Tag Archives: ethnomusicology

EVENT
Veronica Doubleday Talk and Concert with John Baily

CFA Staffer Andrew Chatfield invites you to two events with Veronica Doubleday, Visiting Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Emotional Expression in Women’s Music-Making in Afghanistan:

Veronica Doubleday is an expert on the music of women in Afghanistan. In her colloquium, she will consider the emotional impact of songs and dance performances, looking especially at domestic and wedding music. Ms. Doubleday draws mainly on her research in the western city of Herat, where she worked with amateur and professional performers, including her principal teacher, vocalist Zainab Herawi. She also makes reference to the findings of researchers, performers, poets, and film-makers with women in other areas of the country. She will examine the themes of romantic and familial love, religious devotion, humor, protest, and celebration, with particular reference to Persian-language songs.

Date: Wednesday, December 3 – Today
Time: 4:15 – 5:15 PM
Place: CFA Hall
Cost: Free

Concert with John Baily—Women’s Traditional Songs from Afghanistan:

London vocalist Veronica Doubleday will draw on her deep knowledge of women’s music-making in the Afghan city of Heart, offering insight into their expressive world. She accompanies her singing with the traditional women’s instrument, the daireh frame drum. Her Persian-language texts cover themes of love, spiritual devotion, humor, and protest. Her husband John Baily, Emeritus Professor of Ethnomusicology at Goldsmiths, London University, accompanies her, playing the two-stringed dutar lute.

In the 1970s, Ms. Doubleday undertook research on the lives, beliefs, friendships, and activities of women in the city of Herat while a resident there with Mr. Baily. They learned to perform Afghan music as a technique of ethnomusicological research, and since then have performed concerts and given academic presentations around the world.

Date: Wednesday, December 3 – Today
Time: 7:00 – 9:00 PM
Place: CFA Hall
Cost: Free

EVENT
Concert: Music from East Asia

This invitation courtesy of the CFA:

Featuring Wesleyan’s three East Asian ensembles—the Chinese Music Ensemble co-directed by graduate students Joy Lu and Andrew Terwilliger, the Korean Drumming Ensemble directed by Private Lessons Teacher Chunseung Lee, and the Taiko Drumming Ensemble directed by Visiting Instructor in Music Barbara Merjan—this concert presents a variety of musical styles and repertories from East Asian cultures.

Date: Sunday, November 23rd – tonight!
Time: 7:00pm
Place: Crowell Concert Hall (CFA)
Cost: $2 Wesleyan students, $3 all others

EVENT
Documentary Trolls Meeting

Radio board

Real talk though: do this. It’s going to be awesome, and Becca Seidel ’15 knows what’s up:

If you love This American Life, Radiolab, or any other programs that tell incredible stories through sound, then listen up: the trolls are emerging once again. And by that, I’m not referring to the mythological cave-dwellers, those creepy dolls with the fuzzy hair, or the ACB.

Tomorrow (Friday) at 5PM will be this year’s first meeting of the Documentary Trolls, a radio storytelling collective that began taking shape at Wesleyan last year. The purpose of the group will be to provide a collaborative space in which to create and share audio stories. We will be listening to excerpts from memorable/weird/generally cool radio stories and podcast episodes that have come out in the past few years, and we’ll use those as a starting point to discuss techniques for interviews, narration, sound design, and the use of music in radio storytelling.

Last year, the Trolls came out with a pretty sweet final product: a set of stories that aired on WESU towards the beginning of the summer. We might try to do that again, but we also might just listen to a lot of great radio stories and talk about them. Either way, it’s gonna be super low-key. No experience necessary!

Date: Friday, November 15th, 2013
Time: 5 PM
Place: WESU (above Broad Street Books – contact Becca if you’re not a WESU staff member so she can let you in.)
Contact: rseidel(at)wesleyan(dot)edu

FEATURED
Old School / Fresh Sound: An Interview with The Rooks

“I don’t think we would have the same chance in this city
if we went to any other school or formed in any other way. It had to be Wesleyan.”
rooks

Forget MGMT. Amanda Who? Das What? Wesleyan’s biggest hype band is The Rooks, a six-piece R&B/indie-soul band made up of a group of friends and members of the Classes of 2011 and 2012. The majority of them have settled in New York City after graduating, and since then, the band has released a handful of singles and now – finally – their debut studio EP, Something You Can Take. The album, now on Bandcamp for your free download enjoyment, is a must-hear for anyone who has a taste for classic rhythm and blues, hip-hop, indie rock, or really has ears at all. And, if you’re in the NYC area this Friday, June 21, The Rooks will be playing Fat Baby at 10 PM, so you can experience them live.

I had the opportunity to sit down for a Google Hangout with The Rooks frontman/lead singer Garth Taylor ’12 and drummer Nate Mondschein ’12 to talk about their new album, the forming of the band, the support of the Wesleyan community, and the difficulties of labeling a music style.

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FEATURED
#Ethnomusicology: An Adventure into Olin’s Scores and Recordings

scores and recordings

I have the good fortune of working at Scores and Recordings, the music section of Olin Library. I can objectively say that it’s one of the coolest academic hubs on campus.  S&R has a massive CD and vinyl collection, a pretty strange assortment of cassettes, shelves of musical scores, a bunch of turntables and other media players for student use, audio and video recorders on loan, and a whole room devoted to Wesleyan’s renowned World Music Archives.  It is the home of Notations 21, a collection of creative visual scores that is possibly my favorite book in the whole library.

Scores and Recordings is kind of a metaphor for liberal arts in general— it’s a huge assortment of stuff that you can’t imagine you’d ever be able to string together in a way that makes any sense, but that doesn’t matter because it’s all awesome and interesting and the perfect vehicle for discovering new things.  Especially when you choose items off the shelves at random (which is what we all do when navigating WesMaps, amirite?).

It’s always interesting to see what people check out at the circulation desk — everything from recordings of Tuvan throat singing to John Cage scores to Eminem CDs — but my sense from working at S&R is that not nearly enough people know about what’s available here.  In an effort to mine some of the treasures that are tucked away in this section of the library, I summoned fellow Wesleyinger Gabe to join me in my adventures, AKA pulling random stuff off the shelves and writing about what we found. For this first installment of a continuing series of S&R adventures, we explored the vinyl collection and made some, er, unusual discoveries. Read about our findings after the jump.

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EVENT
EcoMusic Competition

From Sewon Kang ’14:

Calling all environmentally conscious & musically gifted friends!

Submit to an EcoMusic competition hosted by COE, Music, and CFA that centers around environmental issues/themes seen in the exhibition FOOD-WATER-LIFE, currently in the Zilkha Gallery. We are looking for proposals for creative and passionate music that addresses these issues so please consider submitting! You could win $200!!! YAY! Proposals due 3/1/13.

See below for guidelines.

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