Kofi Agawu is Professor of Music at Princeton University, and Visiting
Scholar at the University of Ghana, Legon. He has also taught at Yale University, Cornell University, and King's College, London. His books include Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music (Princeton University Press, 1991), and African Rhythm: A Northern Ewe Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 1995). His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship (1990-91), an Outstanding Publication Award from the Society for Music Theory (1994), and the Dent Medal from the Royal Musical Association for outstanding contributions to musicology.
Midawo Gideon Foli Alowoyie is a master drummer from Ghana. He is
recognized by his peers and knowledgeable specialists as one of Ghana's foremost virtuosos of traditional music and dance. Mr. Alorwoyie held the position of Chief Master Drummer of the resident Ghana National Dance Ensemble up until 1984. Prior to coming to the University of North Texas as an Assistant Professor of Music to teach World Music in the Instrumental Studies Department, Mr. Alorwoyie held positions at the American Conservatory of Music, and at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago. He is also the Founder and the Artistic Director of the Chicago- based African-American Unity Ensemble.
Kwasi Ampene received his Ph.D.in Ethnomusicology at the University of
Pittsburgh in 1999. His areas of specialization include African and African American Music. His current research focuses on 1). The Creative Process in Nnwonkoro: A Female Song Tradition of the Akan of Ghana, and 2). The Pianistic Style of Thelonious Monk. His fields of concentration include: the sociology and aesthetics of music of Africa and the African Diaspora; music composition in oral culture with emphasis on Africa and the African Diaspora; music and social change; popular music; music and social criticism.
Lois Ann Anderson teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her
specialty is the music of East Africa, particularly that of the Great Lakes region. Under the auspices of Fulbright, American Philosophical Society, and the University of Wisconsin Alumni Research Fund, she has done fieldwork in Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi and Morocco. She also participated in the UW-University of Dar es Salaam exchange program. Publications include articles in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, The New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments, Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology, Essays for a Humanist, Music and History in Africa, and The International Britannica Encyclopaedia. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she teaches courses in music cultures, a performance course on various types of xylophone in Uganda, and seminars in ethnomusicology, including bibliography, organology, and field work. The Ugandan xylophone performing group which she directs was invited to perform at the First International Conference and Festival of the Marimba held in Mexico in 1991, and at the tenth annual Uganda North American Convention held in Houston in 1998.
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Naomi Andre holds a B.A. from Barnard College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in
Music from Harvard University. In 1995 she joined the musicology faculty at the University of Michigan, and currently she is an affiliate with Women's Studies. For the 1998-9 academic year she was awarded fellowships from the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, the Rackham Grant and Fellowship program within the University of Michigan, and a postdoctoral fellowship from the American Association of University Women. Her research focuses on Verdi, 19th-century Italian Opera and women in music. In addition to 19th-20th century European music, she also teaches a course in African and world musics. She has published essays on Verdi and Schoenburg and has written articles for The New Grove Dictionary of Women Composers, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (forthcoming revised edition) and The International Dictionary of Black Musicians. She has held internships at the Ford Foundation in New York and the New England Board of Higher Education in Boston. Currently she is active as a member of the Committee on Cultural Diversity in the American Musicological Society, and the Alumni Council for the graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University.
Kelly Askew is Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department and
Center for AfroAmerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. She holds a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from Harvard University, and a B.A. from Yale University with a dual major in Anthropology and Music. Her forthcoming book Performing the Nation: Swahili Musical Performance and the Production of Tanzanian National Culture, examines how musical performance in Tanzania indexes shifting conceptions of national cultural identity. The book is to be published by the University of Chicago Press. Dr. Askew also has extensive film experience having worked on various video documentaries, a major Hollywood motion picture, and a soon-to-be- released Swahili feature film. A second book entitled Media and Culture: A Reader co-edited with Richard Wilk, is under contract with Blackwell Publishers.
Daniel Avorgbedor is Assistant Professor of Music in the School of Music
and the Department of African-American and African Studies at Ohio State University, Columbus. His current research interests include the urbanization and the reinvention of musical culture among the urban Anlo-Ewe; musical creativity in contemporary independent African churches; contemporary African composers; and theories of African presence in the Diaspora. He is currently editing a volume on Music, Religion and Ritual in Africa, and major research awards include Guggenheim (1989), Wenner-Gren (1990), and a recent NEH grant.
