Where community music and applied ethnomusicology meet in theory and practice

Community music presents an ontological challenge for ethnomusicologists. The trouble can be traced back to Dykema’s 1916 claim that “community music is socialized music” (quoted in Veblen, 2013, p. 2). The difficulty arises because most ethnomusicologists would find it hard to imagine any form of music that is not somehow socialized. Ethnomusicology as a field has built itself around the idea that musical sounds and the societies that produce them are inseparably interconnected. Although community music has expanded considerably since Dykema’s time and now includes a wide range of practices, picking out certain strands of music-making as “socialized” and—by implication—others as separate from their social surroundings feels uncomfortable for an ethnomusicological perspective.

“Community music is not a kind of music; rather it is all kinds of music.” (MENC, 1950, p. 10, original emphasis)

Ethnomusicologists would largely agree with this declaration from the National Association for Music Education from 1950.

Yet the two domains share a great deal of common ground. Kari K. Veblen (2013) observed that community music scholars are “documenting interfaces and interconnections between social cultures and musical cultures, as they mirror, shape, and reflect each other” (pp. 5–6). Ethnomusicologists would be at home with such phrasing, hearing echoes of John Blacking (1973), who forcefully argued for the link between musical patterns and social structures—between “humanly organized sound” and “soundly organized humanity.”

Both fields also share a history of rethinking their own boundaries. Ethnomusicology has been notably characterized by repeatedly shifting definitions over roughly 150 years. It began as comparative musicology in the late nineteenth century, concentrating on what were then labelled “exotic” musics, usually studied through the then-new recording technologies of the wax cylinder and gramophone. This approach seen as a laboratory-based, “scientific” enterprise aimed at comparing decontextualized sound patterns, especially against the familiar sounds of Western classical music.

Beginning in the 1940s, ethnomusicology drew closer to anthropology and started focusing on music within its social contexts, aiming to understand the meanings that individuals and groups attach to their sounds. This evolution produced definitions such as “the study of music in culture”, “the study of music as culture” (Merriam, 1977, pp. 202, 204), and later “the study of people making music” (Titon, 1992, p. 24). These later formulations purposefully widened the field, shifting attention away from specific styles or geographic regions toward human music-making of all kinds. Helen Phelan (2008) found a similar spectrum in community music, noting that some definitions “may view all music-making as Community Music” (p. 145). Ethnomusicology and community music clearly have deep affinities.

These overlaps reflect the broader diversification of music studies since the 1980s. The field has grown more fragmented and heterogeneous, welcoming many different approaches to a wide array of musics rather than concentrating on the Western classical canon and score-based philological methods. Researchers who could fairly be called ethnomusicologists now study symphony orchestras (Baker, 2014; Cottrell, 2004; Ramnarine, 2011), and musicologists increasingly adopt ethnographic methods (Bayley, 2011; Clarke et al., 2005). This is not to argue that all contemporary music research is automatically ethnomusicology—despite Nicholas Cook’s suggestion (2008) that “we are all ethnomusicologists now” (p. 526)—but ethnographic approaches are commonplace, and scholars from apparently different backgrounds often overlap significantly in what they do.

Given this heterogeneity, it figures that many studies could be labelled either—or both—ethnomusicological and community music oriented. Examples from those more aligned with community music include Stephen J. Messenger’s (2013) work on sharing and community-building among online jamband fans, which aligns with René Lysloff’s (2003) research on music composition through software mods. Preservation and promotion of folk traditions described by Karlsen, Westerlund, Partti, and Solbu (2013) for Scandinavia, or by Shiobara (2011) for Japan’s nagauta, look similar to the studies of east Asian cultural heritage in Keith Howard’s (2012) volume Music as Intangible Cultural Heritage. The participatory act of choral singing appears in Mary Copeland Kennedy’s (2009) study of the Gettin’ Higher Choir and Caroline Bithell’s (2014) research on the natural voice movement. Some International Journal of Community Music articles are explicit about using ethnomusicological heritage and methods (Balandina, 2010; Jones, 2014).

Subtle differences in purpose and intervention

With such apparent overlaps, what distinguishes the two sub-fields? Until recently a useful answer would have been that practitioners in each area had different ideas about the impact they wished to have. Community music practitioners deliberately aim to reshape musical behaviour; their work tends to be interventionist and proactive, bringing groups together to spark desired changes in both music-making and wider understandings. The Community Music Activity Commission (part of the International Society for Music Education) states its goal is to “enhance the quality of life for communities [and] encourage and empower participants to become agents for extending and developing music in their communities.”

