by Gavin Lee (Soochow University) I recently decided to revisit the issue of teaching opera in prison again with colleagues. Despite insightful responses by William Cheng and Bonnie Gordon to the widely condemned post “Don Giovanni Goes to Prison” by Pierpaolo Polzonetti (all on the Musicology Now blog, published by the American Musicological Society), it…
Category: Politics
by Catherine Grant, Aaron Pettigrew, and Megan Collins Earlier this year, SEM members released a Statement entitled “Disciplinary intervention for a practice of ethnomusicology” (available in full on this blog). According to its authors, the Statement is intended as “a declaration of commitment to changing the academic structures that deny many scholars full inclusion in…
F-16 jet flying low over Istanbul, 15 July 2016 Editor’s note: What follows is the author’s translation of an article that appeared on 17 July 2016; the original Turkish version is here. It was an extraordinary, traumatic 24-hour period. We do not have a full grip on the details of what happened, but it…
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…
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…