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Barnard/Columbia Blues Symposium - Feb. 13-14 (free, but registration and tickets required!)

Event Start: 
Friday, February 13, 2015 - 9:00am - Saturday, February 14, 2015 - 11:00pm
Location: 
Event Oval, Diana Center, Barnard College (Enter at 117th/Broadway, accessible by 1 Train to 116th St.)

The Barnard College and Columbia University Blues Symposium will be a 2-day series of panel discussions and presentations engaging with the musical origins and cultural importance of the greatest American art form: the Blues. The Symposium has been organized by a group of Barnard and Columbia students. 

An incredible group of scholars, musicians, and writers will present on topics like the 12-bar blues, the collection of blues 78 rpm records, the 1969 Ann Arbor Blues Festival, and blues empress Bessie Smith. Panelists include Columbia's own Professor Farah Jasmine Griffin and Professor Bob O'Meally, Yale's Professor Daphne Brooks, as well as "Do Not Sell At Any Price" author and Pitchfork contributing writer Amanda Petrusich, and the Alan Lomax Archive's chief curator Nathan Salsburg.

For the full program, please click here. [6MB PDF file]

The event is free, but ticketed, and scheduled for February 13th and 14th of 2015, in the Event Oval of the Diana Center on Barnard's campus in Morningside Heights.  

To register and obtain tickets for specific programs and events please visit the following link (opens in new window). 
 

For further information, please write to:  bluessymposium@gmail.com.

TONIGHT! Prof. Elizabeth Povinelli - "The Otherwise in Geontological Power" (March 5, 6pm)

Event Start: 
Thursday, March 5, 2015 - 6:00pm
Location: 
701C Dodge Hall (Center for Ethnomusicology
The Center for Ethnomusicology presents a talk by
PROF. ELIZABETH POVINELLI
(Anthropology and Gender Studies, Columbia University)
"The Otherwise in Geontological Power"
Thursday, March 5, 2015
6PM
701C Dodge Hall
(Center for Ethnomusicology)
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC!

Elizabeth Povinelli is Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at COlumbia University.  Her writing has focused on developing a critical theory of late liberalism that would support an anthropology of the otherwise. Her first two books examine the governance of the otherwise in late liberal settler colonies from the perspective of the politics of recognition. Her most recent two books examined the same from the perspective of intimacy, embodiment, and narrative form. Prof. Povinelli's ethnographic analysis is animated by a critical engagement with the traditions of American pragmatism and continental immanent theory.

Click here for a full-sized poster (PDF)

CU Ethno Alum Prof. Adriana Helbig Publishes "Hip Hop Ukraine"

Prof. Adriana Helbig

Prof. Adriana Helbig

The Center for Ethnomusicology congratulates Adriana N. HelbigAssociate Professor of Music at The University of Pittsburgh, and a 2005 alumna of the Columbia Ethnomusicology PhD program, on the publication of her book Hip Hop Ukraine: Music, Race, and African Migration (2014, Indiana University Press). 


Hip Hop Ukraine
Book Description:
 In Hip Hop Ukraine, Prof. Helbig enters a world of urban music and dance competitions, hip hop parties, and recording studio culture to explore unique sites of interracial encounters among African students, African immigrants, and local populations in eastern Ukraine. Adriana N. Helbig combines ethnographic research with music, media, and policy analysis to examine how localized forms of hip hop create social and political spaces where an interracial youth culture can speak to issues of human rights and racial equality. She maps the complex trajectories of musical influence—African, Soviet, American—to show how hip hop has become a site of social protest in post-socialist society and a vehicle for social change."