In contrast, ethnomusicologists have traditionally been more careful about such overt intervention. Comparative musicology (up to the 1950s) aimed at detached observation. Even after participant-observation from anthropology became standard ethnomusicological practice, a sense remained that “observation” still dominated “participation”—echoing Clifford Geertz’s (1973) remark that anthropologists read cultural texts “over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong” (p. 452).

More recently ethnomusicologists have acknowledged that their research always has an impact on the communities involved, whether deliberate or not. Since the mid-1980s, there has been more reflection on these effects (Barz & Cooley, 2008). Some writers address the inevitable unintended consequences of fieldwork, such as the lasting influence of field relationships on both researcher and research subjects (Hellier-Tinoco, 2003). Alongside this, a particular strain of ethnomusicology now deliberately uses music to shape attitudes or behaviour in the societies whose music is being studied. This is commonly called “applied ethnomusicology”—though terms such as “engaged ethnomusicology,” “participatory action,” and “advocacy” also appear. Daniel Sheehy (1992) described applied ethnomusicology as starting with “a sense of purpose” that leads to “an implacable tendency first to see opportunities for a better life for others through the use of music knowledge, and then immediately to begin devising cultural strategies to achieve those ends” (pp. 324–325). Examples include HIV/AIDS work in Africa (Barz, 2006; Buren, 2010), conflict-resolution music projects (Pettan, 2010; Sweers, 2010), and adult education or amateur music-making contexts (McIntosh, 2013; Bithell, 2014).

Because community music practitioners also aim for and implement cultural strategies to better lives through music, the line between community music and applied ethnomusicology is extremely blurred. Calling a project “ethnomusicological” or “community music” can reflect institutional affiliations, disciplinary networks, and ideological stances more than major qualitative differences. It can affect funding opportunities and academic standing classification but may matter little to those actually involved on the ground.

Still, distinct inflections between the two areas remain.

Community music	Applied ethnomusicology
Historically a reaction against formal music education, focused on lifelong learning; more recently taken up in universities	Historically grounded in university research (with archives and libraries), with occasional engagement in educational settings beyond
Historically focused on Euro-American settings but expanding to other music cultures	Historically concentrated on music outside Euro-American traditions
Often backed by public sector organisations, NGOs, and the like	Occasionally involved with NGOs and public sector groups’
Proactively develops local community music, empowering people to initiate new music-making	Uses music-making to address issues beyond the musical (including health, legal, or ethical) alongside fostering individual empowerment
Growing theoretical basis built on extensive prior practice	Massively applying previously developed theoretical ideas

The following section by Angela Impey investigates community music and applied ethnomusicology in South Africa, particularly through one specific archiving project, to demonstrate their intersections as well as the practical or ethical difficulties arising in such cross-cultural work.

Community music in South Africa

If one defining mark of community music is the creation of public programs for amateur music-making that improve social engagement and well-being, then such music has really been performed in South Africa for several centuries. Christian missionaries were especially active in establishing choirs to attract converts from African societies. Four-part harmony was seen as a way to instil European virtues such as precision, restraint, and cooperation. Such initiatives were part of a wider colonial project framing self-improvement along Western ways, linking to larger changes involving westernization, urbanisation, and class differentiation. As Erlmann (1994) suggested in his examination of the first semi-professional Black South African choir to tour overseas (1891–1892): “To sing in a choir, to play the harmonium or the piano was to submit proof of one’s place in a civilized community” (p. 169).

For many South Africans, religious choirs were an opener for other musical ventures. By fusing liturgical repertoire with parts of traditional African musics plus foreign (often African American) song and dance, these groups expressed new cosmopolitan desires and a political vision centred on freedom, democracy, and civil rights (Giddy & Detterbeck, 2005; Lucia, 2008; Olwage, 2006). Today community choirs remain among the most popular musical activities across the country; thousands gather for weekly practices and prominent, often sponsor-backed regional and national competitions.

