ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates the ways in which composing ethnography enabled students to construct unique and multifaceted knowledge about a music culture. The composing of ethnography required students to construct a written portrait of their chosen music culture, which they approached via analysis and interpretation, a series of stages in which a whole phenomenon is dissected and then reassembled to make the phenomenon meaningful to others. Ethnographic data analysis often began as soon as students entered the field whilst writing down fieldnotes from participant-observation and transcriptions of interviews. The interpretation of data meant to make the stories meaningful by going beyond the results and placing them into their broader context. This required students to highlight the significance of the findings and explain what conclusions may be gained from the results, which necessitated a deeper-level understanding of the music culture and original and creative thinking.
