 It organizes an annual international conference and over a dozen regional conferences, maintains an active website, and presents more than a dozen awards for scholarship and service, such as the Jaap Kunst prize for the best published article in the field.The founding of the Society for Ethnomusicology was not the first attempt at an organization focusing on the music of the world.Before the work of SEM’s founders in the 1950s, several efforts in Europe had taken place through the work of dozens of musicologists and those who would eventually be considered ethnomusicologists, including Frances Densmore, Helen Heffron Roberts, and George Herzog.