Biography: Prof. Adriana Helbig is Associate Professor of Music and an affiliated faculty member in Cultural Studies, Women's Studies, Global Studies, and the Center for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She teaches courses on global hip-hop, world music, music, gender, and sexuality, music and technology, and cultural policy. She is also founder and director of the Carpathian Music Ensemble, a student performance group that specializes in the music of Eastern Europe, including Jewish klezmer and Gypsy music. Her research has been funded through grants and research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Councils for International Education, IREX, and Fulbright. She has held a research fellowship at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC and was an inaugural research fellow at the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh. Her articles on Romani (Gypsy) music, postsocialist cultural policy, music and piracy, music, race, and migration, and global hip-hop have appeared in edited collections and journals such as The Yearbook for Traditional Music, Current Musicology, and Popular Music. She is the coauthor, with Oksana Buranbaeva and Vanja Mladineo, of The Culture and Customs of Ukraine (Greenwood Press, 2009). 

Prof. Helbig completed her Columbia PhD in Ethnomusicology in 2005, with a dissertation entitled "Play for Me, Old Gypsy”: Music as Political Resource in the Romani Rights Movement in Ukraine, advised by Prof. Ana Maria Ochoa.

Prof. Helbig's Personal Website

Prof. Helbig's Faculty Page at the University of Pittsburgh.

Order Hip Hop Ukraine on Amazon.com

Other ordering options available through The University of Indiana Press.

Trevor Reed and Robin R. R. Gray Discuss Native American/First Nations Music Repatriation Projects (Wed 12/10, 1-3pm)

Event Start: 
Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - 1:00pm - 3:00pm
Location: 
701C Dodge Hall, Center for Ethnomusicology, Columbia Morningside Campus
The Center for Ethnomusicology Presents:

Native American Scholar/Activists Trevor Reed and Robin R. R. Gray Discuss Their Repatriations of Columbia's Laura Boulton Collection to Hopi and Tsimshian Communities

Wednesday,  December 10, 1-3PM 701C Dodge Hall (The Center for Ethnomusicology)

This colloquium will feature Trevor Reed (Hopi, current Columbia Ethnomusicology PhD and Columbia Law JD student, reporting on his work repatriating Laura Boulton's 1933 and 1940 Hopi music collections, and Robin R. R. Gray, (Tsimshian, Lax'Kwalaams, Ginaxangiik Tribe, and Mikisew Cree First Nation, Anthropology PhD candidate at U Mass/Amherst), who is working to repatriate Boulton's 1933 Tsimshian (Northwest Coast) recordings, made (like the Hopi 1933 recordings) at the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition.

Reed and Gray are working to redevelop these recordings as assets for contemporary communities (and as the long-alienated cultural property of these communities) descended from the performers on the recordings, at the intersection of ethnomusicology, anthropology, cultural rights activism, archiving, and law.  Their work embraces and helps define current critical practice for scholarly and legal activism in accounting for and remediating the exploitation and hoarding of Native American cultural patrimony by collectors, ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, commercial interests, and scholarly and curatorial institutions throughout the 20th century. 

To learn more about Trevor Reed's work, visit the Hopi Music Repatriation Project blog here:
http://hopimusic.wordpress.com/

Listen to Trevor Reed discuss the project with Hopi Cultural Preservation Office (HCPO)repatriation coordinator, Lee Wayne Lomayestewa:
https://hopimusic.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/03-podcast_leewayne-final.mp3

___________________________

To learn more about Robin R. R. Gray's work, visit her website here:
http://www.sfu.ca/ipinch/about/ipinch-people/fellows/robin-r-r-gray

Or see a video interview with Robin R. R. Gray  here:
IPinCH Conversations / Robin R.R. Gray on Reconciliation and Repatriation  

____________________

General information on the Center's extensive repatriation efforts can be found here:
http://news.columbia.edu/research/3186

Or on video here: 
http://vimeo.com/68637578


Book Launch for Prof. Ana María Ochoa Gautier's "Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia" (11/25, 7PM)

Event Start: 
Tuesday, November 25, 2014 - 7:00pm
Location: 
Book Culture, 536 W 112th St, New York, NY

You are invited to Book Culture Tuesday, November 25th, at 7pm for the launch of Prof. Ana María Ochoa Gautier's new book, Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia, published by Duke University Press.

