With great pleasure, The Center for Ethnomusicology announces that Prof. Ana Maria Ochoa has assumed the Directorship of the Center.

Prof. Aaron Fox, who has Directed the Center since 2003, is stepping down to become Chair of the Music Department. He will continue to be affiliated with the Center.
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About Ana Maria Ochoa:
Professor Ochoa is Associate Professor of Music at Columbia University. She holds a Ph D in Folklore and Ethnomusicology from Indiana University (1996). Her areas of interest include music and cultural policy, music and armed conflict, intellectual property, and intellectual histories of sound and music in Latin America, with emphasis on Colombia. Prof. Ochoa taught previously at Columbia (2003-2005) and at New York University (2005-2008). She is the former director of the Music Archives of the Colombian Ministry of Culture. She has also been a researcher at the Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia (Colombia) as well as at The Centro Nacional de Información, Investigación y Documentación Musical Carlos Chávez (CENIDIM) in Mexico.

Dear reader,

I get dozens of emails every single day, many inquiring about the Center, our grad program, and my own work. I simply cannot answer this volume of email personally and still get anything else done.

Please note well: if I answer a question below, I will no longer respond to emails that ask the same question. Please read below before you contact me by email.

Thanks!

Aaron Fox
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Q. How can I learn more about the PhD program in ethnomusicology at Columbia?  read more »

 Thank you to everyone who attended, assisted, and participated in MACSEM 2008!  We wish all of our guests safe travels home.  A full wrap-up with photos will be posted here shortly.  Our best wishes to our friends at the University of Pittsburgh for MACSEM 2009!

Below: MACSEM President Prof. Larry Witzleben presenting the MACSEM Lifetime Service Award to keynote speaker Prof. Adelaida Reyes (MACSEM 2008)

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The EthnoCenter Blog -- August 5, 2007

A couple of stories from this summer provide insight into the challenges of an archivist in the digital era. But more than that, they have implications for all of us. Because we're all archivists -- digital ones at that -- these days. The sheer quantity of digital information the average computer-using person has to manage and care for is staggering.  read more »

We're in the home stretch! Congratulations are in order to Matthew Sakakeeny who has won a Whiting Fellowship -- Columbia's most prestigious internal dissertation-writing award -- for 2007-8, and to Farzi Hemmasi, who has been awarded Columbia's Lane Cooper Dissertation Fellowship for 2007-8.  Farzi also won a writing fellowship at the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, and Brian Karl also won an ISERP fellowship. 

Congratulations to Megan Height, Charles Lawry, Victoria McKenzie, Whitney Slaten, and Simon Calle, all of whom have been awarded the MA degree. Congrats also to Marti Newland, incoming PhD student and Center associate, who has also received the MA degree in African American Studies.

Wow, what a busy spring. In addition to visits to the Center by Jonathan Sterne, Hugo Zemp, Deborah Wong, Klisala Harrison, and Jonathan Shannon, we've got a search going on for 2 new Mellon postdoctoral fellows in the department. (Which reminds me, by the way, that ethnomusicologist Josh Pilzer from UC Santa Barbara, will be speaking in the department on Wed. April 18 at 3 PM). This is what the Center is all about -- dialogue, conversation, exchange. We're delighted to host so many visitors, but it does get exhausting managing all the details

In other news, still not formally announced on our front page but coming soon, the Center's partnership with the Institute for Medieval Japanese Studies enters a new and wonderful phase this summer, as we prepare to send three undergraduate students, one postdoctoral fellow, and one of our alumni off to Japan for 6 weeks (all expenses paid!) to study Gagaku with master performers. We're very excited to announce that the following members of our 2006-7 Gagaku course and ensemble will be making the trip (instruments listed next to names):
Amy Gardner (Barnard) --Hichiriki
Ben Siegelman (Columbia)--Hichiriki
Teresa Wojtasiewicz (Barnard) -- Ryuteki
Ruth Rosenberg (Mellon postdoc fellow) --Ryuteki

These students will be accompanied on the trip by David Novak, PhD, who has been co-teaching and co-directing our Japanese music courses and ensemble this year. Dr. Novak will continue on to research in Osaka. The rest will remain in Tokyo for 6 weeks for intensive private lessons. Full details will be announced on our front page in a week or so. Congratulations to all! We hope this is the first of many such summer exchanges.

