From the Editor

Ethnomusicology has recently been revisiting the nature of cross-cultural interaction, which in its early and most basic conceptualization was about one culture acting upon another, often in the form of past colonial exploitation or present-day cultural appropriation. This issue, 52(1), participates in such revisitation by presenting four essays that address different kinds of cross-cultural interaction beyond unidirectional cultural trajectories and asymmetrical power relationships. Although the authors in this issue engage these general themes, more importantly they present a variety of complex and nuanced critiques of cross-cultural interaction. These critiques point to a multivalent dynamic informed by coexistence, complicity, reciprocity, codependence, and contestation. In contrast to the previous issue, 51(2), which foregrounded individual agency and its personages, this issue focusses on genres—Coptic hymnody, Marathi pop singing, Carnatic classical music, and American(ized) gamelan. Variety in genre and culture is further enhanced by the positionality of each author; a diversity of voices and perspectives are part of the globalization of our field.

Cross-cultural interactions are not necessarily international; they can take place between two populations within the same country. In the essay "Coptic Chant and Maqām: The Modal Heritage of a Liturgical Tradition," Nicholas Ragheb makes a case for an intranational dynamic in Egypt involving the hymnody of its Coptic Christian minority and the maqām practice of its Arabic Muslim majority. He discusses this relationship from two perspectives: the sonic historical, through shared melodic features related to maqām, and the scholarly analytical, in which younger researchers are using the modal theory of māqam to investigate Coptic melos. He raises the interesting possibility that Coptic hymnody and Arabic māqam constitute two branches of an older Egyptian ethos that existed before the introduction of Christianity and Islam into the region. Such a hypothesis assumes an underlying logic of practice that sharpens the outlines of an Egyptian identity within a general Arabic one. The relationships of the two musics are more complex than discourses on the degeneration of purity or the asymmetry of cultural power can account for. Drawing on historical documents, melodic analysis, presentday practice, new directions in scholarship, and experience as a performer of Arabic music, Ragheb frames Coptic hymnody and Arabic maqām in Egypt as having a shared coexistence. This contribution is the first on Coptic music for our journal and hopefully will increase awareness of this rich but understudied Asian tradition.

Aditi Deo provides a second example of an intranational relationship in "The Classical Khayal and Marathi Popular Music: Unpacking Music Genres and Categories in Maharashtra, India." Unpacking involves ethnicity, globalization, authority of a cultural Other, and tensions between the classical and the popular. It is further complicated by language politics; Marathi is the regional language of Maharashtra state, whereas Hindi is the lingua franca of the so-called Hindi Belt, which encompasses some eight states in India and two nations, including Pakistan. The Marathi adaptation of the highly successful British and American "Idol" television singing competitions is a case in point. For this regionalized variant, the repertory is not pop as defined by the global music industry but rather as used locally to reference a repertory best described as light classical or semiclassical. Participant discussion of criteria invokes such aspects of Hindustani classical music as ornamentation, classically derived repertory, formal training, and aesthetics. I find it an instance of complicity by Marathi practitioners for the authority of a Hindustani Other. By deliberately locating khayal outside its classical and Hindustani-centric boundaries, Deo, based in the Marathi region, argues for a more complex array of meanings for the genre in both its sonic and conceptual universes and argues for the significance of marginalized musicking—in this case, televised singing contests—to that complexity.

Rather than expressing the relationship between homeland and diasporic practitioners in terms of cultural flows, the study "Emergence of an Ecumene: Transnational Encounters in South Indian Carnatic Music" by Rajeswari Ranganathan imagines an expanded Carnatic musical universe with boundaries enfolding both groups, the ecumene of the title. The author focuses on heritage South Indian populations in the United States as performers and consumers. Ranganathan...