More recent developments target disadvantaged youth in open dialogue on critical social, economic, and health matters, especially HIV/AIDS and poverty. Many of these low-cost makeshift projects have a being semi-therapeutic approach, using songwriting or instrument teaching as tools for creative self-expression, partly to handle the outcomes of social exclusion. Many partner with hospitals, churches, prisons, or NGOs, and some are linked to schools or universities that bring music education to people who could not otherwise access it. Three projects stand out as examples: UKUSA, founded in 1987 by the well-known educator Elizabeth Oehrle under some of the social tension marking apartheid. It began in a shed at a derelict Durban train station, with around fifty students and three staff gradually became a full bridging programme affiliated with the University of KwaZulu‑Natal’s School of Music since 1989, offering weekend classes in theory (Broad levels preparatory 1–11 and, within depth, specialist classical diploma, but also maskanda guitar (Zulu style), from which contributions traditional and popular shaping of newer bands creative outpour would matter.
UKUSA typically reflects the overlapping lenses all use view to take advantage of cultural settings.

The Fieldband Foundation (FBF) is a nonprofit that trains and manages brass bands across South Africa, numbering about 4,000 members nationwide. The FBF works mainly in communities suffering from severe poverty, unemployment, and social disruption; its mission is to employ music to improve economic, social, physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. Targeting young people aged 7 to 21, it aims to use music and dance as vehicles for life-skills development that enhance employability and economic prospects. The FBF incorporates rhythmic and stylistic elements of African music and dance, blending traditional, gospel, classical, popular, and jazz elements into a varied and continuously evolving repertoire. Many FBF tutors are long-standing brass-band members whose leadership abilities have been identified and cultivated, serving as champions or role models whose role is to foster a welcoming musical environment that encourages individual and community aspirations and broadens visions of the future.

MusicWorks is a small Cape Town–based NGO that has offered Early Child Development (ECD) and “Music for Life” sessions in the townships of Heideveld, Lavender Hill, Langa, and Nyanga since 2002. Its mission is to create a safe space for children living under the persistent threat of emotional and physical violence arising from poverty, substance abuse, and gangsterism, with the added hope that these interventions may positively shape the broader psychosocial fabric of their communities. A multilingual team of music therapists and local community musicians/developers operates the organization, applying music therapy principles to meet each community’s specific needs. Social, cognitive, and emotional development is encouraged through instrumental improvisation, singing, musical storytelling, songwriting, and movement. To ensure programme sustainability, MusicWorks partners with communities, schools, care centres, and hospitals in every area where it works, also offering training and mentoring in “Music for Life” and ECD for practitioners, teachers, and young people who want to lead their own children’s musical sessions.

Community music or ethnomusicology? Reflections on a community music archiving initiative in a South African UNESCO World Heritage site

This section discusses a project different from those described above, which emphasized social change through musical performance. Running from 1998 to 2004 in the iSimangaliso Wetlands Park in KwaZulu-Natal, it focused on archiving musical practices to achieve broader social and environmental goals. Drawing on ethnomusicological research methods and on aims more commonly associated with community music, the case study reveals practical overlaps between these two approaches.

The iSimangaliso Wetlands Park lies along South Africa’s north-east coast, covering roughly 330,000 hectares of grassland savanna, wetlands, and coastal dune forests. Celebrated for its remarkable biodiversity, the Park became South Africa’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999, only five years after the country’s first democratic elections. While this global recognition was welcomed, the conservation objectives imposed for World Heritage sparked vigorous public debate about how best to address the critical livelihood needs of people living within park boundaries. Most of this controversy centred on the Dukuduku Forests in the Park’s southern section. Known as the last remaining indigenous coastal forest on the southeast African seaboard, Dukuduku had long served as a refuge for people escaping persecution. But its once tiny, scattered population had exploded in the years before the 1994 elections as groups fleeing political violence and extreme poverty arrived, causing deep concern among conservationists over potential destruction.

My work in the iSimangaliso Wetlands Park began when most of the “illegal” forest dwellers had agreed to relocate to Khula Village nearby. Although the settlement showed some signs of permanence—basic roads, schools, churches—many lingering tensions threatened stability. Ongoing leadership disputes and acting chiefs’ favouritism towards their kin when distributing the economic benefits of new developments added to the strain. The loss of access to arable land and the forests’ natural resources also worsened the anxieties of families who could barely meet their basic needs.

