The Center is pleased to announce that beginning in January 2017, Prof. Ana Maria Ochoa will assume the Center's Directorship.
Prof. Ana Maria Ochoa
The Center for Ethnomusicology is delighted to congratulate PhD program alumna Dr. Sara Snyder, who has been appointed as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology and as Director of the Cherokee Language Program at Western Carolina University. Dr. Snyder defended her dissertation, "Poetics, Performance, and Translation in Eastern Cherokee Language Revitalization," advised by Prof. Fox, in May, 2016. She has held the position to which she has now been appointed in a visiting capacity during 2016-17. Congratulations, Professor Snyder!
The Center for Ethnomusicology congratulates our newest PhD alumnus, Dr. Adam Kielman! Dr. Kielman, who also holds his undergraduate degree in East Asian Studies from Columbia, defended his dissertation, Zou Qilai!: Musical Subjectivity, Mobility, and Sonic Infrastructures in Postsocialist China, on Dec. 1, 2016. His dissertation, abstracted below, was advised by Prof. Ana Maria Ochoa, and his committee included Profs. Chris Washburne, Kevin Fellezs, Fred Lau (U Hawai'i), and Timothy Oakes (U Colorado/Boulder).
We also warmly congratulate Dr. Kielman on his acceptance of an Assistant Professorship in Music at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, which he will begin in January, 2017.
Congratulations to Adam!
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Adam Kielman: Zou Qilai!: Musical Subjectivity, Mobility, and Sonic Infrastructures in Postsocialist China
Abstract
This dissertation is an ethnography centered around two bands based in Guangzhou and their relationships with one of China’s largest record companies. Bridging ethnomusicology, popular music studies, cultural geography, media studies, vocal anthropology, and the anthropology of infrastructure, it examines emergent forms of musical creativity and modes of circulation as they relate to shifts in concepts of self, space, publics, and state instigated by China’s political and economic reforms. Chapter One discusses a long history of state-sponsored cartographic musical anthologies, as well as Confucian and Maoist ways of understanding the relationships between place, person, and music. These discussions provide a context for understanding contemporary musical cosmopolitanisms that both build upon and disrupt these histories; they also provoke a rethinking of ethnomusicological and related linguistic theorizations about music, place, and subjectivity. Through biographies of seven musicians working in present-day Guangzhou, Chapter Two outlines a concept of “musical subjectivity” that looks to the intersection of personal histories, national histories, and creativity as a means of exploring the role of individual agency and expressive culture in broader cultural shifts.Chapter Three focuses on the intertwining of actual corporeal mobilities and vicarious musical mobilities, and explores relationships between circulations of global popular musics, emergent forms of musical creativity, and an evolving geography of contemporary China. Chapter Four extends these concerns to a discussion of media systems in China, and outlines an approach to “sonic infrastructures” that puts sound studies in dialogue with the anthropology of infrastructure in order to understand how evolving modes of musical circulation and the listening practices associated with them are connected to economic, political, and cultural spatialities. Finally, Chapter Five examines the intersecting aesthetic and political implications of popular music sung in local languages (fangyan) by focusing on contemporary forms of articulation between music, language, listening, and place. Taken together, these chapters explore musical cosmopolitanisms as knowledge-making processes that are reconfiguring notions of self, state, publics, and space in contemporary China.
Event Start:
Saturday, December 3, 2016 - 9:30am
Location:
701C Dodge Hall (The Center for Ethnomusioclogy)
SOUNDING CHINA IN THE WORLD: A WORKSHOP
701C Dodge Hall, 2960 Broadway, New York, NY 10027
Sounding China in the World: A Workshop on Musical Circulations to and from China from the Qing Dynasty Through the Present
9:30am-5:30 pm, 701c Dodge Hall
In this workshop, we will investigate the evolving place of China in the world and of the world in China through the important and underutilized lens of music. Examining circulations of music and their connections to processes of knowledge formation, we will consider the ways diverse musics have been transmitted, reformulated, and integrated in contexts ranging from the eighteenth century Qing court to contemporary southern China. We aim to generate productive dialogue through transhistorical perspectives across and through disciplines in order to reassess China’s central role in the formation of a globalized culture from the Enlightenment through the present.
