Beyond Fieldwork and Beyond an Ethnomusicological Study

I conducted ethnomusicological fieldwork with the primary goals of becoming more knowledgeable about the relationship between court songs and political life in my native kingdom and country and of documenting key aspects of its rich musical culture. However, my hard work was to result in lifelong relationships with members of my research community, advanced professional development, and a publication that is more than an ethnomusicological project. The songs featured in Interpreting Court Song in Uganda are simultaneously musical, philosophical, political, and social texts. The songs’ subject matter and accompanying stories prompt further critical engagement regarding their connections to power relations and political life in general. The notion of reimagining or recasting these songs stands at the heart of their performance, analysis, and interpretation. People—composer-performers, interpreters, analysts, researchers—and their worldviews shape the songs’ meanings and relevance as they apply new ideas to them via analysis and performance. In this vein, Interpreting Court Song in Uganda performs a reimagining or recasting of its own, as its collective analysis aims to inspire new meanings by bringing timeless lyrical themes to life in present-day contexts. The book is at once an academic text, an ethnographic work, and, importantly, a practice in storytelling, interpreting, and reimagining. Similar to the collaborative story time by the fireplace I present in the following section of this prologue, the book’s narrative captures the process of inventing new characters, new ideas, and new philosophies that germinate from the tales it tells. With this, Interpreting Court Song in Uganda challenges us to expand what constitutes an ethnomusicological study in the first place and how such a study might be produced.