The Center for Ethnomusicology Spring Colloquium Series Presents:

Kika Kila: Hawaiian Guitars and Steel Bars in the Era of the Overthrow
a talk by John W. Troutman
(Assistant Prof. of U.S., Cultural, Public, & American Indian History,  Univ. of Louisiana, Lafayette)

Thursday, February 2, 2012
12:00 – 2:00 pm
Center for Ethnomusicology
Dodge Hall 701 C
Free and open to the public.

Soon after the illegal overthrow of Queen Lili'oukalani's government and U.S. annexation of Hawaii in 1898, Joe Kekuku and other Native Hawaiian guitarists embarked upon a series of transcontinental journeys that continue to ripple and resonate. This presentation will explore the origins of the Hawaiian (steel) guitar and situate its development within both the proliferation of a rich guitar culture in the islands, and within the accompanying political turmoil that led to and followed the overthrow of Ka?naka Maoli rule in the Hawaiian islands.
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The Department of Music presents a colloquium in Music Theory:

Prof. Christopher Doll (Rutgers University)

"What’s in a Numeral? Pentatonicism vs. Diatonicism in Popular Music."

Friday, January 27th
4-6PM
620 Dodge Hall
Free and Open to the Public

Popular music of the rock era, from roughly the 1950s to the present, speaks a creole of diatonicism and pentatonicism that resists theoretical constructs designed with only the former in mind. This paper addresses some of the assorted theoretical and practical issues that attend this sort of musical combination, drawing on several musical examples representing various popular styles from the past sixty years.

January 19, 2012
Columbia and Barnard students, audition for limited enrollment vocal classes (MUS3139, MUS3140, MUS3145) at Barnard!
Please email Professor Jane McMahan (jlyrica@gmail.com) for details
6-10PM, 405 Milbank

January 20, 2012
CU Gospel Choir & Band Open Rehearsal
Join the CU Gospel Choir & Band for its first rehearsal for the spring semester. This open rehearsal is for anyone who is interested in singing/playing gospel music.  There is no obligation to join the choir if you attend this rehearsal.  Light refreshments will be served after rehearsal.  Visit www.columbia.edu/cu/gospel for details.  Questions? Email us at gospelchoir@columbia.edu
5PM, 477 Lerner Hall

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The CU Music Performance Program:
Prof. Deborah Bradley-Kramer, Director
Becky Lu, Program Coordinator
Office Hours: Tuesday-Friday, 12:00 to 5:00PM in 618 Dodge
Email: mpp@columbia.edu
Phone: (212) 854-1257
Website: www.music.columbia.edu/mpp/

Mpp-announce mailing list:
Mpp-announce@lists.columbia.edu

Congratulations to Prof. Elaine Sisman, who has been elected honorary member of the American Musicological Society!  Anne Robertson, President of the AMS, announced the award at the annual meeting in San Francisco: “The Board and Council wish to honor you for your significant body of scholarly writings. You have fundamentally altered our understanding of music, rhetoric, and aesthetics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The imagination and innovation of your approach are on full display in your Haydn and the Classical Variation, which brilliantly demonstrates the centrality of variation as a vehicle of musical discourse, and in your equally penetrating studies of the sublime in Mozart’s oeuvre and of memory and invention in Beethoven’s late music. We also wish to recognize your long and dedicated service to the Society in so many roles, and especially your leadership as President and Vice-President.”

Elaine Sisman is the Anne Parsons Bender Professor of Music at Columbia University.

Three views of Dodge Hall, the home of the Columbia University Department of Music. . .

The Department of Music at Columbia University welcomes two new faculty members, both joining us officially as of the Spring 2012 semester.

Kevin Fellezs has been appointed as Assistant Professor of Music, in a joint appointment with the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia.  His book titled Birds of Fire: Jazz, Rock, Funk and the Creation of Fusion (Duke University Press, 2011) is a study of fusion (jazz-rock-funk) music of the 1970s framed by insights drawn from critical race theory and jazz/popular music studies. He has published articles in Jazz Perspectives, Journal of Popular Music Studies, and the Institute for Studies in American Music Newsletter. He has also published essays in a number of edited anthologies including Alien Encounters: Asian Americans and Popular Culture (Duke University), One World Periphery Reads the Other: Knowing the “Oriental” in the Americas and the Iberian Peninsula (Cambridge Scholars), and Heavy Metal: Controversies and Countercultures (Equinox). His research interests extend further, to Asian American popular music, Asian music, and the musical cultures of the Pacific. Prof. Fellezs holds the  PhD in History of Consciousness/American Studies from The University of California at Santa Cruz, and previously taught at the University of California at Merced.