To address the area’s extreme poverty, several NGOs formed to stimulate income generation, particularly by capitalizing on the growing tourism industry that the World Heritage designation had sparked. The Dukuduku Tourism and Development Association (DTDA) approached me to conduct a baseline survey of Khula Village’s cultural assets and assess local musicians’ competence for developing a cultural tourism programme. From the start, I doubted that cultural research directed solely at tourism would serve residents’ long-term needs. Because the settlement was new and comprised disparate groups, it became clear that residents knew very little about each other; despite most being Zulu-speaking, their sense of “community” was little more than a shared location and mutual interest in the area’s economic resources.

Unsure where to begin, I contacted the headmaster of the local high school, which sat at the village centre and served as a social hub. When I explained my interest in meeting local musicians, he was deeply sceptical. In his view, people were too preoccupied with rebuilding their lives to think about music, and certainly had not had time to form formal isicathamiya or ingoma troupes of the kind typical of area cultural tourism. Nevertheless, he promised to discuss my survey with his staff and students and invited me to return for a school concert. Although I had no interest in including polished school productions, I came back as suggested, accompanied by one of my PhD students from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, a skilled percussionist who had recently arrived from Brazil.

The concert, which featured two hastily assembled choirs, was uncomfortably formal and seemed to last for hours. Just as we were preparing to leave, a community member stepped forward and offered to play a song on his guitar. Dressed like a pop star with a headband and scarves around his upper arms, his instrument covered in colourful stickers, he launched into a flashy yet shaky rendition of a Kenny Rogers country song. Students tried to stifle their giggling, and the staff watched awkwardly. Suddenly my Brazilian student jumped up, grabbed the reco-reco he always carried in his rucksack, joined the guitarist, and with sharp, distinctive rhythmic scraping instantly enlivened the song. The children screamed with delight. They leaped up and danced, rushing forward to praise the musicians, kicking high and falling to the ground in the Zulu ngoma style. Once the duo finished, there was no stopping the students. Groups hurried to perform isicathamiya and gospel songs; a few senior boys disappeared into the nearby forest and returned with branches to demonstrate traditional stick fighting. Headmaster Nomandla was astonished: “I had no idea they still knew these things”, he shouted over the music and laughter. “Today you have shown us something about ourselves! We need to encourage these activities. Our children need to remember their culture!”

Thus began Azibuye Emasisweni (“Let them bring back our culture”), a student-led archiving initiative that aimed to link research on cultural practices in Khula Village with knowledge about land, natural resources, and senses of place. The project rested on two related convictions. The first held that culture is as much a part of a World Heritage landscape as its fauna, flora, and marine resources, and that the two are inextricably connected. The second proposed that while documenting environmental and cultural heritage would preserve local knowledge, its more important role was to stimulate knowledge exchange, fostering relationships between individuals and groups and mobilizing collective place-making. We also hoped this kind of community archiving would nurture an awareness of the social power of self-representation and locality among residents, leading to a stronger sense of responsibility for their cultural and environmental assets. Ultimately, it might transform residents from passive recipients of laws and prescriptions into active stakeholders.

The project’s main objectives were to:

* Build a local sound archive at Selithukukhanya High School where materials could be stored and used for classroom and public education. * Stimulate public reflection on the histories, identities, and cultural values of Khula Village’s diverse people, mainly through inter-generational knowledge exchange. * Explore local ecological knowledge, especially how land and natural resources appear in belief systems and musical practices. * Develop practical documentation skills by training students in interviewing, digital audio and video recording, and computer literacy. * Create an information base that could support local cultural tourism and the DTDA, thereby encouraging income generation in the village.

The core principle of community archiving is documenting and exploring community heritage based on local participation, control, and ownership. To meet these aims, we conceived the project as a “living library” at the high school, placed under the school librarian’s care with input from teachers and the headmaster. Locating the project in the library allowed us to frame it both as a dynamic educational initiative within the school and as a school outreach programme. The library also served as the physical space where we trained student researchers, held feedback sessions, and stored our audio-visual collection.

