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Congratulations to Dr. Kevin C. Holt!


Dr. Kevin Holt, Profs. Aaron Fox, Kevin Fellezs, Ellie Hisama, Daphne Brooks, and Farah Griffin
The Columbia Ethnomusicology community warmly congratulates our newest PhD, Dr. Kevin C. Holt!

Dr. Holt defended his PhD dissertation, entitled "Get Crunk! The Performative Resistance of Atlanta Hip-Hop Party Music," on Friday, September 14. The dissertation was advised by Prof. Kevin Fellezs.  Dr. Holt's dissertation committee (pictured) included Prof. Ellie Hisama (Columbia); Prof. Aaron Fox (Columbia); Prof. Farah Griffin (Columbia); and Prof. Daphne Brooks (Yale University). Dr. Holt was supported in our program by a prestigious Ford Foundation fellowship as well as the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences; Dr. Holt also earned his MA degree in African-American Studies at Columbia.

Congratulations Dr. Holt!

Prof. Kevin Fellezs Featured in "Columbia College Today" Magazine

Prof. Kevin Fellezs
Congratulations to
Kevin Fellezs, Associate Professor of Music in Ethnomusicology, who is featured in the Summer 2018 issue of Columbia College Today.  He discusses his upbringing, education, musical interests and experiences, professional activity as a scholar, and his teaching at Columbia.

Lunchtime talk: Dr. Shannon Garland (UCLA): "We Demand Love: Musical Affects, Urban Mobility, and Political Expediency in São Pa

Event Start: 
Thursday, October 11, 2018 - 12:00pm
Location: 
701C Dodge Hall (The Center for Ethnomusioclogy)

The Center for Ethnomusicology is please to present a lunchtime colloquium with:

Dr. Shannon Garland 
(Postdoctoral Scholar in Ethnomusicology, University of California at Los Angeles)


"We Demand Love:" Musical Affects, Urban Mobility, and Political Expediency in São Paulo, Brazil. 

Thursday October 11, 2018
12 Noon to 1:30PM 
(lunch to be served)
701C Dodge Hall 
(The Center for Ethnomusicology, Columbia University Morningside Campus, 116th St and Broadway, NY NY)
Free and Open to the Public


In 2011, a minimalist ballad called "Love Doesn’t Exist in São Paulo" became a major hit in São Paulo, Brazil. Written by an underground rapper, Criolo, whose work usually refers to life for the city’s marginalized, the song became especially popular amongst cosmopolitan, middle-class youth, who had begun using “love” to index ideal modes of inhabiting the city. On the eve of the 2012 municipal elections, political activists drew on the popularity of the song to create an all-day music and arts festival headlined by Criolo. Billed as a non-partisan, popular manifestation expressing the need for a São Paulo governed by love, the event also became a sign of popular support for a particular type of city governance which brought a new mayor to power. This article teases out the dynamics of city life that primed listeners to resonate with the song, allowing its conversion into public event and political expedience. It asks how critiques of class and race inequities were elided through the trope of love. This case brings into relief the way in which affects are shaped by desires formed at the local level through global dynamics of cultural consumption and cultural economy, as well as the importance of actors who can drive affective resonance into particular political articulations. 


Shannon Garland
 is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She holds a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from Columbia University. Examining media circulation, band touring, and live performance in the context of emerging music industry organizations, Dr. Garland's work addresses affect, aesthetics and sociality in the production of differential economies of value. Her book project, For the Love: Independent Music, Affect, and Labor in Brazil and Beyond, traces the interrelationships between cultural finance, social networking, and live performance, to show how aesthetic judgement forms through both global political economy and the intimate politics of social relationships. Dr. Garland serves as the 2017-2019 chair of the Economic Ethnomusicology Special Interest Group within the Society of Ethnomusicology.
 

