A fall colloquium at the School of Music convenes faculty and students from Music Theory, History, Ethnomusicology, and Music Education (THEME), along with visiting scholars in those areas of study.
The fall quarter THEME lecture series runs select Friday afternoons through early December in the School of Music Fishbowl.
The series kicks off Friday, Oct. 11 with a presentation by Elizabeth Wells (Mount Alison University). Her talk, "The Jewish West Side Story," addresses the roots of the famous musical and its origins as a story about warring Catholics versus Jews on Manhattan’s East Side, exploring the Jewish vestiges that remain in the mambo-inflected musical and what they reveal about American culture at mid-century.
Upcoming talks in this series:
Storying a More Inclusive History of Music Education: An Imperative, a Challenge, a Promise
With a focus on African-American music education, this presentation draws upon historical studies to show both the unique research challenges and the promise of a better understanding of how the transmission of music in its diverse contexts is embedded in social, cultural and political values and practices.
Catherine Appert (Cornell University)
Diasporic Flows: Voicing Social Change in Hip Hop Time
Drawing on ethnographic research in Dakar, Senegal, this talk explores hip hop as a social practice of musical genre that works to remember and reinvent histories of diasporic connection, and to mobilize them in the pursuit of immediate and material social change.
This presentation reviews the work of the UW Ethnomusicology program’s Community Artists in Residence over the past decade, focusing especially (though not exclusively) on the methodologies and achievements of “artivists” (arts activists) in the genres of Mexican son jarocho and Puerto Rican bomba.
All sessions begin at 3:30 p.m. in the School of Music Fishbowl. Admission is free. Visit the links above to learn more about individual presenters.