Event Date: Tuesday, Nov. 25th, 7:00pm
Location:  Book Culture (event link here)
536 W 112th St, New York, NY 10025

In Aurality, Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier explores how listening has been central to the production of notions of language, music, voice, and sound that determine the politics of life. Drawing primarily from nineteenth-century Colombian sources, Ochoa Gautier locates sounds produced by different living entities at the juncture of the human and nonhuman. Her "acoustically tuned" analysis of a wide array of texts reveals multiple debates on the nature of the aural. These discussions were central to a politics of the voice harnessed in the service of the production of different notions of personhood and belonging. In Ochoa Gautier's groundbreaking work, Latin America and the Caribbean emerge as a historical site where the politics of life and the politics of expression inextricably entangle the musical and the linguistic, knowledge and the sensorial.

Ana María Ochoa Gautier is Associate Professor of Music and Director of the Center for Ethnomusicology at Columbia University. She is the author of several books and many articles.

$24.95
ISBN: 9780822357513
Availability: Coming Soon - Available for Pre-Order Now
Published: Duke University Press - November 21st, 2014

Rolando Peña: How To Be A Latin American Vanguard Artist and Not Die Trying (Nov. 19, 4-6pm)

Event Start: 
Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - 4:37pm
Location: 
701C Dodge Hall (Center for Ethnomusicology), Columbia U. Morningside Campus, Broadway @ 116th St.

Rolando PeñaThe Center for Ethnomusicology Presents:

Rolando Peña
"How To Be A Latin American Vanguard Artist and Not Die Trying."

Wed. Nov. 19, 4pm-6pm
Center for Ethnomusicology
701C Dodge Hall
Columbia University Morningside Campus
116th and Broadway

Free and open to the public!


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click image for full-sized poster!

Rolando Peña is an internationally known multimedia artist who has been involved in theatre, dance, and fine arts since 1958. A student of architecture and design at Universidad Central de Venezuela, he joined the theater faculty of that university in 1963. In 1965 he staged the pioneering multimedia shows Testimonio and Homenaje a Henry Miller with the writer José Ignacio Cabrujas, which featured dance, theater, films, slide projections, and other elements, the first such performances in Caracas.

Supported by a grant from the Venezuelan government, he then moved to New York City to study dance with Martha Graham, Alwin Nicolais, and Merce Cunningham. He was quickly accepted by some of the iconic figures of the day. In 1966 Allen Ginsburg and Timothy Leary joined him for the psychedelic show The Illumination of the Buddha, and the following year he founded and directed the Latin American vanguard group The Foundation for the Totality, which presented exhibitions, happenings, films, publications, and other projects. Soon he became involved with Andy Warhol and his famous Factory: Warhol filmed many of The Foundation for the Totality’s happenings, and Mr. Pena acted in some of Warhol’s films.

Rolando Peña’s own film Diálogo con Ché, which he scripted and acted in and José Soltero directed and shot in New York, was invited to the 1969 Cannes Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival, and the Cinémathèque Palais Chaillot in Paris. Moving back to multimedia, in 1975 he exhibited Santería at the Bogarin Workshop Gallery in New York, and this same multimedia installation was the opening exhibit at the Annex at the Contemporary Art Museum in Caracas.

But beginning in 1980 he found the theme that became the predominant focus of his subsequent work: crude oil. Mr. Peña uses oil as an expression both of Venezuela and of how Venezuela is perceived internationally. By means of sculpture, graphics, film, and video, and sometimes live performance, he examines the ideas of power, money, and religion through the vehicle of oil and the machinery associated with its extraction.

