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High Country News: "Is a new copyright law a ‘colonization of knowledge’?" (feat/Interviews with Aaron Fox and Trevor Reed)

High Country News article image

Journalist Graham Lee Brewer (Cherokee) reports for High Country News on the potential impacts of new federal legislation affecting the copyright protections afforded to historic audio recordings ("The Music Modernization Act").  Features interviews with Prof. Aaron Fox, Director of the Center for Ethnomusicology, and Prof. Trevor Reed, (Arizona State University School of Law), who is an alumnus of Columbia's PhD program and Law School and has worked extensively with Center collections, as well as Prof. Jane Anderson (NYU, Anthropology), a friend of the Center. 

The article may be accessed here: 
https://www.hcn.org/articles/tribal-affairs-is-a-new-copyright-law-a-col...

A key quote: 

"The problem with intellectual property law is you cast all value in monetary terms. The ethical perspective on Native American field recordings, from anthropologists at least, and from many Native American community members too, is that other kinds of values attach to these,” said Aaron A. Fox, an associate professor of ethnomusicology at Columbia University. “They’re values of sovereignty, rather than exchange value.”

Fox said that while many also see intellectual value in releasing documented history into the public realm, basic social justice requires that Indigenous communities should be allowed to decide which of their traditions are special and how their distribution should be regulated. The circumstances under which most of the recordings were taken are simply too unequal, he said.

Prof. Kate Galloway: "Listening to Indigenous Knowledge of the Land in Three Sound Art Installations" (Friday 4/12, 4:30PM)

Event Start: 
Friday, April 12, 2019 - 4:30pm
Location: 
701C Dodge Hall (The Center for Ethnomusioclogy)


The Center for Ethnomusicology at Columbia University Presents a Colloquium Talk by:

Kate Galloway
(Visiting Assistant Professor of Music, Wesleyan University)

"
Listening to Indigenous Knowledge of the Land in Three Sound Art Installations."

Friday, April 12, 2019
4:30PM-6:00PM
701C Dodge Hall (Center for Ethnomusicology)
Columbia University Morningside Campus (Broadway at 116th St.)

Free and Open to the General Public, All Are Welcome!

For further information and assistance with accommodation, please write to: aaf19@columbia.edu

Abstract:  In this paper I explore the soundscapes and resonances of Rebecca Belmore’s (Anishnaabe), Julie Nagam’s (Anishinaabe/Métis/German/Syrian), and Elizabeth LaPensée’s (Anishinaabe/Métis/Irish) soundwork and how their sound art reflects their concern for the environment and a profound commitment to Indigenous ways of knowing, making, and listening. Working at the intersecting borders of art and politics, they perform sonic interventions into settler colonial spaces, such as the National Parks system, the art gallery, and the game industry. Belmore’s work across different artistic and performance media is a crucial site of Indigenous knowledge formation. In sound installations such as Wave Sound (2017), Belmore explores pressing issues that concern both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, including, water and land rights, violence against Indigenous people by the state and police, and the embodied and viscerally sensed impact of global climate change. Similarly, in Our future is in the land: If we listen to it (2017), Nagam uses a variety of media, including light, digital projection, and innovative sound technology to create an immersive 360-degree installation that combines environmental field recordings and the voices of Indigenous storytellers with line drawings and projections of an arboreal landscape to highlight our destructive and complex relationship with the environment. And in LaPensée’s social impact game Honour Water (2016), an Anishinaabe singing mobile media game app, the combination of activist play, history, bodies, hardware, music, and code, brings awareness to threats to the water systems and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK).

I listen acutely and with care to these three sound art installations and the multisensory ways music and sound are used to resound Indigenous futures, traditions, and ways of knowing on their own terms. Each of these sound art installations gravitates towards the ecological and considers what healthy and unhealthy relationships between humans and the nonhuman world–plants, animals, natural resources–sound like. Belmore, Nagam, and LaPensée introduce marginalized perspectives and voices to address the problematic settler colonial authority and whiteness that conspicuously dominates the discourse on music, sound, and environment, a relatively homogenous and exclusionary artistic, technological, and scientific discussion.

