The International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance is pleased to announce the 2024 prizes for Best Article, Best Book, and Best Documentary Film or Video. Details on each of the winning submissions are followed by comments from the members of the respective subcommittees.

Prize Committee: Brian Diettrich (Chair), Lee Tong Soon, Nicola Scaldaferri, Sean Williams, Sunhee Koo

Article Prize Subcommittee: Sunhee Koo (Chair), Marko Kölbl, Lawrence Witzleben

Book Prize Subcommittee: Sean Williams (Chair), Frederick Lau, Frank Gunderson, Michael Iyanaga

Documentary Film or Video Prize Subcommittee: Nicola Scaldaferri (Chair), George Murer, Patrick Alcedo

Student Paper Prize Subcommittee: Brian Diettrich (Chair), Marcia Ostashewski, Lonán Ó Briain

Best Article

Winners

Cassandre Balosso-Bardin. 2023. “The Social Production of a Mallorcan Bagpipe: Collaboration, Technology, Ecology, and Internationalization.” In Shaping Sound and Society, edited by Stephen Cottrell, 35-53. New York: Routledge.

This is an exemplary study of the social life of a musical instrument, engagingly written and meticulously researched. The details of the multi-stage craftsmanship and changes over time are fascinating, and we learn a great deal about this community, the players, and the instrument makers.

Stefan Fiol. 2022. “White Caste Supremacy and Dis/Connection in Fieldwork Encounters.” In The Routledge Companion to Ethics in Ethnomusicology, edited by Jonathan P. J. Stock and Beverley Diamond, 105–116. New York: Routledge.

In recent years, we have seen many essays on the troubled legacy of ethnographic fieldwork, but the author offers a fresh and thoughtful perspective. He draws on details of his interactions with drummers and elites and reflections on his family’s missionary legacy to address broad questions of ethics and responsibility that are relevant to all ethnomusicologists.

Best Book

Winner

Christina J. Woolner. 2023. Love Songs in Motion: Voicing Intimacy in Somaliland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

The ICTMD Book Prize Subcommittee is pleased to award the 2024 prize to Christina J. Woolner for her book, Love Songs in Motion: Voicing Intimacy in Somaliland, published by the University of Chicago Press. In focusing on a previously undocumented musical tradition in a postwar location that is challenging to access, Woolner opens the door to a fraught but beautiful tradition of singing love songs to communicate intimacy and build communitas. Love songs—“voiced and re-voiced, storied and re-storied”—are simultaneously metaphorical, heartfelt, and healing. The ways in which love songs flow across social and political boundaries—public and private, intimate and collaborative, live and recorded—places them continuously in motion. Using clear, beautiful writing, Woolner embraces the multivocal performance and content of love songs, in an Islamic environment where gender equality is not always a given, with scholarly analysis and ethnographic rigour. We offer our warmest congratulations to Dr. Woolner, and to the Somali people with whom she works.

Honourable Mention

Stéphane Aubinet. 2022. Why Sámi Sing: Knowing Through Melodies in Northern Norway. New York: Routledge.

The Book Prize Subcommittee is also delighted to award an Honourable Mention to Stéphane Aubinet, for his book, Why Sámi Sing: Knowing Through Melodies in Northern Norway, published by Routledge. In this fascinating work that foregrounds Indigenous ways of encountering melody, Aubinet focuses attention on the yoik as its own unique type of epistemology, simultaneously of both the natural world and the Sámi, while facilitating communication in the present. This book elegantly explores the many ways in which the yoik—and the yoiker—can engage animals, landscapes, non-humans, and the past, through the power of a living melody, bringing them into a type of felt presence that transcends boundaries. The members of the committee congratulate Dr. Aubinet, together with the Sámi communities, on their excellent work.

Best Documentary Film or Video

Winner 

Shan Du. 2024. Devagan. 66 minutes.

Devagan is a rich exploration of the Nava Durgā performance —a Hindu music and dance tradition—among the Newar people of the city of Bhaktapur, Nepal. Based on careful ethnographic research, it joins together elements of local mythology in its narration. The film astutely brings to the screen complexities of fieldwork research, including the filmmaker’s positionality in the culture she participated in and observed. Such complexities are convincingly resolved in a filmic narrative which shows solid technical mastery and a keen sense of cross-cultural understanding.

Honourable Mention

Petr Nuska. 2023. Hopa lide. 89 minutes.

The film is devoted to the lives of Romani musicians in Slovakia. The author portrays the pluralities and fluid nature of their musical activities, challenging stereotypes about them, and intimately recounting their musical experiences and quotidian lives. Guided by an innovative use of observational approach, Hopa lide is a collaborative film that breaks conventional moulds for ethnographic inquiry. This film beautifully coalesces into an original and fascinating portrait of musical practices on the move.