In Ethnomusicologizing: Essays on Music in the New Paradigms, composer and musicologist brings together a series of essays on music making in contemporary culture. More specifically, it focuses on the myriad ways we engage with music—as makers, as listeners, as consumers, as producers. Banfield labels this fully engaged process as “ethnomusicologizing,” as he explores the ways we create, share, teach, and discuss music. Throughout he argues that music is more than the experience of structured sound. It is rather a way of being more critically present as musicians and as citizens of sharing in the world itself.

Ethnomusicologizing contains writings on contemporary music and culture studies, offering glimpses on more than just music history through reflective essays, interviews with contemporary artists, and exercises in the analysis and criticism of popular culture. In this work, Banfield instructs readers in the ways by which we may better appreciate and understand creative artistry and process, and their relation to history and its meaning. The essays comprise a choir of voices and perspectives that provide insight into contemporary music culture that provide readers a text that uses his own experiences as a musician—and in particular his travels through the musical world of Cuba—as well as his takes on contemporary popular recording artists, American music traditions, and music education to explore every aspect of creating, performing, and being in music.

Offering many points of entry into the idea that musical experience, global citizenship and community-mindedness are all parts of a greater whole, Ethnomusicologizing encourages artists and readers to talk about the meaning of music—and art more generally—in entirely new ways.