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I n reflecting on how we might write about Bev’s life and work in this opening text, we have chosen to let Bev’s own voice “speak” her story, rather than have us write that story. In opting for this approach, we are cognizant of the kinds of dialogic, experiential models that have increasingly inspired Bev’s own work, as well as the real value of asking deep questions, articulating alternative critical stances, and searching at the boundaries of ideas, rather than struggling to find definitive answers or the “right” story. Of great importance here, too, is Bev’s work on life stories in various research domains. In the introduction to the “Telling lives” section of Music and gender (2000), for instance, Bev notes that musicology has traditionally prioritized “telling lives” of influential figures in the Western art tradition, and goes on to observe: “More recently, we have become attuned both to the perspectives and factors that ascribe historical significance to lives and to the critical problems of ‘telling’— representing, and interpreting—the enormous complexities of human musical experience” (Moisala and Diamond 2000, 95). Along these lines, Jeff Titon emphasizes that life stories are “personal narratives” even if the story gets transferred to the written page. Titon (1980, 276) also underlines the reflexive nature of the processes surrounding this kind of research: “The storyteller trusts the listener(s) and the listener respects the storyteller, not interrupting the train of thought until the story is finished. That is not to say the listener is passive as a doorknob; he nods assent, interposes a comment, frames a relevant question; indeed, his presence and reactions 1 Beverley Diamond Life Stories, Academic Directions and Teaching, Research and Scholarly Activity robin elliott gordon e. smith ONE are essential to the story. He may coincidentally be a folklorist, but his role is mainly that of a sympathetic friend.” Aware of these contextual considerations, over a three-day period in May 2007, we had a series of conversations with Bev at her home in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Initially, we conceived of our visit with Bev and the ensuing conversations as a kind of fieldwork and, in the planning stages, we imagined them as interviews, complete with some prepared questions, a tape recorder, and even a camera. To this end, we planned six morning and afternoon sessions over Friday, Saturday, and Sunday on the following selected topic areas: (1) research and fieldwork perspectives in the 1980s, the SPINC project, Visions of sound (1994); (2) Bev’s article (for this volume) about the life and music of her partner, Clifford Crawley; (3) Bev’s life story (family, schools, musical training, university education); (4) Canadian music topics (e.g., thinking in decades: 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, etc., “Narratives in Canadian music history” [1995], Canadian music: Issue of hegemony and identity [1994], “What’s the difference? Reflections on discourses of morality, modernism, and mosaics in Canadian music” [2001], “Overview: Musical culture in Canada” in The United States and Canada, volume 8 of the Garland encyclopedia of world music [2001], etc.); (5) perspectives on fieldwork, Inuit work in the 1970s, First Nations work in the 1980s and 1990s, Sámi and other recent fieldwork, changes in ethnomusicology as a field of study over thirty years, feminist studies and music and gender, music technology; (6) teaching, university and institutional environments; collaboration with consultants, colleagues, and students; teaching and research. Significantly, the sessions turned into a collaborative ethnographic experience; they did not end up being interviews in any formal sense but rather three-way conversations with Bev’s voice as the focal point. And, needless to say, the sessions flowed into each other, and into lunches, dinners, and a visit to the recently opened provincial cultural centre, The Rooms, and another to spectacularly scenic Cape Spear, the easternmost part of North America. Reflecting back, in adopting this interactive, experiential framework we were attempting to avoid what might be called, among other things, an ethnographic “crisis of representation” (Marcus and Fischer 1986, 7–16). As it turns out, we ourselves became part of the framework, an aspect of the research we had not anticipated, and one that all three of us found inspiring and memorable. Without deliberate intent on our part, we became part of a “metaphor of dialogue,” which has influenced many ethnographers over the past two decades, stimulated in part by the writings of such scholars as Clifford, Marcus, Fischer, and Rosaldo. Referring to this shift 2 Robin Elliott and Gordon...

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