Rāga In The sword and the flute, an exquisite documentary on Indian culture told entirely with miniature paintings, the court and the temple offer clashing views of human experience. The dominance of the 16th-century Muslim Mughal emperor, Akbar, adopts a symbiosis with the Hindu Rajputs that is evident in Indian music even today. The lighter-skinned…
Author: SEM
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 6,700 times in 2015. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 6 trips to carry that many people. Click here to…
Klaus Wachsmann Klaus Wachsmann’s remark (quoted above) was made when a mother singer burst into tears after singing for him on one of his first recording safaris in rural Uganda in 1950. It was discussed in the two-part exchange (Ethnomusicology 59/3, Fall 2015, 475–82) following the appearance of “The audible future: Reimagining the role of…
David McAllester in 2005 (Photo courtesy of Alan R. Burdette) Editor’s note: In 2004 the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Board of Directors asked Matthew Allen to interview his friend and former teacher David P. McAllester, Professor Emeritus of Music at Wesleyan University, on the occasion of the latter’s award of an Honorary Membership in the Society….
The memory of the symposium is still quite vivid to me and it comes as something of a shock to realize how long ago this was. (Robert Garfias, “Introduction and Commentary. Reflections on the Symposium,” p. 2) A valuable historical resource is available at this link, thanks to Robert Garfias. I offer a few reflections…
I have long felt the need for another kind of forum at conferences—supplementing paper sessions and roundtables—that encourages more intimate and sustained intellectual discussions between scholars with overlapping interests. As President of MIDSEM in 2013 I had the opportunity to introduce a new workshop format called Ethno in the Rough at the Midwest Chapter…
In a recent edition of the SEM newsletter, Robert Garfias reflected on the issue of music endangerment: [L]ike biological diversity, species are disappearing, languages are disappearing. And in a sense cultures are disappearing. Every few years somebody dies who was the last person who knew how to do something or other; the last person who…
Folkways in Wonderland (FiW) is a cyberworld for musical discovery with social interaction, allowing avatar-represented users to explore selections from the Smithsonian Folkways world music collection while communicating through text and audio channels. FiW is built on Open Wonderland, a framework for creating collaborative 3D virtual worlds similar to Second Life. Figure 1. [Click images…
It is the evening of 11 December in Vienna’s 15th district, and I am sitting with Jana, Lejla, and Šarlot, eagerly awaiting the screening of a documentary about a unique community choir on the occasion of its fourth anniversary. We are in Brunnengasse, known as a migrant district of Vienna, at the AU Gallery, which is starting…
Unidentified cast members from the original Broadway production of Hair. The Kenn Duncan collection, New York Public Library Digital Gallery [Editor’s note: This post contains numerous hyperlinks to video and sound files that enrich the text with excerpts from the films and productions that the author discusses. We suggest that you read through the post…