This spring, Prof. Fellezs will be teaching:

Spring 2012 African-American Studies W3030 section 001

AFRICAN-AMERICAN MUSIC; 3 points;
Tuesday Thursday 11:00am-12:15pm 603 Hamilton Hall 

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Benjamin Steege  has been appointed as Assistant Professor of Music. Prof. Steege comes to Columbia having previously taught at Stony Brook University. He specializes in the history of music theory in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular emphasis on musical and scientific modernisms, the history of psychology, and the history of listening. His book, Helmholtz and the Modern Listener, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. Other publications appear in Current Musicology, Journal of Music Theory, Zeitschrift für die Gesellschaft der Musiktheorie, and Journal of the American Musicological Society (forthcoming). He is on the editorial board of Music Theory Spectrum, and has been a research fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2010-11) and recipient of an Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Dissertation Fellowship (2005-06).

This spring, Prof. Steege will be teaching:

Spring 2012 Music G6333 section 001

PROSEMINAR IN MUSIC THEORY; 3 points;
Wednesday 10:10am-12:00pm 701A Dodge Hall.

 

Spring 2012 Music G4360 section 001

ANALYSIS OF TONAL MUSIC; 3 points;
Tuesday 3:10pm-5:00pm

Room TBA

On Wednesday, December 7th, 50 outstanding performing, visual, media and literary artists were awarded with USA Fellowship grants of $50,000 each, in Santa Monica, CA.

Professor George Lewis, the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music, was one of the awardees, receiving the USA Walker Fellowship.

George Lewis is a composer, trombonist, improviser, educator, and a pioneer of computer music. Lewis has been a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, and studied at its school under USA Prudential Fellow Muhal Richards Abrams. Lewis’s work with musicians from Count Basie to John Zorn is documented in over 140 recordings. He has also created and performed with interactive computer systems since the late 1970s and has collaborated with visual artists, roboticists, and turntablists in sound installations. He is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University and won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002.

Photo credit Eileen Barroso

W4035 Animal Music
Call #: 91903, 3 pts
(Spring 2012) MW 2:40pm-3:55pm, 716 Hamilton
Instructor: Rachel Mundy

This course explores the controversies surrounding theories of animal song from Darwin's day to the present. Changes in technology, religious values, and Western politics all impacted belief in the musicality of non- human animals. In this course, we will use texts, recordings, and notated sound to traverse a forgotten lineage of nineteenth- and twentieth-century studies of biology, race, anthropology, language, and music that hotly debated the animal origins of human song.

Explore our course offerings for Spring 2012!

V2014 Popular Musics- Americas: Country Music    
Instructor: Aaron Fox Call #: 68348, 3 pts, TR 2:40pm-3:55pm, 405 Dodge
This is an undergraduate lecture/discussion survey course that combines a detailed musical and social history of “country” as an American and global popular music genre with an introduction to key issues in the academic study of popular music as exemplified by the growing scholarly literature on country. Inarguably, the genre (formerly known as “hillbilly” and “country and western” and sometimes “folk” music) constitutes a crucially important strand in the history of music in the 20th century, both in the United States and globally.

V3030 Asian American Music    
Instructor: Ellie Hisama Call #: 62292, 3 pts, MW 10:35am-11:50am, 404 Dodge
Examination of the diverse ways in which Asian Americans have understood and shaped their musical prac- tices. We will explore the ways in which Asians have been represented via sound, text, and image, and will consider Asian Americans’ participation in composed music traditions, jazz, traditional/folk music, diasporic music, improvised music, and popular musics. The course will reflect on readings from musicology, ethnomu- sicology, and music theory as well as fields outside of music in order to consider Asian American music in relation to critical issues of diaspora, race/ethnicity, gender/sexuality, polyculturalism, and political activism.

The members of the Department of Music at Columbia express our sadness and shock at the untimely passing of Prof. David Sanjek (Salford University, UK) on Tuesday in New York. David was a dear friend and colleague to many of us, a protean figure in popular music studies, and an all around great guy.  We send our sincere condolences to his family, friends, and colleagues.  A longer appreciation of David Sanjek's career is forthcoming.

Fred Lerdahl, the Fritz Reiner Professor of Composition at Columbia, has published a tribute to his friend and colleague, the late George Edwards (Edward MacDowell Professor Emeritus of Music) in the online journal New Music Box.

"Music was his refuge, his inner sanctum of order, beauty, and refined expression."