Speaker Biography: Kate Galloway, Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Wesleyan University,  specializes in North American music that responds to and problematizes environmental issues and relationships, musical expressions of Indigenous modernities and Traditional Ecological Knowledge, sound studies, new media and audiovisual culture, and the digital humanities. Her current book project Remix, Reuse, Recycle: Music, Media Technologies, and Remediating the Environment is under contract with Oxford University Press and examines how and why contemporary artists remix and recycle sounds, musics, and texts encoded with environmental knowledge. She holds the PhD in Music from the University of Toronto. 

Dr. Langston C. Wilkins: "Still Holdin’ Slab: The Automobility of Houston, Texas’ Hip Hop Music Scene" (Friday, March 29 at 4PM)

Event Start: 
Friday, March 29, 2019 - 4:00pm
Location: 
701C Dodge Hall (The Center for Ethnomusioclogy)
The Center for Ethnomusicology presents a colloquium talk by: 

Dr. Langston Collin Wilkins
(Director of the Center for Washington Cultural Traditions)

"Still Holdin’ Slab: The Automobility of Houston, Texas’ Hip Hop Music Scene."

Friday, March 29, 2019, from 4:00PM-6:00PM

701C Dodge Hall (Columbia Morningside Campus @ 116th and Broadway)
Free and Open to the Public -- ALL are always welcome
Reception to follow
For information or special accommodations, write: aaf19@columbia.edu

Abstract:  Within hip hop discourse, Houston, Texas is known as the “City of Syrup,” a reference to cold medicine based drug concoction that have
 become commonplace in Houston rap music and related media. It is also called “Screwston” in memory of the late Houston-based DJ Screw and the slowed down sound he contributed to hip hop. Just as important as these elements, however, is SLAB, the vehicle culture developed within Houston’s African-American neighborhoods. In this presentation, I argue that SLAB is a catalyst in the production of the scene, being a primary influence on musical aesthetics and cultural identity.


Slabs are typically large American sedans that have been tricked out with explosive paint jobs, various types of vehicle adornment, and booming sound systems. Slab culture coalesced in the early 1980s due to the development of “swangas,” a colloquialism for the rims that came standard on certain Cadillac models. Slab owners invest thousands of dollars in the creation of their vehicles, purchasing their cars when they are in modest states and slowly converting them into something more elaborate. During this process, the vehicle becomes inscribed with individual experience and identity and broadcasts this to the outside world.

Since the early 1990s, slab has played a key role in the indigenization of hip hop music in Houston influencing the creation of music groups as well as becoming source material for hip hop lyrics and a symbolic producer in the composition of instrumentals. Furthermore, the cars have functioned as markers of authentic Houston hip hop identity and experience both within and outside of the city. Using insight gained from years of ethnographic and archival research, I will explore the complex role of SLAB in the production of Houston’s multifaceted hip hop scene. 

Speaker Bio:
  Langston Collin Wilkins, PhD is a Seattle-based folklorist, ethnomusicologist and writer. His research interests include hip hop culture, urban folklife and African American music. He received his PhD in Folklore & Ethnomusicology from Indiana University in 2016. He also holds a Masters degree in African American and African Diaspora Studies from Indiana University and a Bachelors of Arts in English from the University of Texas at Austin. Langston is currently the Director of the Center for Washington Cultural Traditions, a collaboration between Humanities Washington and the Washington State Arts Commission that seeks to document and preserve the traditional culture of Washington state.

Dr. Yun Emily Wang awarded Charles Seeger Prize, Martin Hatch Prize, and Clara Henderson Prize at SEM 2018!


Dr. Yun Emily WangThe Center for Ethnomusicology joins our colleagues in the Department of Music in congratulating Dr. Yun Emily Wang for this remarkable trifecta of awards at SEM 2018.

Currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Music at Columbia, Dr. Wang recently received the Charles Seeger Prize, the Martin Hatch Prize, and the Clara Henderson Prize at the Society for Ethnomusicology 2018 Annual Meeting. The Charles Seeger prize is awarded by SEM and it recognizes the most outstanding paper presented by a graduate student at SEM 2017. The Martin Hatch prize recognizes the best student paper on a topic relevant to Asian music presented at SEM, and it's awarded by the Society for Asian Music, which meets in conjunction with SEM every year. The Clara Henderson prize is from SEM's Section on Dance, Movement, Gesture, and recognizes the best student paper on a topic related to dance, movement, and gesture.  

William Cheng: "...But the Nazis Love(d) Music, Too" (Colloquium Talk, Fri 4/19, 4pm)

Event Start: 
Friday, April 19, 2019 - 4:00pm
Location: 
620 Dodge Hall, Dept. of Music, Columbia Morningside Campus @116th and Broadway

The Center for Ethnomusicology, in collaboration with the Department of Music Colloquium Series in Musicology and Music Theory, presents a talk by:

Prof. William Cheng 
Associate Professor of Music at Dartmouth College

" ...But the Nazis Love(d) Music, Too." 

About how obvious such conventional wisdom 
sounds, yet how the wisdom remains --feels-- sufficiently unobvious as to merit repeated articulation in academia and pop culture alike.

Friday April 19, 2019
4:00PM-6:00PM EST
620 Dodge Hall, Columbia University
(Broadway at 116th St.)
Free and Open to the Public -- Reception to Follow 
For accommodations or further information contact: aaf19 @ columbia. edu

William Cheng
is an Associate Professor of Music at Dartmouth College. He's a founding coeditor of University of Michigan's Music & Social Justice series, and the author of Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination (Oxford, 2014), Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good (Michigan, 2016), and Loving Music Till It Hurts (Oxford, forthcoming 2019).

Prof. Siv B. Lie - “Music that Tears You Apart: Jazz Manouche and the Qualia of Ethnorace” (FRIDAY FEB 15 @ 4PM)

Event Start: 
Friday, February 15, 2019 - 4:00pm - 6:00pm
Location: 
701C Dodge Hall (The Center for Ethnomusicology)

The Center for Ethnomusicology at Columbia University presents a colloquium talk by:

Prof. Siv B. Lie
(Univ. of Maryland at College Park)

“Music that Tears You Apart: Jazz Manouche and the Qualia of Ethnorace”

_________________

DATE AND TIME: Friday, Feb,. 15, 2019, 4PM
LOCATION: 701C Dodge Hall, Columbia Morningside Campus @ 116th St. 
Free and Open to the Public!
Contact aaf19@columbia.edu for accommodations or further information.

Abstract: Jazz manouche is a genre through with notions of Manouche (French Romani/“Gypsy”) ethnoracial identities are performed and articulated. Drawing on ethnographic research in the French jazz manouche scene, this presentation takes a semiotic approach to investigate how ethnoracial categories are generated through sonic perception and language about sound. My analysis foregrounds fluidities between expressive practices by exploring how sensory experiences (“qualia”) of power, rawness, and “feeling” are used to correlate particular musical sounds with ethnoracialized bodies. These discourses can serve or compromise Manouche interests as they naturalize ideologies about social difference.
Speaker Bio: Siv B. Lie is an assistant professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research in ethnomusicology and linguistic anthropology examines relationships between cultural production and minority rights. She focuses on how Romani (“Gypsy”) populations use music and language to serve their own social, political, and economic interests. Her current book project, tentatively titled Django Generations: Constructing Ethnorace, Citizenship, and Jazz Manouche in France, argues that music and discourse about music profoundly shape senses of ethnoracial and national belonging among French Manouche populations. Through ethnographic, performance-based, and archival research methods, her work takes an interdisciplinary approach to exploring the politics of expressive practices and the commodification of culture. Dr. Lie has published in Popular Music and Society, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and Jazz and Culture. She is co-founder and Principal Coordinator of the Initiative for Romani Music at New York University, an organization that brings together scholars, artists, and community members to raise awareness about Romani musics and cultures, and is Co-Curator of the Music section of RomArchive, a digital archive of Romani arts set to launch in 2019. Dr. Lie earned her Ph.D. from the Department of Music at New York University and is also a violinist, violist, and vocalist in a variety of genres.

