as a distinctive trend within ethnomusicology in the beginning of the 1990s, under the broader term: “applied ethnomusicology” (see Pettan and Titon 2015).↩︎

13. In the late 1990s, the by then newly formed ICTM Study Group on Music and Minorities defined a minority as: “a group of people distinguishable from the dominant group for cultural, ethnic, social, religious, or economic reasons” (Pettan 2019: 43). The existence of a dominant group in relation to which a minority is defined and power as a key factor in this relationship is more explicit in the definition of minorities adopted by the ICTM Study Group in Vienna in 2018: “The term minority encompasses communities, groups and/or individuals, including indigenous, migrant and other vulnerable groups that are at higher risk of discrimination on grounds of ethnicity, race, religion, language, gender, sexual orientation, disability, political opinion, social or economic deprivation” (ibid.).↩︎

14. In her later research in Kampala, Uganda, Reyes focused on another category of refugees, so-called urban refugees who fled refugee camps, whether because the camps were often targets of attacks and abductions by various guerilla groups or because they just wanted to be able to move independently from the restricted way of life in the camps managed by UNHCR. However, by breaking their ties with the camp system, these refugees had to confront different kinds of issues concerning their survival in the city, from finding employment to facing interethnic acts of retribution. Reyes stresses that this type of refugee aimed at keeping a “low profile,” avoiding interaction with the local authorities and public attention (Reyes 2010).↩︎

15. Baily and Collyer (2006) attempt to explain Reyes’ devotion to urban migrant groups as related to her academic environment, that of Columbia University, characterized at that time by numerous research projects within various disciplines directed towards urban minorities.↩︎

16. Ursula Hemetek and Adelaida Reyes had been leading members of the ICTM Study Group on Music and Minorities – Hemetek as founder and Chair for almost two decades and Reyes as Secretary (2005–2011) and Vice-Chair (2011–2021). Apart from common scholarly interests, this longstanding interaction between these two scholars was motivated by shared visions and devotion concerning music and minorities research. Ursula Hemetek (2021) writes extensively on her relationship with Adelaida Reyes in an obituary published a few days after her passing away, on the website of Music and Minorities Research Center (MMRC). Reyes had also been a member of the Advisory Board of MMRC until January 2021, when she resigned for health reasons.↩︎

17. Between 1987–1997, Reyes worked as professor of music/ethnomusicology at New Jersey City University. After her retirement she was proclaimed Professor Emerita by the same institution and she continued her active involvement in the international community of ethnomusicological research on music and minorities until her recent death.↩︎

18. In 1985, the World Refugee Survey estimated the number of refugees worldwide at 10,069,700 (Reyes 1986). At the end of 2019, according to data provided by UNHCR, the worldwide number of forcible displaced people reached 75.9 million, of whom 20.4 million are refugees under the mandate of UNHCR, 5.6 million are Palestinian refugees under UNRWA’s mandate, and 4.2 million are asylum seekers.↩︎

19. In his recent article “Migration and Music” ethnomusicologist Martin Stokes (2021) discusses current debates on music and citizenship extensively.↩︎

20. The Music and Syrian Migration Study Group is an independent initiative of ethnomusicologists who study the musical experiences of Syrian migrants in various regions of the world, including, so far, Turkey, the Middle East, Europe, and North America. The group organizes regular online meetings, where research projects are presented and discussed, and provides a space for the exchange of information on relevant conferences, seminars and publications.↩︎

Author Biography

Christidis holds degrees in Architecture (2010) and Music Science and Art (2017) and plays the piano and the Middle Eastern oud. In 2019, he enrolled in a doctoral course in ethnomusicology at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. Since 2020, he is a researcher at the Music and Minorities Research Center. His work examines music in the context of forced migration from Syria to Europe. In 2020, Christidis was awarded the Dissertation Prize for Research on Migration by the Austrian Academy of Sciences.