The archiving initiative was designed as an after-school club and initially involved ten volunteer students (aged 16 to 19) and three unemployed school leavers. It followed a documentation-reflection-action sequence using ethnomusicological approaches to documentation, collation, and analysis as the main engagement method. After a series of weekend workshops, where we refined our aims, practised recording and interview skills, and mapped the village according to places students deemed culturally and environmentally significant, the young researchers began collecting narratives, songs, and cultural information from elderly relatives and neighbours. Because Khula’s community comprised displaced people from many locations, the students focused primarily on mapping musical pathways to Khula, starting by collecting songs and stories from their home localities and linking them to where they now lived. One narrative was recorded as follows:

> “Though their physical graves are left behind, we have to collect the souls of our ancestors to our new home. When a new home is completed, you collect them by taking a branch of a tree called umLahlankosi. If it is a female ancestor, you have to collect her with a branch called umGanu. You go to their graves and you tell them: ‘Now my ancestors, I have come to collect you from this abandoned home to a new place.’ When you collect them using a car, this is what happens: You will go with a few older members of your family and at the graves you will tell each of your ancestors that you are there to collect them to a new home. From there you tell them that they must get into the car and go. Inside the car you don’t talk to anyone. If the car stops in town, and it happens that your relative comes and talks to you, you just keep your mouth shut. He will see you carrying umcansi (a small reed mat) and the branches of this tree, and he will understand.” (Baba Thethwayo, interviewed by student researcher Mduduzi Mcambi, Khula Village, April 2001)

Every two weeks we gathered to discuss materials, play interview excerpts and song recordings, and assess documentation skills. All recordings were copied and kept in a dedicated cupboard in the school library for use by any interested school community member. Students transcribed interviews so we had both aural and text-based records. Later, University of KwaZulu-Natal students translated everything into English, and the interviews (in Zulu with English translations) were bound into books for the school’s use.

Feedback and assessment were vital, and we used various communication methods to reach different audiences. We organized school events where researchers shared their materials with fellow pupils and teachers. Occasionally, elders who had already been interviewed participated in wider feedback sessions, broadening debates about cultural knowledge and its value for Khula residents. These sessions had a significant effect on some students who initially resisted discussing “these old things”; they realized they already knew much about medicinal plants, rituals, and musical practices. Bringing their stories into public discussion and giving them value boosted the project’s relevance, legitimacy, and inclusiveness, sometimes even turning contributors into active research team members.

After some years, we created a large cultural map of the village, painting, sewing, and gluing colourful materials onto a canvas that highlighted sites and activities of cultural and environmental significance. This map formed part of a school exhibition alongside photographs and cultural artefacts—baskets, grass sleeping mats, spears—drawing the wider public into conversations about historical knowledge and its relevance for the Khula community. These sessions inevitably included much singing and dancing, shifting focus from talking about culture to knowledge shared through people’s bodies and sensibilities. Although the original aim—stimulating community building and fostering cultural and environmental agency—may have been somewhat idealistic, we nonetheless achieved certain results during the six years I was involved. Most notably, we developed a sound archive at the school containing a substantial collection of songs, stories, and life histories of Khula elders, many of whom have since passed away. Rather than simply representing a cultural history of places and lives elsewhere, our emphasis on using these songs, stories, and knowledge to reflect on Khula Village’s present and future—publicly and in various forums—opened new discussions about residents’ own identities and the value of their cultural and environmental assets. This fuelled a shift in self-representation from a collection of displaced individuals to a sense of being a collective founded on diverse but mutually valuable histories and cultural backgrounds, at least within the school community and arguably more broadly.

The initiative had several notable long-term consequences. It contributed to developing the Veyane Cultural Village, which has become a meaningful source of income.

In Khula Village, support arose for establishing a place-based enterprise, with active involvement from many School of Music students and graduates. A dynamic collaboration also emerged with a youth environmental education initiative, first hosted at the school and later moving to Veyane Cultural Village. This program depends heavily on cultural knowledge to encourage locals to care for environmental resources. The venture caught the interest of a major corporate sponsor, who after seeing our modest attempt to establish a computer hub for storing materials and offering access, agreed to fund a full computer lab at the school. For a rural and severely underfunded school, this represents a rare and highly valuable educational resource.