Ana Alonso Minutti (U New Mexico): Sounding Protest & Enacting Resilience in the New Mexican Desert

Event Start: 
Friday, November 30, 2018 - 4:00pm
Location: 
701C Dodge Hall (The Center for Ethnomusioclogy)
The Center for Ethnomusicology at Columbia University Presents a Talk by:

Prof. Ana Alonso Minutti (UNM)

Ana Alonso Minutti

(Associate Professor of Music, University of New Mexico)

Sounding Protest & Enacting Resilience in the New Mexican Desert 

Friday, November 30, 2018
4PM-6PM
701C Dodge Hall (The Center for Ethnomusiclogy, Columbia Monringside Campus, Broadway @ 116th St.) 
Free and Open to the Public!



Description: Since 2010, Albuquerque has been the site for the feminist music festival Gatas y Vatas, a platform for cis and trans women, genderqueer, and non-binary performers. Drawing from ethnographic work, in this presentation I explore the ways in which performers from the Gatas y Vatas network embrace a decolonial intersectional position to create counter-hegemonic strategies to disrupt racial, class, and gender normativities. In light of the results of the 2016 election, the 2017 iteration of the festival was centered on the concept of “protest,” and more than forty-five visual artists and performers from the US Southwest and beyond responded to the call. While rooted in a gendered activism, the network challenges the geographic limits imposed by colonization through embracing a level of identification with Hispanic and Indigenous women across the US-Mexico border. I argue that their performances challenge the power dynamics at the border by exposing flows of discriminatory violence across the two nation states. During the presentation I will discuss several sets performed at Gatas y Vatas in the last years, with particular attention to the 2017 festival iteration. While highly personal, the sets reflect the network’s decolonizing efforts to counteract the escalated levels of racism, sexism, and classism of the current US political climate, as felt at the local level. More than a music festival, Gatas y Vatas has become a space for revolutionary social activism and a site for community healing, resiliency, and hope.

Speaker Biography: Ana Alonso Minutti was born and raised in Puebla, México, where she graduated from the Universidad de las Américas. She migrated to the U.S. to pursue graduate studies at the University of California, Davis, where she obtained M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in musicology. Her scholarship focuses on music traditions from Mexico and the US-Mexico border, experimental and avant-garde expressions, intersectionality, religion, and decolonial methodologies. She has presented her work throughout the Americas and Europe, and has published in Argentina, Mexico, and the U.S. Recently, she coedited the volume Experimentalisms in Practice: Music Perspectives from Latin America (Oxford University Press, 2018), and her book Mario Lavista and Musical Cosmopolitanism in Mexico is under contract by Oxford University Press. 

As an extension of her written scholarship, she directed and produced the video documentary Cubos y permutaciones: plástica, música y poesía de vanguardia en México, which was exhibited at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico City in 2017. Apart from her scholarly work, she has engaged in various composition projects, particularly for vocal ensembles. Her latest piece, Voces del desierto, is to be performed in the multidisciplinary arts project Migrant Songs at Albuquerque’s National Hispanic Cultural Center on March 2019. 

Currently, she is associate professor of music, a faculty affiliate of the Latin American and Iberian Institute, and research associate of the Southwest Hispanic Research Institute at the University of New Mexico.

Film Screening with Ethnomusicologist Gerald Coté: Miroir en Face ("Mirror Image") Friday Nov. 9, 6PM

Event Start: 
Friday, November 9, 2018 - 6:00pm - 8:00pm
Location: 
701C Dodge Hall (The Center for Ethnomusioclogy)
The Center for Ethnomusicology at Columbia University is Pleased to Present a Film Screening of: 

Miroir en Face ("Mirror Image")

Friday Nov. 9, 2018
6PM-8PM  (NOTE TIME CHANGE FROM EARLIER ANNOUNCEMENT)
701C Dodge Hall (The Center for Ethnomusicology, Columbia Morningside Campus, Broadway @ 116th St.) 
Free and Open to the Public!

We will be joined by Canadian Ethnomusicologist 
Gerald Coté (Professeur invité Faculté de musique, université Laval, Québec) who appears in the film) for the screening. 

Film producers: Erica Pomerance and Jacinthe Combary
Film distibutor : Les productions Via le Monde Inc. and Taling Dialo.

Miroir en Face is a documentary film about a trip made by young Cree (Candian First Nations) from James Bay North of Quebec to visit Dogon Country, Mali, Africa. 
in November, 2005.  The documentary focuses on the encounter between these Quebec Aboriginal youth and the Dogon they meet in Bandiagara. 

Biography: Gérald Côté obtained his Ph.D. in ethnomusicology in 1997. He has published several essays including Les 101 Blues du Québec and Processus de création et musique populaire, as well as numerous articles and conferences given in Romania, Brazil, Mexico and Africa. He is the co-director and co-founder of the Acte Sept Ethnomusicological Research Center (CREAS-in french) since 1995, a study center located in Bamako on the traditional practice of Malian music, which led him to spend several stays on the African West Coast. Having been a consultant for many documentaries, he has traveled to more than 40 countries on behalf of various projects celebrating cultural diversity. From 2004 to 2007 he worked on the adaptation of a music program for Cree youths at the James Bay School Board. In 2006, Gérald Côté bring a group of Cree and Inuit students from Chisasibi in Africa for a special encounter with the Malian Dogon. A year after this experience a Canadian producer release a documentary about this exceptional experience.

In 2011, he worked on the design of an international exhibition at the Musée de la civilization in Quebec City on the theme of the musical influence of Africa on the music of the American continents. The success of his latest book Jazz from Inside -for an anthropology of African-American music-, gave him a reissue and was the subject of lectures at the Berklee Colledge of Music in Boston. As a visiting professor at Laval University in Quebec, he continues his research about the link between the social context and de musical aesthetic around the world in a multifactorial and holistic approach.







RPM LIVE: Indigenous Hip Hop at Nublu! (Thursday OCT. 18, 8PM) and Snotty Nose Rez Kids at the Center (WED OCT 17 4PM)

RPM LIve PosterThe Center for Ethnomusicology at Columbia University is proud to consponsor this exciting show at NUBLU on Thursday Oct. 18.  We also invite members of the community to join us for a free pre-show meet and greet and jam with headliner act and Polaris Prize winning First Nations Hip Hop group Snotty Nose Rez Kids (Haisla First Nation, Vancouver, BC, Canada) on WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 17 from 4PM to 6PM in the Center (701C Dodge Hall, Columbia Morningside Campus).  Space will be limited so come on time!  The presentation by SNRK will be facilitated by Indigenous hip-hop scholar (and Columbia College and IRAAS (MA) alumna!) Lauren Amsterdam, and attended by Jarrett Martineau, the head of RPM MEDIA (Toronto).

WHAT: Snotty Nose Rez Kids with Lauren Amsterdam and Jarrett Martineau (RPM)
WHERE: 701C Dodge Hall (Center for Ethnomusicology, Columbia U Morningside Campus)
WHEN: Wednesday Oct. 17, 2018; 4PM-6PM
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
_________________
Revolutions Per Minute, a global Indigenous music platform & label, and brujas, an NYC-based feminist skate collective, join forces to bring you a dope evening of Indigenous and WOC/POC hip-hop + music from across the continent. 