From the article:

"George and I met in 1965 as incoming graduate students at Princeton. He, Joel Gressel, and I soon formed a three-way friendship that became at least as important to our development as the classes we took. After seminars we would relax by playing pool, frisbee, chess, or tennis, and we spent long hours listening to and discussing music, not only modern pieces but also the classics, in particular Beethoven and Mahler. By the time I met him, George’s personality and musical style were already formed. He had an acerbic wit that quickly spotted contradictions and deflated pretensions. Beneath the high-spirited jokes and puns lay a stern moral sensibility, seemingly inherited from his Puritan background. (One of his forebears was the 18th-century theologian Jonathan Edwards.) This sensibility made him vulnerable to moods of discouragement and outrage, yet it was also a strength. He held firm convictions, musical and otherwise. He followed unwaveringly his own artistic path, and he approached all of his relationships and obligations with exemplary candor, responsibility, and loyalty."

Click here to read more . . .

The Columbia Middle Eastern Music Ensemble (CMEME) is a new performance ensemble devoted to vocal and instrumental music from the Middle East and other nearby regions, including the Balkans, North Africa, and Central Asia. Co-directed by ethnomusicologists and musicians Dr. Farzaneh Hemmasi and Ozan Aksoy, and established by Dr. Hemmasi in the fall of 2011, the group’s repertoire includes songs and instrumental pieces from folk, popular, and classical genres and from Arabic, Armenian, Greek, Hebrew, Kurdish, Ladino, Persian, Turkish, and other ethno-linguistic backgrounds, emphasizing the many commonalities of diverse groups in this greater cultural area. CMEME gives those concentrating in music additional exposure to non-Western musics and provides a performance opportunity for students taking the Global Core course Asian Music Humanities: India and West Asia. The ensemble also complements the many Middle East-focused course offerings in departments across the university.

CMEME is open to both beginning and experienced musicians from Columbia’s undergraduate, graduate, faculty, and staff communities, and undergraduates may enroll in the ensemble for credit. Students may receive instruction on fretless string instruments, guitar, woodwinds, percussion, and voice. Auditions are held in the fall, but interested participants may contact the directors at any time of year. CMEME is generously funded by Columbia’s Center for Ethnomusicology and the Louis Armstrong Jazz Performance Program.

For more information, contact Dr. Farzaneh Hemmasi at hemmasi@gmail.com

The recent "Composer Portrait" of Prof. George Lewis at Miller Theater was reviewed in The New York Times by critic Steve Smith:

"Sharing Hoop Dreams of a Compositional Strategist"

" . . .rare, rich and provocative: contemporary-classical concert music that reflected, organically and without compromise, black American musical, literary and cultural perspectives . . . Absorbing in scope and expressive in detail,"

Visiting Professor of Composition Richard Carrick has received a commission from the Fromm Foundation. 

Prof. Carrick will be writing his second string quartet for the young, dynamic MIVOS Quartet. He is thrilled to be honored by Fromm.  The commission comes with a cash award and a 3 year deadline to write the new work. Carrick plans on writing his quartet next spring and summer.

Prof. Carrick's personal website:
http://www.richardcarrick.com/rc/index.html

More information about the commission can be found at
http://www.music.fas.harvard.edu/fromm.html

The members of The Department of Music at Columbia University express our collective sorrow and offer our condolences to the friends and family of George Edwards, Edward MacDowell Emeritus Professor of Music, who passed away on October 23, 2011.  Prof. Edwards had a long and distinguished career at Columbia, in addition to his significant public career as a composer and critic. 

George Edwards was born on May 11, 1943, in Wellesley, Massachusetts.  He attended Oberlin College from 1961-65, where his principal teacher was Richard Hoffman.  From 1965-68, he attended graduate school and earned the MFA at Princeton University, where he studied with Milton Babbitt, Edward T. Cone, and Earl Kim.  He taught music theory and composition at the New England Conservatory in Boston from 1969-1976. He was a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome from 1973-75, and won the Rome Prize in Composition in 1975. In 1977 he was appointed Assistant Professor of Music at Columbia University in New York.  He was a Guggenheim Fellow in both 1980 and 1986, and earned tenure at Columbia in 1987, heading the composition program here from 1987 to 1995.  He also served on the Advisory Committee of the Alice M. Ditson Fund from 1988 to 2005, serving as the Committee's Secretary from 1995-1998.  He served as Chair of the Department of Music at Columbia from 1996 to 1999. After his retirement in 2006, he was named Edward MacDowell Emeritus Professor of Music by Columbia's Board of Trustees.

Prof. Edwards is survived by his wife, Rachel Hadas, to whom he was married in 1978, and by his son, Jonathan Hadas Edwards, born in 1984. Please visit Rachel's website for her moving tribute to George by Rachel and Jonathan. .

Please click here to read an extended appreciation of George Edwards' music and life by his friend and colleague Fred Lerdahl, the Fritz Reiner Professor of Composition at Columbia.

The family has suggested that donations may be made in memory of Prof. George Edwards to either of the following organizations: