I'l be using this blog to post important announcements and comments relevant to the ethomusicology program community here at Columbia, thoughts on graduate school in general, and other such stuff.

We just finished welcoming 11 newly admitted students in the department, all of whom came for a 2 day intensive orientation. It was great fun, and we've got some really interesting people coming in to our program next year, and into the department at large as well. Every year I notice how the conversation with newly admitted students moves further into questions of how to operate in the interdisciplinary environment that music scholarship has become while learning and mastering a specific disciplinary approach to music. It gives me a lot of optimism to have this conversation with bright people entering the profession. I don't think any of us will recognize "musicology" in ten years. I think it will deal substantially with popular music and social theoretic questions, that the world will be its frame of reference much more than Europe or the West, and that historiography, ethnography, and musical analysis -- to say nothing of performance and composition -- will find increasingly integrated applications.

But really, I just wanted to say "welcome" to our new students, and thank them and all of our current students and faculty who helped out to make their visit a great time for everyone.

--  Aaron Fox