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So, check out the amazing Google map of CU ethnousicology field projects on our front page right now! Last Thursday, Google updated its GoogleMaps API to enable users to create their own detailed GIS maps on Google, and with a little improvisation and a little help, we've figured out how to embed our developing map projects on ethnocenter. org. The first map shows where our current students' field projects are located, and provides links to their bios or -- if they have them -- project websites. It also shows you where faculty and alumni have worked, and where the Center has ongoing projects. Pretty impressive stuff when you see it all on one map. This project will grow in coming months, so stay tuned.

But the coolest thing of all is the KML -- if you click on this link, and download the associated KML file (it will be called "MS" and you might need to add the extension .kml once it's downloaded) -- you can open up this map in Google Earth and browse our project roster in three-dimensional splendor.

If you haven't played with Google's "Earth" browser [download it here for free, Mac or PC] boy are you in for a treat. It's especially delightful for kids, because it allows you to "travel" on a three dimensional satellite-photographed globe, and now to browse all the markups that people are adding to the globe in MyMaps. But its uses as simple but powerful GIS application for the masses are just now being imagined. In some ways, this technology could revolutionize ethnomusicology's integration with cultural geography and change some of the ways we imagine "fieldwork" in a multi-sited, global paradigm. All ethnomusicologists should learn to use this tool. It's amazing. The applications for data visualization, fieldwork collaboration, and publishing research are endless.

In other upcoming news, our MA student Megan Height has won a summer FLAS award to study Spanish in Mexico, and our PhD alumna Ada Helbig has received a 6 month Postdoctoral Fellowship from the IREX Individual Advanced Research Opporunities Program and an 8 month Advanced Research Fellowship from the American Councils for International Education Research Scholar Program. Anna Stirr, currently working Nepal with support from Fulbright and SSRC, has won a PEO Sisterhood fellowship for next year. PhD student Melissa Gonzalez has won an OMA Summer Merit Fellowship, and several other students have won departmental summer fellowships (full announcement coming soon). The track record of our students in grant competitions continues to be the best in the country among all ethnomusicology (and most cultural anthropology) programs.

Finally, congratulations also to MA student Sara Snyder, elected treasurer of MACSEM (the Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology). And in some exciting news, Columbia's Center for Ethnomusicology has agreed to host MACSEM's 2008 spring meeting. More news on that soon!

Lots else going on, proper announcements to follow on the home page. I just haven't had the time to get all this properly announced yet.

Other news -- I will be in Bloomington, Indiana, for a conference of Boulton archivist, from thursday the 12th through monday, the 15th. I will be visiting Ohio State University's department of music on May 15.

Aaron Fox  read more »

I'l be using this blog to post important announcements and comments relevant to the ethomusicology program community here at Columbia, thoughts on graduate school in general, and other such stuff.

We just finished welcoming 11 newly admitted students in the department, all of whom came for a 2 day intensive orientation. It was great fun, and we've got some really interesting people coming in to our program next year, and into the department at large as well. Every year I notice how the conversation with newly admitted students moves further into questions of how to operate in the interdisciplinary environment that music scholarship has become while learning and mastering a specific disciplinary approach to music. It gives me a lot of optimism to have this conversation with bright people entering the profession. I don't think any of us will recognize "musicology" in ten years. I think it will deal substantially with popular music and social theoretic questions, that the world will be its frame of reference much more than Europe or the West, and that historiography, ethnography, and musical analysis -- to say nothing of performance and composition -- will find increasingly integrated applications.  read more »

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