Dialogue on Multimedia Resources, Music Education, and My People Tell Stories

Abstract

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us working in universities or colleges were politely encouraged to consider online delivery alongside face-to-face teaching, while emails, video calls, and social networking offered supplementary links to collaborators in the field. Since early 2020, however, we have experienced unprecedented pressures to convert our lessons into online and hybrid formats, we have rapidly familiarised ourselves with the pyrotechnics of hosting large-scale Zoom or Microsoft Teams video calls with colleagues and students, and the Internet has become our primary site for collecting ethnographic data. While we juggled the task of inspiring or at least retaining the attention of our students with maintaining our own personal health and wellbeing, these sink-or-swim conditions have distracted from essential moves to decolonise our curricula. As the first waves of the pandemic subside in places—especially in richer countries that are hoarding vaccines and accruing wealth through medical patents—longer term opportunities for blended approaches to research and teaching are beginning to appear on the horizon. The multimedia reviews section of the Yearbook for Traditional Music includes critical reviews of digital resources. Some resources are already familiar to readers (e.g., YouTube [Gidal 2008]—published when this was the website reviews section); others are more specific to geographical regions, musical cultures, or time periods (e.g., a podcast series on themusical history of northern India in the lateMughal empire [Widdess 2020]). Under the exceptional time pressures of the past eighteenmonths, I (LonánÓBriain) have tended to go to themost prominent publications and online resources in ethnomusicology when preparing a lecture on a musical culture beyond my areas of expertise. This habit deserves attention if we are tomakemeaningful steps towards greater diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the discipline. Danielle Brown (Founder and CEO of My People Tell Stories) is one person encouraging us to pause and reconsider.1 Rather than commission a review of her company’s website and multimedia resources—which I recommend to readers investigating autoethnography, storytelling in ethnomusicology, and employment for music scholars outside of academia—we had a conversation about these issues over