From the Editor

Issue 53(1) furthers our editorial intent to serve our readership through a diversity of content. The five major articles and the three reviews cover a range of geocultural areas: West Asia (Azerbaijan), South Asia (India), Southeast Asia (Burma and Timor), and East Asia (Japan, putatively Korea). Authors' voices include those of practitioners and Indigenous scholars. Although diverse in approach and focus, the major articles exhibit points of confluence concerning subject matter and conceptual themes.

Affect constitutes a major theme. Although ethnomusicology has interrogated affect from the early days of Wiora, Schneider, and Sachs, it has recently regained center stage largely because of developments in philosophy and psychology. The five authors consider affect via performance in varying degrees and in different ways. Their observations connect to other current interests in the field including reception, intertexuality, diverse subjectivities, and decentering hegemonies. Chant and song, the focus of three of the studies here, provide an added layer of complexity through text. In addition to its obvious function as a vehicle for semantic presentation, text constitutes a second mode of sonic organization, potentially independent of the primary system understood as melody, rhythm, timbre, and form. Given ethnomusicology's long stewardship of affect, I suggest that the present attention to affect from other fields recalls the adage "old wine in new bottles."

Praxis emerges as a second theme. Attention to praxis is appropriate to our present concern for voices that have been either silent or silenced; it signals the further democratization and decolonization of the field. This shift of attention acknowledges and valorizes agency vested in practitioners and their purview and authority. The empirical bias of our field privileges "ways of knowing" that reside with the practitioner performer rather than the philosopher theoretician. The authors' examination of praxis include its nature, approaches, and mechanics; their insights into praxis address the general category and genrespecific systems. They describe varying degrees of confrontation and complicity regarding external authority, including the political, social, and religious. Praxis maintains a droit d'être operationally through challenge, negotiation, selective compliance, and affirmation. It finds or creates new meanings and environments in the present informed by modernity, globalization, and technology. The articles also show that a major quality of praxis is agility.

A general assumption holds that semantic text and music organization work in tandem to attain an intended or desired affect. "Affective Hermeneutics: Love, Mugham, and Post-Soviet Azerbaijani Subjectivities" by scholarperformer Polina Dessiatnitchenko uses this interconnection to examine a specific cultural outcome, generating the emotion of intense desire for a beloved (human or divine) embodied in the concept of eşq. Focusing on intentionality, the author regards traditional pedagogy and her experience with it as critical for artistic competence in attaining eşq for the performer and the listener. Striving toward affect in contemporary Azerbaijan has political import in addition to artistic and spiritual aspirations. The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the concomitant removal of its control on social and cultural practices have led to the reinscription of ghazal performance in national and religious terms with an identity formation informed by a contemporary global environment of secular modernity. The post-Soviet return to mugham performed in intimate venues has revived communities based on affect. The voices of teachers and fellow performers present a praxis that assumes the interconnectivity if not unity of the creative and the spiritual—a praxis that the author puts forward to challenge some claims presently promulgated by affect theory.

Affect and mediatized music present challenges for Buddhist monks in Myanmar, whose Theravāda orthodoxy should prohibit contact with music. Heather MacLachlan examines the monks' dilemma of negotiating between religious sanctions and their surrounding secular soundscape in the essay "Burmese Buddhist Monks, the Seventh Precept, and Cognitive Dissonance," invoking a wealth of diverse monastic voices. The presence of music in their lives suggests a praxis of selective compliance to religious authority in which active music making is forbidden but the consumption of mediated music is tolerated and—in some cases—proactively enabled. Praxis prescribes the selection of music genres that may be tolerated, their meaning making for Burmese identity, and conditions that allow passive and mediated...