FEATURING:
• Snotty Nose Rez Kids  (BC/CAN)
• CHHOTI MAA (MX/OAK) x Dio Ganhdih (NY)
• ASCXNSION (PDX) 
• No intimate (Brujas/NYC)

Fresh off their recent nomination for the Polaris Music Prize, Canada's most prestigious music award, Haisla Nation hip-hop group Snotty Nose Rez Kids will make their New York debut at RPM Live. Joining the bill with their firepower flows and potent politics are Indigenous rapper CHHOTI MAA from Guanajuato by way of Oakland, alongside Haudenosaunee MC Dio Ganhdih. Portland-based hip-hop artist ASCXNSION will also make her NYC debut. NYC skate crew and culture makers, brujas are representing, and deejay No intimate will hold down the foundation of rhythm & sound. Plus locally-grown herbal treats offered by Herban Cura. Don't sleep.

RPM Live : 012 NYC 
Thursday, October 18
Nublu Classic (62 Avenue C, NY)
Doors: 8pm
Tix: $10/15
Art by @lexx_valdez 

BRUJAS is an urban, free-form, creative and autonomous organization that seeks to build radical political coalition through youth culture. We express community through skateboarding, art and political organizing.

• Snotty Nose Rez Kids
RPM Records artists Snotty Nose Rez Kids (SNRK) are an Indigenous hip hop duo currently based out of Vancouver, BC. Their most recent release The Average Savage was shortlisted for the 2018 Polaris Music Prize, Canada's most prestigious music award. Proudly hailing from the Haisla Nation, SNRK creates music that pays homage to their upbringing on the Rez in Kitimaat Village while also touching upon larger themes related to Indigenous identity, politics and resistance in ways that engage a diverse audience.

• CHHOTI MAA
CHHOTI MAA was born out of a tradition of migrants in Guanajuato and forced by the Mexican post-NAFTA exodus into movement. Her raps have roots in her grandmothers poetic recitation and in Mexican oral tradition. She established herself as a rapper/singer in Richmond VA, but deepened her freestyle & lyrical skills in Trujillo, Peru. She's now based in Oakland and her music deals with decolonial living, migrant swag and reconstructing the womyn temple. CHHOTI MAA is a cultural producer-organizer, educator, bruja, writer and artist. 

• Dio Ganhdih
Dio Ganhdih is a queer indigenous rapper with a heart beat based in Brooklyn, an imagination spun in upstate New York, and a nervous system best suited for the Bay Area. From deep within Mother Nature's beauterus, Dio Ganhdih, otherwise known as Heavily Falling Snow, delivers subhersive and unapologetically raw rhymes. Dio utilizes poetry and lyricism to push cultural resiliency while resisting settler-colonialism and distorting imperialist visions of her native homeland. Her latest EP "Do It Ourselves" was released in 2017.

• ASCXNSION
ASCXNSION is a hip-hop emcee, spoken word poet, visual artist, and producer from Portland, OR, making her NYC debut at RPM Live. Her 2018 EP, Dripping Gold, blends trap beats, dope lyrics, and Indigenous consciousness to electrifying effect.

• No intimate
No Intimate is an NYC-based DJ with a techy, leftfield approach that is heavily influenced by her experimental music studies and arts-accessibility work. In addition to playing at Yaeji’s Curry In No Hurry event series, No Intimate can be heard on the airwaves at the Lot radio, as well as on Jubilee’s most recent Magic City compilation. 


The Columbia Ethnomusicology Phd Program Is Accepting Applicants for 2019 Matriculation

Important notice to prospective PhD program applicants: 
The Columbia Ethnomusicology PhD program admits cohorts in two consecutive years out of each three year period.
 We ARE  admitting a cohort for 2019, and therefore we ARE accepting applications in the fall of 2018.  We will again accept applications next year as well, in Fall 2019, for matriculation in 2020. We will not be accepting applications in 2020. 

Please contact the Area Chair, Prof. Christopher Washburne by email
 
(cjw5@columbia.edu ) with questions about this schedule and about the process of applying, including visiting the program. 

See our "FAQ" for PhD Program Applicants HERE for valuable information.

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