From the Editor

The present volume of Asian Musicology brings together six research articles and a conference review, several of which were first presented in earlier form at the Eighth Biennial Conference of the International Musicological Society— Regional Association for East Asia (IMSEA), convened at Guangxi Arts University, Nanning, on 19–21 September 2025 under the theme “Heritage and Community.” That theme provides a useful, if necessarily porous, framework for reading the contributions collected here. The aim of this introduction is not to summarise the individual studies, which readers will rightly prefer to consult for themselves, but to indicate some of the shared analytical concerns they address, and to register why the volume marks, in my view, a coherent moment in the work of our field. If “heritage” too often functions as a museum word, the studies in this volume insist that musical heritage is something we inherit only insofar as we keep moving it; if “community” too often functions as a flattering generalisation, the studies collected here treat it instead as something produced — by interviews, by archives, by performance occasions, by acts of listening — rather than as something simply given.