Kevin Holt Wins Ford Predoctoral Fellowship!
Congratulations to Columbia ethnomusicology PhD student Kevin Holt, who has been awarded a 2013 Predoctoral Fellowship from the Ford Foundation.
This fellowship, which provides three years of full support for doctoral research, is sponsored by the Ford Foundation and administered by the National Research Council of the National Academies. Mr. Holt's selection for this prestigious award reflects Ford Foundation's panelists’ "judgment of scholarly competence as well as the promise of future achievement as a scholar, researcher, and teacher."
Mr. Holt's doctoral research concerns youth culture and hip-hop music in Atlanta and more broadly in the US; his MA thesis was an ethnographic study of "Amateur Night at the Apollo Theater." He holds a prior MA from Columbia's Institute for Research in African-American Studies, and a BA in Music from Oberlin Conservatory.
Mr. Holt is also the third PhD student in ethnomusicology at Columbia to win support from the Ford Foundation in the past three years!
Maria Sonevytsky Appointed Assistant Professor at Bard College!
The Department of Music congratulates alumna Dr. Maria Sonevysky (PhD, Ethnomusicology, 2012). Dr. Sonevytsky has been appointed as Assistant Professor of Music at Bard College, beginning in 2014. Prior to taking up the position at Bard, Dr. Sonevysky will be a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at the University of Toronto for 2013-14.
Dr. Sonevytsky is currently a Mihaychuk Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. She received her BA degree in Music from Barnard College, and her PhD in Music (Ethnomusicology) from Columbia University. Her dissertation was entitled “Wild Music: Ideologies of Exoticism in Two Ukrainian Borderlands." The dissertation develops comparative musical-ethnographic studies of two distinct Ukrainian borderland groups, the Hutsuls of the Carpathian Mountains, and the Crimean Tatars, and examines the role of discourses of "wildness" and exoticism in Ukrainian music, culture, and politics.
In 2011, Dr. Sonevystky presented “The Chornobyl Songs Projects: Living Culture from a Lost World” that sought to broaden public awareness about the cultural impact of nuclear disaster by reviving ritual song repertoires from rural communities around Chornobyl that were dispersed after 1986. The project culminated with multi-media performances in four cities, and will result in a recording from Smithsonian Folkways in 2013. Sonevytsky is also an accomplished accordionist, as well as a vocalist and pianist. She performs with a composers’ collective in New York City called Anti-Social Music.
Commencement 2013: Congratulations to Our Music Grads!
Commencement 2013: The Department of Music Congratulates our Graduating Students!
Columbia College (Majors and Concentrators)
- Andrew Dugue (Concentration)
- David Halpern
- Emily Hamilton (Concentration)
- Victoria Lewis - Cum Laude
- Megan Maloney (Concentration)
- Ilan Marans
- Mark Micchelli - Cum Laude
- Emily Ostertag - Cum Laude
- Natalie Robehmed
- Christopher Ruenes- Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa, Departmental Honors*
- Rieko Shepherd
- Ian Shirley - Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa
- Jacob Snider
- Gregory Somerville
- Maria Sulimirski
- Natalie Weiner
School of General Studies (Majors)
- Sebastian Clegg
- Iva Kupresak
Barnard College (Majors, except as noted)
- Rebecca Gray - Music & English (Writing), Departmental Honors
- Martina Wiedenbaum - Ethnomusicology
- Lucy Finkelstein-Fox - Ethnomusicology & Psychology, Departmental Honors
- Rachel Bronstein - Music
- Lisa Campbell - Music
- Elissa Mendez-Renk - Music
- Laura Pantley - Music
- Emma Solomons - Music
- Alexandra Vidal - Music
- Xuela Zhang - Music
* Departmental Honors are awarded to Chris Ruenes for his composition "Rupt ures," written under the supervision of Brad Garton. Finalists for Departmental Honors were Emily Ostertag, Jacob Snider, and Rieko Shepherd.
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
MA:
- César Colon-Montijo
- Beatriz Goubert
- Orit Hilewicz
- Kevin Holt
- Anne Adele Levitsky
- Brooke Rosemary Lyssy
- William Lowell Mason
- Imani Danielle Mosley
- Thomas Christopher Smith
PhD/DMA:
- Beau Bothwell
- Sean Hallowell
- Nicholas Higgins.
Tyler Bickford Appointed Assistant Professor of English at Pittsburgh
The Department of Music congratulates ethnomusicology graduate program alumnus Tyler Bickford (PhD, 2011, With Distinction), who has been appointed as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of English (in Children's Literature and Childhood Studies) at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Bickford has been a Core Lecturer teaching Contemporary Civilization at Columbia since 2011, and was awarded the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching (Columbia's highest honor for a graduate student instructor). He is also a past winner of the Lise Waxler Prize (SEM) and the Hewitt Pataleoni Prize (MACSEM).