Schedule
9:30 Welcome (Susan Boynton)
10:00 Session 1 (Chair: Susan Boynton)
10:00-11:00: Qingfan Jiang (Music, Columbia), Unfinished Mission: Jesuits and the Circulation of Musical Knowledge in the Encyclopedic Century (respondent: Paize Keulemans)
11:00-12:00: Paize Keulemans (East Asian Studies, Princeton), An Aural Account of the Fall of the Ming Dynasty: Critical Listening in Chinese Rumor, Jesuit History, and Dutch Tragedy of the 17th Century
(respondent: Qingfan Jiang)
2:00-3:00: Session 2 (Chair: Wei Shang, East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia)
2:00-3:00: Adam Kielman (Music, Columbia), Mobilities, Musical Cosmopolitanism, and Southern China’s Transforming Music Industry (respondent: Fred Lau)
3:00-4:00: Fred Lau (Music, University of Hawaii), “Are we there yet?” 1960s Hong Kong Pop Music and Modernity (respondent: Adam Kielman)
4:00-4:30 Break
4:30-5:30 Final Discussion
Sponsors: Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Department of Music, Columbia Global Centers | Beijing
Event Start:
Monday, December 5, 2016 - 4:00pm
Location:
701C Dodge Hall (The Center for Ethnomusioclogy)
The Center for Ethnomusicology presents a talk by:
Prof. Amanda Weidman (Anthropology, Bryn Mawr College)
Trading Voices: The Gendered Beginnings of Playback in South India
Monday Dec. 5, 2016
4-6PM
701C Dodge Hall (Center for Ethnomusicology)
Free and Open to the Public
Reception to Follow
Description: This talk examines the period of transition from singing actors and actresses to the playback system in the South Indian Tamil language film industry, focusing on its gendered beginnings as a form of experimentation with female voices and bodies in the 1940s. I examine the discourse around actresses that viewed them as fragmentable entities, discussed in terms of natippu (acting), pattu (singing), nattiyam (dancing), and azhaku (looks, beauty); debates about the practice of iraval kural, the “traded” voice; and the ways that female voice-body relationships were constructed and managed in films of the late 1940s and early 50s, in which a system of differentiated female voices accomplished crucial ideological work.
More broadly, I argue that playback lent itself to the typification of characters, since the character traits of the onscreen body, rather than being voiced by the actress with whatever kind of voice she might have, could be accentuated by the use of a “suitable” playback voice. With its constructed pairing of voices and bodies, playback theoretically made gender crossings and “cross-dressed” voices possible, but in this context it in fact led to a greater regimentation of voice-body relationships and gendered vocal sound—a regimentation that would be realized concretely in the vocal domination of a very few playback singers later in the 1950s.
Amanda Weidman is a cultural anthropologist with interests in music, language, performance, technological mediation, and semiotics. She has conducted research in South India for more than 20 years, and is currently at work on a book project on the aesthetics and ideologies that govern playback singing in the South Indian Tamil film industry. She is a member of the Anthropology Department at Bryn Mawr College, where she teaches courses in Linguistic Anthropology, Anthropology of Sound and Media, History of Anthropological Theory, and contemporary South Asia. She is also a Karnatic violinist. She holds the PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University, and is the author of Singing the Modern, Voicing the Classical (Duke U. P. 2006).
Event Start:
Thursday, December 1, 2016 - 4:00pm
Location:
701C Dodge Hall (The Center for Ethnomusioclogy)
The Center for Ethnomusicology Presents a Talk By:
Prof. Nicola Scaldaferri
(University of Milano, Italy)
The Ethnomusicologist and his Zampogna. Collaborative Research in Basilicata (Southern Italy)
Thursday Dec. 1, 2016
701C Dodge Hall
Free and Open to the Public
Reception to Follow
The presentation discusses the author's experience in the field as a bagpipes player (the instrument is the Italian zampogna, a double chanter instrument) in his home region, in Basilicata, in Southern Italy, especially during festivals and religious rituals; and more recently, also in other contexts, as a way of building a common ground with local musicians. A particular focus will be on the festival Maggio di Accettura, the object of a collaborative research done in team, with Steven Feld and photographs Stefano Vaja and Lorenzo Ferrarini. It will be introduced by a description of the instruments and musical repertory.