His initial exhibition on this theme was entitled The Oil Tower, which was mounted in 1980 at the Alternative Museum. He was supported in part during these early years by Fellowships from the Venezuelan National Endowment for the Arts (CONAC) and CAPS in New York, and a grant from the National Art Foundation in Venezuela (FUNDARTE). In 1997 he was chosen to represent Venezuela at the 47th Venice Biennial. His project El Modelo Estándar de la Materia: Tributo al Siglo XX, an interactive multimedia installation, was mounted in 1999 at the Sofía Imber Contemporary Art Museum in Caracas. He presented many video installations with oil as metaphor in the ensuing years, including The Oil Spill, at the 2000 London Biennial; El Modelo Estándar de la Materia, at ExpoHannover in 2000; Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking: God’s Barrel, at Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo El Gallo in Salamanca in 2002, which then travelled to the Instituto Italo Latino-Americano in Rome and the Museo Pinacoteca Amedeo Modigliani in Follonica, Italy, and was revived as a mural for the Andres Bello Catholic University in Caracas in 2008.

Increasingly recognized as an important figure in the art world, several tributes to his work were organized, such as at “Interarte 99” in Valencia, Spain, in 1999; at Feria Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo, at Mercado de Fuencarral in Madrid, organized by the European Association of Young Artists, in 2000; and the lecture series “Arte Ciencia y Tecnología, en la obra de Rolando Peña” presented at the Andrés Bello Catholic University. In addition he served as a Professor of Multimedia at the Ateneo de Caracas in 1972-73; as an invited conferee at a conference on contemporary art at the University of St. Denis in Paris in 1985; as a guest artist at the Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones from 1998 to 2001; as a guest lecturer at Andrés Bello Catholic University from 1999 to 2007; and as the organizer of special events for the Organización Nelson Garrido (ONG) in Caracas since 2001.

His knowledge of contemporary art has led to his curating several international shows: Les Droits de l’Art at Chapelle de la Salpêtrière, Paris (1989); Pierre Restany Le Coer et la Raison, at Morleix, France (1991); V Muestra Internacional de Video, in Seville, Spain (1991); AU DELA, Observatori 2001, at Segundo Festival Internacional de Arte, in Valencia; and Performance Art (Dialogues-Performance) at ONG in 2007.

During his Guggenheim Fellowship term, Mr. Peña will be working on a new interactive multimedia exhibition entitled Make Oil Green, which adds the topic of global warming to his persistent interest in and exploration of the theme of oil.

Jocelyne Guilbault: "Roy Cape's Labor of Love: Theorizing Work Ethics through Musical Biography"

Event Start: 
Thursday, October 23, 2014 - 4:00pm
Location: 
701C Dodge Hall (Center for Ethnomusicology)

The Center for Ethnomusicology is pleased to present:

Prof. Jocelyne Guilbalt (University of California, Berkeley)

Roy Cape's Labor of Love: Theorizing Work Ethics through Musical Biography

Thursday Oct. 23, 2014

4:00  - 6:00 pm
Center for Ethnomusicology
701C Dodge Hall (Columbia Morningside Campus)

Jocelyne Guilbault is Professor of Ethnomusicology at the Music Department of the University of California, Berkeley. Since 1980, she has done extensive fieldwork in the French Creole- and English-speaking islands of the Caribbean on both traditional and popular music. Informed by a postcolonial perspective, she published several articles on issues of representation, aesthetics, the cultural politics of West Indian music industries, multiculturalism, and world music. She is the author of Zouk: World Music in the West Indies (1993), a study that maps the complex musical network among the French-Creole speaking islands, and the vexed relations that are articulated through music between the West Indian French Departments and the Metropole, France. Co-editor of Border Crossings: New Directions in Music Studies (1999-2000), she has since then been on several Editorial boards, including The Black Music Research Journal, the Society for Ethnomusicology Journal, and MUSICultures (Canada). In 2007, she published Governing Sound: the Cultural Politics of Trinidad's Carnival Musics (2007), a study that explores the ways the calypso music scene became audibly entangled with projects of governing, audience demands, and market incentives. Her new book about and with Roy Cape, titled Roy Cape: A Life on the Calypso and Soca Banstand (2014) is both a study about reputation, circulation, and work ethics, and a dialogic experiment in story.