Prof. Braxton Shelley (Harvard Univ.): Take Me Higher”: “Tuning Up” and the Gospel Imagination (Oct. 19, 2018)

Event Start: 
Friday, October 19, 2018 - 4:00pm
Location: 
701C Dodge Hall (The Center for Ethnomusioclogy)

The Center for Ethnomusicology Presents a Colloquium with:

Prof. Braxton Shelley (Music, Harvard University)

“Take Me Higher”: “Tuning Up” and the Gospel Imagination

Friday October 19, 2018
4:00PM-6:00PM
701C Dodge Hall
(The Center for Ethnomusicology, Columbia University Morningside Campus, 116th St and Broadway, NY NY)
Free and Open to the Public, Reception to Follow

Braxton D. Shelley is an assistant professor in the music department at Harvard University, and the Stanley A. Marks and William H. Marks Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute. He was the 2016 recipient of the Paul A. Pisk Prize from the American Musicological Society.

Shelley completed a PhD in the history and theory of music and a master of divinity at the University of Chicago. He earned a BA in music and history from Duke University. In his doctoral dissertation, “Sermons in Song: Richard Smallwood, the Vamp, and the Gospel Imagination,” Shelley’s analysis of gospel music braids cognitive theory, ritual theory, and preaching with studies of repetition, form, rhythm, and meter.

Prof. Morgan Luker (Reed College): "Matrix Listening: Lessons from the Columbia 'T' Series" (Fri Sept 28)

Event Start: 
Friday, September 28, 2018 - 4:00pm - 6:00pm
Location: 
701C Dodge Hall (The Center for Ethnomusioclogy)


The Center for Ethnomusicology at Columbia University Presents a Colloquium with:

Prof. Morgan Luker (Music, Reed College)

"Matrix Listening: Lessons from the Columbia “T” Series (Argentina, 1912-1923)

Friday September 28th 2018 (note corrected date)
4:00PM-6:00PM

701C Dodge Hall (The Center for Ethnomusicology, Columbia University Morningside Campus, Broadway at 116th St.)
Free and open to the public, reception to follow

A matrix number is a code inscribed in the run out area of gramophone records. They are not relevant to the conventional listening experience and are, in fact, inaudible. Nevertheless, I argue that framing scholarly listening around matrix numbers and other forms of industrial organization can provide valuable insights into directly musical concerns. I make this argument through an examination of the Columbia “T” series, a set of hundreds of 78-rpm discs that the U.S.-based recording company produced for export to Argentina between 1912 and 1923, drawing lessons regarding genre relationality, the materiality of recorded sound, the productivity of recorded sound collections, and listening as a method.

Biography: Morgan Luker is Associate Professor of Music at Reed College. He is the author of The Tango Machine: Musical Culture in the Age of Expediency (University of Chicago Press) and the founding director of Tango for Musicians at Reed College (www.reed.edu/tango). His current research examines the materiality and management of historic sound recordings as objects of knowledge in and about Argentina.

Prof. Luker is also an alumnus of Columbia's PhD program in Ethnomusicology.


“Music and Sound at the Mediterranean Crossroads” -- ICTM Study Group Meets at Dar Souiri, Morocco

The twelfth symposium of the ICTM Study Group Mediterranean Music Studies took place in Essaouira (Morocco), 18-23 June, 2018 on the theme “Music and Sound at the Mediterranean Crossroads.” It was hosted at Dar Souiri by the Association Essaouira-Mogador, and it was supported by the Center for Ethnomusicology at Columbia University, by a Global Humanities Projects Grant from the Division of Humanities in the Arts and Sciences at Columbia University, and by the International Council for Traditional Music. This was the first meeting of the study group held in North Africa.

View the Program Here (PDF)


Co-organized by Prof. Alessandra Ciucci (Department of Music, Columbia University) and vice-Chair of the Study Group) and Ruth Davis (University of Cambridge and Chair of the Study Group), the symposium was generously assisted by André Azoulay (President and Founder of the Association Essaouira-Mogador). In the effort to recognize the diverse ways in which people sound, listen to and perform the Mediterranean, the symposium brought together academics and students working on themes related to music and sound in the Mediterranean, and aimed in particular to create a dialogue and facilitate the exchange of knowledge with scholars from the southern shores of the Mediterranean and the MENA region.

