In December 2025, the book “Singing, Song, and Sound as Human Acts of Personal and Cultural Agency” edited by Ardian Ahmedaja, a researcher at the Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music, was published by the publishing house “Böhlau” (Vienna, Austria).
The book is the sixth volume of the series European Voices published by the Research Centre for European Multipart Music based at the Department for Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology of the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. The opening contribution of the book is the article “Agencies of “Ethnographic Singing” in Latvia: The Politics of Sound” (pp. 19–53) by JVLMA professor and senior researcher Anda Beitāne. It is driven by the desire to elucidate the processes and mechanisms through which the local multipart music practices in Latvia transformed into ethnographic and folklore ensembles and moved onto the stage as part of the amateur art system. The article is elaborated within the project “Latvian cultural ecosystem as a resource for national resilience and sustainability” / CERS (No. VPP-MM-LKRVA-2023/1-0001) funded by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia within the framework of the national research program “Latvian culture – a resource for national development” (2023–2026). The national research program is administered by the Latvian Science Council. The book is available https://www.vr-elibrary.de/doi/abs/10.7767/9783205223757
The authors of the present book are members of the Research Centre for European Multipart Music (EMM) from Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, and the United Kingdom. They reflect on diversified realizations of personal and cultural agency based on three main topics: performing agencies and politics of sound, the dependence between individual and group, and various ways of sound production and perception. As is customary in ethnomusicological publications, some of the the articles are accompanied with a wide range of audiovisual examples. The EMM was founded in 2003 and brings together researchers from different countries around the world who are focused on the study and conceptualization of multipart music. The European Voices series has so far published five books: Multipart Singing in the Balkans and the Mediterranean (EV I), Cultural Listening and Local Discourse in Multipart Singing Traditions in Europe (EV II), The Instrumentation and Instrumentalization of Sound (EV III), Playing Multipart Music: Soloist and Ensemble Traditions (EV IV) and Music for Dance (EV VI).