Dr. Bickford's Columbia ethnomusicology dissertation, entitled "Children's Music, MP3 Players, and Expressive Practices at a Vermont Elementary School: Media Consumption as Social Organization among Schoolchildren," is an ethnographic study of the media ecology of K–8 schoolchildren at a small, rural, public school in New England.
You can read an article about Dr. Bickford in the Columbia Spectator here. Dr. Bickford's personal website (with several of his publications) is here.
Announcing a New MFA Program in Sound Arts at Columbia!
New Program Announcement!
SOUND ARTS
A new Interdepartmental MFA Program offered by the Columbia University School of the Arts in association with the Department of Music and the Computer Music Center.
Spring 2013 Featured Courses in Music
Featured courses in Music for Spring 2013!
(Click on the image to open full-sized poster.)
Music and Property (MUSI W4420)
Course Information
MUSI W4420
Music and Property
Section 001 Call Number: 66829 Points: 3
Instructor: Aaron A Fox (bio)
Tues/Thurs 6:10pm-7:25pm, 622 Dodge Hall
This is an upper-level undergraduate lecture/discussion course (also open to graduate students by instructor permission). The goal of the course is to survey the pragmatic, ethical, and philosophical dimensions of assertions that “music” is something that can be “owned” by individuals, groups, governments, or private institutions. Because this is a sweeping topic, and one only recently emergent within musical scholarship as a major alternative to approaches through aesthetics, cognition/perception, performance, or social history, this course will be designed with a focus on several major domains of current debate and emergent scholarly focus: current conflicts over the practice of “illegal downloading” of copyrighted music from file sharing networks; digital sampling and music production; the appropriation of cultural value in “world music;” and the question of “cultural property rights” with respect to Native and Indigenous cultural heritage materials (including music recordings) held in archives and museums in the US (the focus of the instructor’s own work).
NEW SEMINAR: Advanced Seminar in Ethnomusicology: Archival Practice (MUSI G9401)
Course Information
MUSI G9401 (Advanced Seminar in Ethnomusicology 1)
NEW FOR SPRING 2013
Archiving Practice
Call Number: 74384 Points: 3
Instructor: Aaron A Fox (bio)
Tuesdays 2:10pm-4:00pm, 701C Dodge Hall
Topics, literature, and projects in audio archive management, repatriation, and intellectual property issues.
Advanced Seminar in Ethnomusicology: Music, Affect, and Public Culture (MUSI G9402)
Course Information
MUSI G9402 (Advanced Seminar in Ethnomusicology)
Music, Affect, and Public Culture
Instructor: Ellen Gray (bio)
Call #: 28037, 3 pts
Thursdays 12:10pm-2:00pm, 701C Dodge
Musical anthropology and ethnomusicology have tentatively begun to work with "affect" as a keyword for understanding how contemporary cultures of musical circulation and listening shape publics and mobilize sentiment. But what is "affect"? How does it differ from "emotion"? How might one go about ethnographi- cally studying affect when sound/music/aesthetics are the object of inquiry? This seminar places two con- temporary interdisciplinary "turns" in the social sciences and humanities (the "acoustic turn" and the "affective turn") in productive alignment. We track genealogies of the following keywords and terms through relevant theoretical and ethnographic literatures: "listening"; "voice"; "emotion"; "structures of feeling"; "affect"; "public feeling" and "publics" while thinking through the possibilities of "affect" for anthropologies of sound and music.
NEW COURSE: Musical Instrument in Electronic/Computer Music (MUSI W4626)
Course Information
MUSI W4626 (New Course for Spring 2013)
Musical Instrument in Electronic/Computer Music
Instructor: Jaime Oliver (Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Music) (bio)
Call #: 92448, 3 pts
Tuesdays, 11:10am-1:00pm, 320H Prentis
A central aspect of composing with computer media is designing the software system with which we will work; in other words, the composer, performer, and/or improviser is often responsible for designing and as- sembling his own instrument. Electronic and Computer music practices challenge our views of what a mu- sical instrument is and how it is expected to behave. Through the analysis of various documents by a wide range of musicians as diverse as Theremin, Schaeffer, Stockhausen, Mathews, Moore, Thenney, Risset, Buchla, Moog, Mumma, Martirano, Waisvisz, Rowe, and Puckette amongst others, we will attempt to un- derstand what new conceptions of musical instrument may have emerged with electric and digital media, and explore software implementations of some of their designs towards a final paper or computer system.
