Ethnomusicology at Columbia - News & Events

The Center for Ethnomusicology is pleased to present a public colloquium featuring  Sonia Seeman (Assistant Professor, Department of Music, University of Texas at Austin), entitled:

Metaphoricity, Iconicity and Mimesis: Towards a Musical Semantics of Social Identity in Turkish Roman (“Gypsy”) Music

The colloquium will be held from 4-6PM on Tuesday, November 6, 2009, in 701C Dodge.  It is free and open to the public. For more information, please click here.

 read more »

Music for shamisen, koto, and shakuhachi with Yoko Hiraoka and Ralph Sauelson.  A free one-hour lecture-demonstration that is open to the public.

For more information please contact the Institute for Medieval Japanese Studies at (212)854-7403 or medievaljapan@columbia.edu

Department of Music is cosponsoring with EALAC and the Donald Keene Center a lecture by Giorgio Biancorosso, University of Hong Kong:

Music as Anamorphic Spot: The Radio Broadcast in *Tengoku to Jigoku* ("High and Low," dir. A. Kurosawa, 1963)
October 8th (Thursday) 6:00-7:30pm
Room 403 Kent Hall
Map: http://www.columbia.edu/about_columbia/map/kent.html

Lecturer bio:  read more »

Music Department, Professional Development Workshop

Friday, 9 October, 2:30-4 pm: Applying for Fellowships (Workshop leaders: Profs. Susan Boynton & Ellie Hisama)

This workshop will provide information about available fellowships and external grants for graduate students in music (in composition, ethnomusicology, musicology, and theory), and suggestions for preparing your application including the project statement, research sample, and CV.

Location: Dodge 620 (PLEASE NOTE CHANGE OF LOCATION)

Please contact Ellie Hisama, coordinator of the Fall 2009 workshops, if you have any questions: eh2252@columbia.edu

The Japanese Gagaku Ensemble will hold auditions on the first day of class on Thursday, 9/10 at 5pm in 112 Dodge (enter the building from College Walk).  Opportunities to study this ancient court music of Japan are extremely rare in the United States.  Students will be supplied with excellent instruments, including the hichiriki, ryuteki, sho, biwa, and koto(gaku-so). Some musical background (wind instruments, especially) and/or prior knowledge of Japanese culture are helpful, but not prerequisites. Ensemble meets once a week for 2-3 hours and will perform at least twice publicly. The instructor is Louise Sasaki.  For more information contact Patricia Slattery at pas2141@columbia.edu.  For more information visit the CU Music Performance Program website:  music.columbia.edu/mpp.

The Columbia Klezmer Band and Columbia’s Bluegrass Band, Lion in the Grass play their spring concerts back-to-back in one night of rollickin' fun!  It's free so bring your friends along.

Columbia Klezmer Band at 6:00 PM
Columbia’s Bluegrass Band, Lion in the Grass at 7:00 PM

The Columbia Klezmer Band, founded in 2000, is a group of talented Columbia, Barnard, and JTS students from a variety of musical backgrounds. Klezmer is the Jewish folk/dance music whose roots lie in old Eastern Europe.
 
The band is coached by Jeff Warschauer, who is internationally  renowned as a klezmer instrumentalist, Yiddish singer and educator.

Lion in the Grass, the CU Bluegrass Band, was started at Columbia in 2004, and has already achieved a strong reputation on campus and in the community.  It is directed by Toby King.

Sponsored by the Columbia University Music Performance Program

In this unprecedented performance workshop, open to any student performers from any and all traditions--musicians, poets, actors, dancers, musicians, writers--Greg Tate, Louis Armstrong Visiting Professor at the Center for Jazz Studies for Fall 2009, will demonstrate how new musical material may be generated and existing musical material may be restructured and renewed in real-time performance, using Conduction, the versatile lexicon of hand and baton gestures developed over the past twenty years by improvisor and conductor Lawrence "Butch" Morris.

As leader of the innovative musical ensemble Burnt Sugar, The Arkestra Chamber, Tate uses Conduction in live performance and in the studio to compose and select material from a wide range of composers and genres--Thelonious Monk, Chaka Khan, Jimi Hendrix, Charles Mingus, Iggy Pop, and others. In this workshop, joined by  members of the Arkestra and the workshop participants, Tate will demonstrate these techniques and create new music.
 read more »

Digital Economies and the Politics of Circulation
Dates: April 3 and 4, 2009
Location: Philosophy Hall, Columbia University

A conference co-organized by
Ana María Ochoa
The Center for Ethnomusicology, The Music Department, Columbia University

Claudio Lomnitz
Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, Columbia University

For the detailed program please click here.

This is an interdisciplinary and transnational conference that seeks to explore the interrelationship between the changing status of textualities, the rise of informal economies and the global politics of circulation.  By changing textualities we mean the transformation in modes of support and circulation of artistic artifacts and legal documents (from different types of musics, to cinema as well as documents that make up the legal archive). The point of departure for the conference is the realization that there is a gap between practices of archiving, production and circulation of different forms of textualities and their juridical status. The association between property, technology, art forms and governmentality is being challenged from a broad spectrum of creative practices, but this is not just a problem about intellectual property. The migration of the discussion in the globalization of the arts to a legal terrain brings to the foreground the increasing incommensurability between the local, national and global politics of diversity, and governmentality. Thus practices of exchange of digital texts become a radical site for the audiovisualization of the global crisis of the political entailed by this incommensurability.  read more »