Sensing

Beverley Diamond, Memorial University of Newfoundland

The 2020 Charles Seeger Lecture will be delivered by Beverley Diamond, Professor Emerita of Ethnomusicology at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Prior to taking up the first Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Ethnomusicology at Memorial in 2002, Bev taught at York University (Toronto, 1988-2001), Queen’s University (Kingston, 1975-88), and McGill University (Montreal, 1973-75). Bev completed all her degrees, in musicology and ethnomusicology, at the University of Toronto.

A Canadian, most of Bev Diamond’s research has taken place within the country’s borders. Offering nuanced analyses in a non-polemical voice, much of her writing addresses the creative moves of musicians—some who call themselves Canadian and many who don’t—that speak to the myriad conditions of colonialism, globalization, and patriarchy. Each of her multitudinous articles, co-edited volumes, and books address one or more topical areas: gender; technological production and mediation; expressions of Indigenous modernity in Inuit, First Nations, Métis, Australian Aboriginal, and Sámi communities; Indigenous intellectual property; and Canadian settler musics.

A few examples help to tell some of her story.

In the 1980s and early 90s, Bev was asking incisive questions about the biases and values that framed accounts of Canada’s musical history, including those that advanced an uncritical, romantic discourse about Canadian multiculturalism. Gathering scholarship across the musicologies and humanities, Canadian Music: Issues of Hegemony and Identity (1990)—her co-edited volume with Robert Witmer—helped reset Canadian music studies by offering new approaches to historiography, shifting musical emphases, and illuminating the power that academics wield through their assumptive and interpretive choices.

In 2000, Bev co-edited Music & Gender (U Illinois P) with Pirkko Moisala. While theirs was not the first volume on that topic in our field (Koskoff 1987; Herndon & Ziegler 1990), it broke new ground. Music & Gender was remarkable both for its authors’ use of feminist theory and for its recognition of ethnocentrism and class bias in feminist theory. The productive tension of that interstitial space characterizes a great deal of Bev’s work. As she wrote in her own article in that collection, “feminist scholars should not debate as much as relate the essentialist to the constructionist, acknowledging both the hegemonic struggle and strategic uses of the former while attempting to validate the latter” (132).

First steps toward establishing socially responsible partnerships with First Peoples and the scholarly community were taken with Bev’s sprawling SPINC (Sound Producing Instruments in Native Communities) project, begun in the late 1980s. As Bev recalls, “I formed the SPINC group… because I really felt I needed people to talk to about... my struggle to work ethically in First Nations contexts.” She invited two former students to form a research team, the published outcome of which was Visions of Sound (Wilfrid Laurier UP and U Chicago P 1994). Visions of Sound set the stage for a “new organology”; it was equally venturesome in its experiments with graphic representation, reflexivity, and dialogism—between the investigators and their First Nations consultants and between co-investigators. Visually complex and quirky, Visions of Sound is an interrogative exploration of Indigenous instruments’ socio-sonic, spiritual, and material design that refuses generalization. Bev hews to that refusal and her commitment to working with others in Native American Music in Eastern North America (Oxford UP 2008). In the preface, she writes: “I had always vowed that I would never write a textbook. I am more interested in exploring the uses and limitations of authority than setting down what students inevitably would read as… a truth about the musical practices of a group of people. As it turns out, by working with a group of Aboriginal advisors whose knowledge was so deep and whose capacity to discuss issues of representation was so capable, I found the preparation of this book one of the most rewarding projects I have ever undertaken. I hope that the differences among our perspectives remain clear and that this textbook, then, can never be read simply as a univocal authoritative text” (xiii). One of the three advisors that Bev profiles in the text is Haudenosaunee singer Sadie Buck, whose expertise and friendship have nourished Bev’s musicological practice over decades. Readers feel Sadie’s presence, not just through quotation, but in the ways Bev listens to and with Sadie, while taking responsibility for her own tongue. As Sadie herself has said, “Respect is in the voice” (Visions of Sound 1994:65). 