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Event Sponsors: 
 Center for Ethnomusicology



















_________________________

Congratulations to Dr. Melissa Gonzalez!


The Center for Ethnomusicology warmly congratulates Dr. Melissa Gonzalezwho successfully defended her PhD dissertation on September 17, 2014.  Dr. Gonzalez is also an alumna of the Barnard College music major.  Her dissertation, advised by Prof. Christopher Washburne,  is entitled: "Cien por Ciento Nacional!" Panamanian Musica Tipica and the Quest for National and Territorial Sovereignty."  

Dissertation Abstract:  "In this dissertation, I investigate the socio-cultural and musical transfigurations of a rural-identified musical genre known as musica tipica as it engages with the dynamics of Panama's rural/urban divide and the country's nascent engagement with the global political economy. Though regarded as emblematic of Panama's national folklore, musica tipica is also the basis for the country's principal and most commercially successful popular music style known by the same name. The primary concern of this project is to examine how and why this particular genre continues to undergo simultaneous processes of folklorization and commercialization. As an unresolved genre of music, I argue that musica tipica can offer rich insight into the politics of working out individual and national Panamanian identities.   

Based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Panama City and several rural communities in the country's interior, I examine the social struggles that subtend the emergence of musica tipica's genre variations within local, national, and transnational contexts. Through close ethnographic analysis of particular case studies, this work explores how musicians, fans, and the country's political and economic structures constitute divisions in regards to generic labeling and how differing fields of musical circulation and meaning are imagined."

Congratulations to Dr. Gonzalez!

Congratulations to Dr. Shannon Garland!

Dr. Shannon Garland

The Center for Ethnomusicology warmly congratulates Dr. Shannon Garland, who successfully defended her doctoral dissertation on September 5, 2014.  Dr. Garland's dissertation, advised by Prof. Ana Maria Ochoa, is entitled: "Music, Affect, Value, and Labor: Late Capitalism and the (Mis)Productions of Indie Music in Chile and Brazil."


Dissertation Abstract: This dissertation traces the tensions surrounding indie music production in Santiago, Chile and Sao Paulo, Brazil. I conducted several years of ethnographic research on locally situated, yet transnationally interpolated, musical production, circulation and listening practices in Santiago and Sao Paulo. I open by detailing the expansion of the indie touring market from the global north into both cities, theorizing the enlistment of affect as a neoliberal technique for producing monetary value. The next chapter considers spaces for musical association as forms of infrastructure that both emerge from and themselves help constitute musical-social networks in Santiago. I follow by showing how the history of Brazilian individuals' engagement with particular sets of indie sounds from the global north bear upon the contemporary formation of infrastructures of social relations, musical aesthetics, and places for musical and social association. Finally, I detail how the tensions between the construction of audience, value, aesthetics and circulation arising from new production structures manifest in the politics of a new type of Brazilian institution called Fora do Eixo. Here, I inspect the logics of aesthetic valuation in building structures for music production within a complex state-private nexus of cultural funding in Brazil. As a whole, this dissertation explores the political struggles emerging as actors seek to establish new structures for participating in live shows and for playing music as both a creative practice and as an economic activity within emerging forms of communication made possible by digital media. Each struggle is simultaneously interpolated by the messy articulation of transnationally-produced notions of aesthetics, authentic modes of engagement with music, and moral-ethical ways of organizing music production, circulation and remuneration as a social practice. The dissertation thus highlights the way new media and economic logics build upon and clash with historical practices of production, evaluation of aesthetics, and regimes for mediating the artistic, the economic, and the social.

Sound and Vision Colloquium Series

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Center for Ethnomusicology 2014 Sound & Vision Series

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