Waiting for the opening procession of the Gnawa and World Music Festival (photo by Sonja Kieser)

Waiting for the opening procession of the Gnawa and World Music Festival (photo by Sonja Kieser)




The 67 participants at the symposium engaged in rich dialogue aiming to provide a different point of entry, through music and sound, to explore burning political questions in the Mediterranen, and envisaging this sea as a laboratory in which music and sound are essential for those who believe that the Mediterranean, Mare Nostrum, or al-Baḥr al-Abyad al-Mutawassiṭ is necessary for the future, rather than a geographic space of a past.
Aissawa Performance at Dar Souiri 2 (Photo by Sonja Kieser)
 
Aissawa Performance at Dar Souiri
(Photo by Sonja Kieser)





Held in conjunction with the Gnawa World Music Festival, the symposium benefitted from an audience that included academics, as well as Moroccans attending the festival who were interested in the diverse themes of the symposium. Two performances of traditional Moroccan music held at Dar Souiri, together with the numerous musical events associated with the Gnawa World Music Festival, enriched the academic debates of the symposium.

Traveling Sounds in Bilad al Sham with Oded Erez, Nadeem Karkabi, Clara Wenz, Abigail Wood and Loab Hammoud (photo by Lhoussain Simour)

Traveling Sounds in Bilad al Sham with Oded Erez, Nadeem Karkabi, Clara Wenz, Abigail Wood and Loab Hammoud (photo by Lhoussain Simour)

Alumna Dr. Lauren Flood Appointed Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at U Pennsylvania!

Dr. Lauren Flood
The Ethnomusicology community at Columbia is delighted to congratulate our PhD alumna, Dr. Lauren Flood (PhD, 2016), who has been appointed as a Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at the Wolf Humanities Center at the University of Pennsylvania.  Dr. Flood has just completed a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship in Music at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her Columbia PhD dissertation, "DIY Music Technology in New York and Berlin," was advised by Prof. Ana Maria Ochoa, with research supported by the US National Science Foundation. 

Congratulations Lauren!

Whitney Slaten Appointed as Assistant Professor at Bard College!

Prof. Whitney Slaten

The Ethnomusicology community at Columbia is thrilled to congratulate our PhD alumnus Whitney J. Slaten, who has been appointed as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at Bard College (Annandale on Hudson, NY), where he will begin teaching in Fall 2018.  

Congratulations Prof. Slaten!

Congratulations to Dr. Trevor Reed!

Dr. Trevor ReedThe Ethnomusicology community at Columbia University is delighted to congratulate Dr. Trevor Reed (Hopi), who successfully defended his PhD dissertation, entitled Sonic Sovereignty: Hopi Song, Indigenous Authority, and Intellectual Property in an Era of Settler-Colonialism, on Monday, May 7, 2018.  Dr. Reed, who is also about to receive the JD from Columbia's School of Law, will be moving to Phoenix, Arizona to take up an Associate Professorship in Law at Arizona State University.  Dr. Reed's committee included Prof. Aaron Fox (sponsor), Prof. Ana Maria Ochoa, Prof. Kevin Fellezs, Prof. Jane Anderson (NYU, Anthropology), and Mr. Stewart Koyiyumptewa, Director of the Hopi Office of Cultural Preservation. 

Congratulations to Dr. Reed!

Michael Wedd (GS Anthropology 2018) Wins GS Dean's Thesis Prize in Anthropology!

Michael WeddThe Ethnomusicology community at Columbia is proud to congratulate graduating GS Anthropology Major Michael Wedd, who has been awarded the GS Dean's Prize in Anthropology for his senior thesis, entitled:  "Neuroqueering Music Therapy and Autism."  Michael's thesis was advised by Prof. Aaron Fox.  Michael also worked with Prof. Fox to produce a symposium at Columbia entitled "New Frontiers in the Study of Music, Autism, and Neurodiversity" at the Center for Ethnomusicology in February of 2018 (which may be viewed in its entirety here). Michael is heading off to a year as a "Venture for America" Fellow, during which he will work as a Product Manager at Leverege, a tech startup in Baltimore, Maryland. 


You can also read more about Michael's research and activism here.


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