‘You are part of the club’: negotiating the field as a musician–ethnomusicologist

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the position of ethnomusicologists approaching the field with the prior lived experience of being a working/proficient musician, meeting other fellow musicians in all the complexity of each person’s multi-layered background. Within these layers, musical practice and the experience of musicking are central to the relationships created between these individuals. The various case studies put forward in the paper bring to the fore how proficient musician-researchers have used their musical skills to negotiate fieldwork, integrating it as a central part of their process. Musical ability, central to their identity as an individual, becomes an additional layer that has arguably enabled musician-ethnomusicologists to access communities on a level where the latter are able to actively work with them, assigning them roles that can satisfy both parties and lead to what is presented as ‘applied relationships’. The article makes the case that the musician-ethnomusicologist’s creative practice, while not directly leading to REF outputs and therefore remaining an unspoken activity, is intricately entwined with their research activity.