Nicola Scaldaferri is associate professor at the University of Milan, where is the director of the LEAV (Laboratory of Ethnomusicology and Visual Anthropology). He received his PhD in Musicology at the University of Bologna, the degree in Composition at the Conservatory of Parma; he was Fulbright scholar at Harvard University, and visiting professor at St. Peterburg State University. His interests include 20th century music and technology, Balkan epics, Italian folk music, instruments from Western Africa. As performer he plays zampogne and other Italian folk instruments.
Event Start:
Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - 7:00pm
Location:
701C Dodge Hall (The Center for Ethnomusioclogy)
The Center for Ethnomusicology presents:
An Intimate Evening of Cross-Cultural Improvisation featuring Steve Loza, Qi Li, Farzad Amoozegar, and Manoochehr Sadhegi.
Wednesday Nov. 16, 2016
7PM-9PM
701C Dodge Hall (Center for Ethnomusicology)
Free and Open to the Public, Reception to Follow
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Qi Li is a highly accomplished performing artist on the erhu, the Chinese two-string bowed fiddle, and a prolific educator of Chinese music. After graduating from the China Conservatory of Music in 1982, she performed for several years as erhu soloist with the Beijing-based National Traditional Orchestra of China (the most renowned orchestra of Chinese instruments). She has been featured in concerts at prestigious venues such as Madison Squire Garden (New York), Ronald Reagan Building (Washington. D.C.), and Avery Fisher Hall/Lincoln Center (New York). She also directs several Chinese music groups in California, including the Los Angeles Chinese Music Ensemble.
Farzad Amoozegar is a specialist in the Persian plucked lutes tar and setar. As a teenager, having migrated from Iran to Canada, he began learning the classical radif tradition at the age of eleven from Master Mohammed Reza Lotfi in US, and then moved to Iran during his early twenty to study under master musicians such as Hossein Alizadehi, Dariush Tala'i, Hooshang Zarif, Masood Shareai, and Ershad Tahmasbie. While in Tehran, he has also lectured on Iranian music at Azad University, led various workshops on tar and setar, and performed throughout Iran and the Middle East. Currently, he is a doctoral candidate in the departments of ethnomusicology and anthropology at UCLA.
Steven Loza has taught at UCLA since 1984 and currently serves as chair of the Department of Ethnomusicology. His areas of research include topics such as religion as art and musical mesitzaje, the mixing of race and culture. He is the author of Barrio Rhythm: Mexican American Music in Los Angeles and Tito Puente and the Making of Latin Music. among numerous other publications. He has directed ensembles focusing on Latin American music, world jazz, and intercultural improvisation. He has recorded three CDs of his music; a recent composition was premiered by the Mexico City Philharmonic Orchestra.
Manoochehr Sadhegi was born in Tehran, Iran, and came to the U.S. to study music, completing his MA in ethnomusicology under Mantle Hood at UCLA. He is considered a Grandmaster or Ostad of the saunter, a Persian hammered dulcimer. He was awarded the 2003 National Heritage Fellowship Award by the Library of Congress and in 2002 he was a recipient of the Durfee Foundation Master Musician Award. Through the past fifty years he has performed concerts of classical Persian music on the santur lectured at various schools and universities, taught performance privately and with group projects (including a performance ensemble at UCLA), recorded various CD projects, and performed Persian classical music on the santur.
Event Start:
Friday, November 4, 2016 - 4:00pm
Location:
701C Dodge Hall (The Center for Ethnomusioclogy)
The Center for Ethnomusicology is please to present a colloquium presentation by:
Prof. John W. Troutman
(History and Geography, University of Louisiana, Lafayette, author of Indian Blues and the new Kika Kila)
speaking on:
"Steel Bars and Hawaiian Guitars: (Re)Centering Indigenous Technology and Musical Practice within the Origins of the Modern Music Industry."
Friday November 4, 2016
4:00PM to 6:00PM
701C Dodge Hall (The Center for Ethnomusicology)
Reception to follow talk
Information:
aaf19@columbia.edu
Free and open to the public!
The Hawaiian steel guitar profoundly altered the early twentieth-century sounds of the modern music industry. However, few scholars have acknowledged the instrument's role in shaping the soundtrack of modernity, let alone its indigenous origins. In this talk, John Troutman will draw from his new book, Kīkā Kila: How the Hawaiian Steel Guitar Changed the Sound of Modern Music, in order to contemplate the efforts of Hawaiians to develop a new instrument within the context of intense colonial upheaval, and their impact along regional theater circuits and on New York City stages in the years that followed.