While Bev has stayed on the theoretical cutting edge throughout her 47-year career, she exhorts her colleagues to think carefully about what theory actually is. Her article, “Theory from Practice: First Nations Popular Music in Canada” (2000) equates social theory with musical practice—and by musical practice she means acts of sounding and all their attendant activities. Practices, then, are not just informed by theory; nor are they objects to which scholars apply theory. Bev concludes her article by inviting readers “to recognize alternative critical theory in systems rooted in oral tradition or reliant on … sensory data other than words.”

In the late 1990s, the recording studio emerged as an important site for ethnography, and Bev was there. Following her Indigenous consultants’ lead, she focused less on sonic results and more on the social achievement of those results. In the studio, Bev discovered that “identity”—ethnomusicologists’ go-to concept for a quarter century—had lost its explanatory power. As an alternative, she developed “alliance studies,” setting in motion her conviction that musical practice is theory. Alliance studies is an inquiry-based model that shows how we might hear contemporary expressions of Indigeneity in terms of alignments, relationships. She asks: What genres do musicians place their voices in? How does technological mediation inflect Indigeneity? In her evocation of the model, Bev notes how Indigenous musicians are under pressure to conform to a “patron discourse” (van Toorn 1990)—a discourse that values “unusual” timbres and distinctive practices. What does it mean, Bev then asks, when Indigenous musicians choose mainstream styles instead, and how do they shape meaning through language choice, through citation and collaboration?

Ever mindful of process, one of Bev’s many gifts is for creating welcoming spaces in which diverse stakeholders feel empowered to share their ideas. The Research Centre for the Study of Music, Media and Place (MMaP) that Bev established at Memorial University in 2003 is one such space. Implementing a model that puts university and broader societal goals into shared relief, MMaP brings musicians, audiences, communities, and academics into dialogue, and serves as a crucible in which projects can be collectively shaped. MMaP’s Back on Track CD series (now up to 11 releases), for example, presents previously unreleased archival materials, reissues of out-of-print recordings, and commissions of new work, all richly documented, providing Indigenous and settler communities access to their forbearers’ legacies. 

As an inspiring mentor to younger scholars, Beverley Diamond has few peers among Canadian university music professors. The major projects she has spearheaded, such as SPINC, Canadian Musical Pathways, and those at MMaP, have involved extensive input from and training for countless students, from undergraduates to post-docs. A tireless champion of her students’ work, many of them are carrying forward her approach to research and community engagement in the academy and other milieux.

Since the 1980s, Bev has contributed to SEM at all levels, serving on or chairing 18 committees prior to taking on the presidency in 2013. In that role, she amplified the presence of Indigenous voices at the President’s Roundtable and masterminded the inaugural SEM/ICTM Forum in 2015. Recognizing how the International Council for Traditional Music and SEM support scholars who often work under very different conditions of knowledge production—indeed, often with different definitions of what counts as knowledge—Bev, together with Salwa El Shawan Castelo-Branco, engineered a space for conversations among the societies’ constituent members. In fact, Bev’s organizational allegiances spread in many directions; notably, she has been steadfast in her support of associations such as the Canadian Society for Musical Traditions and MusCan. 

An astute grant-writer, Bev has attracted, by herself or as a member of joint projects, numerous grants from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) as well as other funding agencies. She has, in turn, served as an expert assessor for many such agencies, including the European Research Council (2012-19), and continues to generously assist others in the process of their grant-writing. Awards and honors have been bestowed upon Bev in abundance, including a Festschrift (2010), a Trudeau Fellowship (2009-12), and election to the Royal Society of Canada (2008), a designation considered the country’s highest academic honor. For her manifold accomplishments and breaking the path for a progressive scholarship of musics in Canada, SSHRC bestowed its highest accolade upon her in 2014: the Gold Medal Prize.

- C. Kati Szego, Memorial University of Newfoundland