Toward a curatorial ethnomusicology: Designing the conditions for musical encounters

For more than a century, ethnomusicology has been grounded in fieldwork, documentation, and the interpretation of musical cultures. While these remain central to the discipline, ethnomusicologists today increasingly engage in artistic collaborations, festivals, educational programme, and community-based cultural initiatives. Although these activities are now integral to contemporary ethnomusicological practice, their conceptual significance has received comparatively little theoretical attention. This paper asks: What becomes of ethnomusicology when its work extends beyond documenting musical life to designing the conditions through which new musical encounters become possible?

Drawing upon long-term ethnographic practice in Thailand and Southeast Asia, the paper examines a series of interconnected projects, including intercultural music collaborations, university teaching, and Queer Spectrum Music, a curated festival bringing together artists from diverse musical traditions, gender identities, and social backgrounds. Rather than treating these initiatives simply as forms of public engagement or research dissemination, the paper considers them as ethnographic sites in which musical relationships, cultural negotiation, and new knowledge emerge through participation.

The paper argues that these practices reveal an expanding role for ethnomusicologists—not only as researchers who document and interpret musical cultures, but also as practitioners who intentionally design the cultural conditions within which new musical encounters may occur. From this perspective, fieldwork does not necessarily end when researchers leave a community; it may continue through the ongoing creation of contexts that enable listening, collaboration, and the emergence of new cultural relationships.

These observations suggest that an additional conceptual orientation within contemporary ethnomusicology may be emerging. For discussion, this paper refers to this orientation as Curatorial Ethnomusicology. Rather than proposing a new sub-discipline, the paper offers this concept as a vocabulary for understanding ethnomusicological practices in which curating functions as a mode of knowledge production through the design of conditions for encounter.

In relation to the conference theme Curiosity and Courage, the paper argues that curiosity involves questioning inherited assumptions about where ethnographic fieldwork begins and ends. In contrast, courage lies in recognising that ethnomusicologists may contribute not only by interpreting musical worlds, but also by helping create the conditions through which new musical worlds become possible.