Interested members of the public are also invited to attend Prof. Fox's class "Music in Contemporary Native America" on Thursday, Nov. 3, 2016, from 6-7:30pm, to hear Prof. Troutman discuss his important first book, Indian Blues. Please defer to students in the class during discussion if you attend.
John Troutman is Associate Professor of History at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He received his doctorate in history from the University of Texas at Austin and his master’s degree in American Indian Studies from the University of Arizona. He has received multiple fellowships and grants from the Smithsonian Institution, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. His research agenda focuses on the historical significance of music in American life, particularly in the lives of indigenous peoples. His first book, Indian Blues: American Indians and the Politics of Music, 1879-1934, was favorably reviewed in journals that span the disciplines of American Studies, History, Musicology, Anthropology, Folklore, and American Indian Studies; among other accolades it won the Western History Association’s biennial W. Turrentine Jackson Award for a "first book on any aspect of the American West.” In May of this year, the University of North Carolina Press published his second monograph, Kīkā Kila: How the Hawaiian Steel Guitar Changed the Sound of Modern Music. The book chronicles the history of the Hawaiian steel guitar, from the cultural and political context that produced it in the Islands in the 1880s, to its role in shaping the sounds of modern music in North America and throughout the world.
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Event Start:
Thursday, October 27, 2016 - 4:00pm
Location:
701C Dodge Hall (The Center for Ethnomusioclogy)
The Center for Ethnomusicology Presents:
Dr. Zuzana Jurková
(Head of the Institute for Ethnomusicology, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University, Charles University, Prague)
Music Representation of an Underprivileged Group:
the Case of the Czech Roma
Thursday, October 27, 2016
4:00pm – 6:00pm
701c Dodge Hall (Center for Ethnomusicology)
Columbia University Morningside Campus
Free and Open to the Public, Reception to Follow Talk
Abstract: Although the Roma are the most numerous minority in the Czech Republic (ca. 3% of the population) they did not established any mechanism for the selection of political or cultural representatives. In fact, the Roma who reach influential positions negotiate and construct their roles in accordance to who they were elected to represent and those they face. Because of this situation, there is no coherent way of Roma representation through music despite the fact that such a representation is regarded by the public opinion as the most positive aspect of Romani culture which can be used as a marker of collective identity and, at the same time, as a powerful “diplomatic” tool (Lundberg 2010). This talk focuses on two different aspects of Romani musical representations in the Czech Republic: individual and institutional. In the first case, I analyze how two of the most distinguished and visible “Romani” musicians construct their musical styles and, in turn, how various groups consider these styles as Romani. In the second case, the talk focuses on Džemil and Jelena Silajdžič, the managers of the biggest European Romani festival held annually in Prague (Khamoro). I discuss the profound influence that these two managers have on the (re)presentation of Romani music in the Czech Republic, and analyze the role of the Silajdžičs as mediators of the perception of Romani music(s) among the majority, among Roma themselves.
Zuzana Jurková studied ethnology and musicology at the Philosophical Faculty of Charles University and at the music conservatory in Brno. She is the head of the Institute for Ethnomusicology at the Faculty of Humanities of Charles University, focused mainly on the the research of musics of minorities (Voices of the Weak, 2009; Sounds from the Margins, 2013). She concentrates on Romani music (including numerous publications, and an Open Society Fund grant in 1996-8), on the history of Czech ethnomusicology (Ph.D. 1996, a Fulbright scholarship in Bloomington, USA, 1998) and, in recent years, on urban ethnomusicology (Pražské hudební světy 2013; Prague Soundscapes 2014)
Event Start:
Wednesday, October 26, 2016 - 12:00pm
Location:
IAB International Affairs Bldg Room 1512 (420 W 118th St.) Columbia University
The Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University presents Indigenous Forum:
A conversation with Standing Rock Sioux Chairman David Archambault II at Columbia University
Wednesday, October 26, 12:00pm
IAB International Affairs Bldg
Room 1512
420 W 118th St.
Standing Rock Teach-In! Friday Oct 28, Schermerhorn Hall 612, 6:30-9:30PM
