Keynote Speakers

Martin Scherzinger (NYU) and Jann Pasler (UCSD) will be our keynote speakers.
Walter Aaron Clark (UCR), Münir Beken (UCLA) and Nicol Hammond (UCSC) will be our panel discussants.
Hossein Omoumi (UCI) will be our special lecture recital artist.

Martin Scherzinger (New York University)

Scherzinger works on sound, music, media and politics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a particular focus on music of Europe, Africa, and America, as well as global biographies of sound and other ephemera circulating in geographically-remote regions. The research includes the examination of links between political economy and digital sound technologies, poetics of copyright law in diverse sociotechnical environments, relations between aesthetics and censorship, sensory limits of mass-mediated music, mathematical geometries of musical time, histories of sound in philosophy, and the politics of biotechnification.

Website: http://www.martinscherzinger.org

Martin Scherzinger will be in residence in UC San Diego from Feb 24-28, holding a public seminar and appointments with graduate students. For more information, or if you wish to participate in the seminar, please e-mail sdicm2016 at gmail dot com.

Jann Pasler (University of California, San Diego)

Musicologist, pianist and documentary filmmaker, Jann Pasler has published widely on contemporary American and French music, interdisciplinarity, intercultural transfer, race and gender, material culture, and radio. Her work on why and how music mattered in Third Republic France has now expanded to the French empire. Recent books: Writing through Music: Essays on Music, Culture, and Politics (OUP, 2008); Composing the Citizen: Music as Public Utility in Third Republic France (UC Press, 2009), Saint-Saëns and his World (Princeton UP, 2012); and La République, la musique et le citoyen, 1871-1914 (Gallimard, 2015). She has three books-in-progress: L’Empire français sonore: Les Ethnographies coloniales de la musique, 1860-1960,  Listening to Race in France, 1870-1940, and Performing Frenchness: Music, Colonial Culture, and Governance in the French Empire, 1870-1940.

Website: http://www.writingthroughmusic.com

Nicol Hammond (University of California, Santa Cruz)

Nicol Hammond is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Musicology at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She is an ethnomusicologist and popular music scholar specializing in South African popular, traditional, and choral music, and in feminist and queer studies. She is originally from Johannesburg, South Africa, where she completed her BMus at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2006. She lived in New York from 2006 to 2014, where she completed a PhD at New York University. Her dissertation focuses on South African rock musician Karen Zoid and the intersection of gender, sexuality and nationalism among post-apartheid Afrikaner youth. She has published on the topic of her dissertation, and also on South African choral music, and music and sports. She is a choral conductor and singer.

Her research interests include music and nationalism, gender and sexuality, queer theory, voice, African music theory, South Africa, Afrikaans music, women’s work, popular music, cultural studies.

Website: http://music.ucsc.edu/faculty/nicol-hammond

Walter Aaron Clark (University of California, Riverside)

Walter Aaron Clark received his doctorate in musicology from UCLA (1992), where he wrote his dissertation under the guidance of the late Robert M. Stevenson. He also holds performance degrees in classical guitar from the North Carolina School of the Arts (B.M.), where he studied with Jesús Silva and performed in a master class with Andrés Segovia; and the University of California, San Diego (M.A.), where he was a student of Pepe and Celin Romero. Prof. Clark’s specialty is the music of Spain and Latin America, and he is the founder/director of the Center for Iberian and Latin American Music at the University of California, Riverside. He is the series editor for Oxford University Press’s Currents in Latin American and Iberian Music and editor-in-chief of both the incipient New Grove Dictionary of Iberian and Latin American Music and the new refereed online journal Diagonal: An Ibero-American Music Review. He also serves on the editorial boards of Revista de Musicología, Monumentos de la Música Española, Cuadernos de Música Iberoamericana, Música em Contexto, Soundboard Scholar, and the Encyclopedia of Latin American Popular Music (ABC-Clio/Garland, 2014).

Website: http://music.ucr.edu/faculty/clark/

Münir Beken (University of California, Los Angeles)

Assistant Professor Münir Nurettin Beken received his Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from the University of Maryland. His career spans theory, composition, ethnomusicology, and performance. He studied composition with Cemal Resit Rey, Yalçın Tura, and Stuart Smith, and participated in composition workshops with such luminaries as George Crumb, Lukas Foss, Philip Glass, Roger Reynolds, Steve Reich and Charles Wuorinen. Dr. Beken’s compositions have been performed internationally with considerable recognition in some of the most significant concert halls in the world.

His scholarly interests include the phenomenology of music, cognitive musicology, and melodic modal systems of the Middle East and Central Asia. Dr. Beken has written several articles for the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and other scholarly publications, and a premier journal in Ethnomusicology. Dr. Beken is currently Assistant Professor of theory and composition in Ethnomusicology Department at University of California Los Angeles. He is a member of ASCAP.

Website: http://www.turkishculture.org/whoiswho/music/munir-nurettin-beken-956.htm

Hossein Omoumi (University of California, Irvine)

Hossein Omoumi, Maseeh Professor in Persian Performing Arts, was born in Isfahan, Iran, and began his musical education singing with his father. At age 14 he began to study the ney, the traditional reed flute of Iran.

In 1962, Omoumi entered the National University of Iran to study architecture, but also played the ney in musical competitions, later entering the National Conservatory of Music in Tehran. His performance career has included appearances at many of the major festivals and concert halls in Europe and the United States, including San Francisco’s World Music Festival, UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall and Wadsworth Theater the Getty Center, in Los Angeles, the World Music Institute and Asia Society in New York, and Theatre de la Ville in Paris.

Omoumi is a noted scholar and teacher of Persian music, having served on the National Conservatory and Tehran University in Tehran, Center for Oriental Music Studies of Sorbonne University in Paris, UCLA in Los Angeles and the Ethnomusicology department of the University of Washington in Seattle. He is also an architect, having received his Doctorate from the University of Florence, Italy.

His research on the making of the ney and percussion opened new possibilities and introduced significant innovations to the ney, tombak and daf.

Website: http://www.omoumi.com

 

The time and location of these important guests’ appearances in the IcM will be published together with the conference schedule in mid-December. Thank you!