The cases discussed here illustrate activities positioned between community music and applied ethnomusicology. UKUSA, Fieldband Foundation, and MusicWorks show typical community music involvement: rooted in local education, they emphasize building individual and collective performance skills to improve community welfare and promote social change in disadvantaged areas. However, these projects are on the African continent, rich with community music traditions, rather than in Euro-American contexts where community music has been traditionally defined. The Khula Village archiving project reflects core ethnomusicological themes of cultural heritage, identity formation both personal and communal, locality, and placemaking. Sharing and developing musical performance skills opened transformational avenues that then expanded into a different kind of undertaking: the insights these skills and embodied cultural knowlege provide help foster wider understanding of shared culture and collective experience, nurturing community identity. Thus, this work included elements from both Sheehy’s (1992) concept of applied ethnomusicology— deploying musical knowlege for societal benefit—and the community music aspiration to improve quality of life through music-making.

Clear common ground exists between activities labelled community music and those called applied ethnomusicology. Both fields intentionally step into the musical traditions of others, for specific purposes and often with outcomes the practitioners intend to be beneficial—and these aims are generally admirable. These interventions, when missing care, regardless of being initiated from outside—by national or global bodies, ethnomusicologists, or community music facilitators—run the risk of appearing as imposed ideologies instead of musical practices grown from within.

Ethnomusicologists have a longer record grappling with these ethical issues than do community music practitioners, and they often claim that their contribution derives from an ethnographic principle of “deep listening” and from grasping the meanings tied to sound systems in their existing cultural contexts. Community music supporters could respond by saying they typically work deeper in the cultural settings themselves, so they do not face as large a cultural divide and therefore misunderstand less. Regardless of stance on this debate, the ongoing work in both spheres confirms the renewal of music scholarship since the 1980s in multiple facets, and speaks to a general trend toward socially engaged practice throughout the field.

Reflective questions

1. Where do applied ethnomusicology projects and community music programs share features?
2. How do the separate backgrounds of ethnomusicology and community music affect present practice?
3. How do organizational and disciplinary frameworks that shape both fields steer the approaches of scholars and practitioners?
4. Are ethnomusicology and community music converging more strongly or drifting apart?
5. What ethical issues emerge when someone proactively interacts with another culture’s music-making?

Additional sources Campbell, P. S., & Higgins, L. (2015). Intersections between ethnomusicology, music education, and community music. In S. Pettan & J. T. Titon (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology (pp. 638–667). New York: Oxford University Press.

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Notes

1. For further background on comparative musicology and ethnomusicology's relationship, see Nettl and Bohlman (1991).
2. ISME Community Music Activity Commission (CMA). Retrieved from ISME website (https://www.isme.org/our-work/commissions-forum/community-music-activity-commission-cma). See also contributions to the Ethnomusicology Forum special issue on Fieldwork Impact, Issue 1 (2003).
3. A terminological overview in this area appears in Dirksen (2012).
4. Thanks to Professor Elizabeth Oehrle for contributing to this section; see also Oehrle, Akombo, and Weldegebriel (2013).
5. Whittaker (2015) offers more details on the Fieldband Foundation's work.
6. Thanks to MusicWorks facilitator Charlotte Cripps for providing organizational information.
7. MusicWorks earned both the Mentor International Innovation Award and a Impumelelo Innovations Trust Silver Award in 2010 for groundbreaking music therapy work across Cape Flats communities. Retrieved from http://musicworks.org.za/why-music-works/about-us/
8. Formerly Greater St. Lucia Wetland Park.
9. Seventy percent of iSimangaliso Wetland Park has since been claimed by those displaced pre- and post-Apartheid.
10. This research began while I lectured at the University of KwaZulu Natal School of Music.
11. The reco-reco is a hollow Brazilian gourd instrument, one side notched, in the Latin family of "scrapers" or "rasps" played with a stick for a ratchet sound.
12. Veyane Cultural Village: http://www.veyane.co.za

Stephen Cottrell

Stephen Cottrell is Professor of Music at City University London. His research covers three linked topics: ethnographic examinations of music-making, especially Western art music; musical instrument studies, with emphasis on the saxophone; and the study of performance. His books include Professional Music-making in London (2004) and The Saxophone (2012), in addition to many peer-reviewed articles and chapters.

Angela Impey teaches ethnomusicology at SOAS, University of London. She explores music as oral history, with special focus on gender, land, and cultural citizenship in southern Africa and South Sudan. She has led numerous community arts education outreach initiatives across southern Africa and repeatedly publishes on advocacy ethnomusicology. In 2011 she established a master's program in Music in Development at SOAS that looks at music's role in promoting local interests, needs, and identities across diverse global contexts.