Prof. Mark Slobin (Wesleyan University): “The Self and the City: Writing Detroit” (03/28)

Taking off from the 2016 article in “Ethnomusicology” on my work in Detroit music history, the talk will survey the topics and approach of the completed book manuscript, which blends personal and family accounts, oral history from interviewees, and archival sources to illuminate the musical life of America’s fourth-largest city, called “the capital of the twentieth century,” even as capitalism and racism were sowing the seeds of Detroit’s decline.

Mark Slobin is the Winslow-Kaplan   Professor of Music Emeritus at Wesleyan University and the author or editor of many books, on Afghanistan and Central Asia, eastern European Jewish music, film music, and ethnomusicology theory, two of which have received the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award: "Fiddler on the Move: Exploring the Klezmer World" and "Tenement Songs: Popular Music of the Jewish Immigrants.  His current project is on the musical life of Detroit, 1940s-60s. He has been President of the Society for Ethnomusicology and the Society for Asian Music.