The Musicological Society of Japan celebrated its fiftieth anniversary by holding an international congress on 2–4 November 2002 in Shizuoka, a city which is not far from Tokyo, whose skyline is backed by the imposing Mount Fuji. 470 people were registered as participants, out of whom about 100 were from abroad. The conference coincided with the International Convention of Street Performance in the same city.

The ‘Hood Comes First: Race, Space and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop. By Murray Forman. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2002. 400 pp.

Global Noise: Rap and Hip-Hop Outside the USA. Edited by Tony Mitchell. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001. 352 pp.

Eileen Southern, who died in Florida in October 2002, was widely recognised as a pre-eminent figure in the study of African-American music. Her seminal history, The Music of Black Americans, first published in New York in 1971, was the first academic study to give serious scholarly attention to the totality of African-American music – from the congregational singing of slaves to all-black Broadway musicals, from blues and jazz to experimental composers – and was hugely influential. Resolutely unpolemical and meticulously balanced, it did more to establish the validity of the subject in the academy than any other single book. It had its genesis in a course which Dr Southern (who had a Ph.D. in Renaissance music from Harvard) developed in the late 1960s at Brooklyn College. She herself later described how she was put under pressure to devise the course by a college administration somewhat desperate to find ways to meet the demands of black students for the inclusion of Black Studies in the curriculum. The idea met with disbelief among colleagues in the music department, and the particular scorn of an unnamed Englishman, holder of a Ph.D. in musicology from Oxford, who opined that a course in black music presented ‘nothing of substance to deal with’. Declaring ‘I'll show them’, a furious Eileen Southern was determined to design a course that demonstrated the range of black music. The result turned out to be so rich that a more sympathetic colleague suggested one day to Dr Southern that she turn the course into a book – and The Music of Black Americans was the result (Standifer, n.d.).