Gregory Barz is an ethnomusicologist at the Blair School of Music at
Vanderbilt University, where he holds secondary appointments in the Divinity School and the Graduate Department of Religion. His research interests include the study of music and religion in East Africa. He has sung and recorded with Kwaya ya Upendo in Dar Es Salaam, and has in engaged field research in Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda.
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Mellonee Burnim is an Associate Professor in the Department of Folklore
and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University. Burnim earned her Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from Indiana University in 1980. She is a specialist in African American religious music. With a B.M. in Music Education from North Texas State University, Burnim served for two years as a choral music teacher in the Texas public school system before earning her M. M. in ethnomusicology, with a concentration in African music from the University of Wisconsin in 1976. Burnim has successfully combined her expertise in choral music, piano and ethnomusicology to establish an international forum for her work. She has conducted choral workshops on African American religious music across the United States, in Cuba, and in Malawi. She has also conducted research in Liberia, addressing the topic of the African/African American musical continuum in Christian worship. Burnim is co-editor of the African American section of the forthcoming North America volume of the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music.
Eric Charry is an Associate Professor in the music department at Wesleyan
University. He has published extensively on music from Mali, Guinea, Senegal, and The Gambia, and his book, Mande Music: Traditional and Modern Music of the Maninka and Mandinka of Western Africa , will be published by the University of Chicago Press in Fall 2000.
Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje, Professor of Ethnomusicology at UCLA, has
also taught at Tuskegee University in Alabama. While her undergraduate training was obtained from Fisk University in Tennessee, she received the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from UCLA with specializations in African- American and African music, respectively. Professor DjeDje is the author of several monographs -- American Black Spiritual and Gospel Songs from Southeast Georgia: A Comparative Study, Black Religious Music from Southeast Georgia, and Distribution of the One String Fiddle in West Africa -- and articles that have appeared in such journals as Ethnomusicology, Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology, The Black Perspective in Music, the Journal of African Studies, The Western Journal of Black Studies, and the Black Music Research Journal. Her most recent publications include Turn Up the Volume! A Celebration of African Music and California Soul: Music of African Americans in the West (co-edited with Eddie S. Meadows). She has also published a two-volume edited collection of essays on African music entitled African Musicology: Current Trends as well as several entries in Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia and The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Black Women in America: Music (Vol. 5). In addition, she has articles in the Africa and North American volumes of the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music and the Cambridge History of American Music. She is currently conducting research on African-American religious music in California, as well as a study on the history of the fiddle tradition in African and African-American cultures. Professor DjeDje has not only conducted fieldwork in the United States, but has also done research in Jamaica and several countries in West Africa (Ghana, Nigeria, Côte d'Ivoire, The Gambia, Senegal, and Burkina Faso).
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Akin Euba is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Music, University of
Pittsburgh, and Founder and Director of the Center for Intercultural Music Arts, London. Since 1990, the Center has organized a biennial international symposium and festival on the theme "New Intercultural Music" and publishes an open-ended series of books titled INTERCULTURAL MUSIC and a bulletin titled INTERCULTURAL MUSICOLOGY, both edited by Cynthia Tse Kimberlin and Akin Euba. Euba is the author of four books, including YORUBA DRUMMING: THE DUNDUN TRADITION (Bayreuth African Studies Series 1990). Akin Euba's compositions have been performed throughout the world, including Stockholm, Bayreuth, London, Moscow, New York and various cities in Africa and Asia. The CD of his opera CHAKA, from a dramatic poem by Leopold Senghor, performed by the City of Birmingham Touring Opera and conducted by Simon Halsey, was published by the MRI Press in 1999. Euba has pioneered several new theories, including that of African Pianism, which was the subject of an international symposium and festival which Euba organized at the University of Pittsburgh in October 1999. Two of his other theories, Creative Ethnomusicology and Intercultural Musicology, are the topics of two graduate seminars which Euba teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. In recognition of his contribution to music, Euba has been appointed Overseas Fellow of Churchill College, University of Cambridge for the 2000-2001 academic year.
Andy Frankel completed a B.A. of Music and Anthropology at Pitzer
College in Claremont California after a long interest in African music and culture. He was the recipient in 1984 of a Thomas J. Watson fellowship, which he spent in SW Nigeria studying the speech surrogate instruments of the Yoruba People of Nigeria with a particular emphasis on bata drums: their use in masquerade ceremonies and the secretive meta language or "Ena" used by bata drummers. In 1986, Andy enrolled in the Ethnomusicology program at the University of Washington, to pursue an M.A. He subsequently became involved in the promotion and presentation of African Music and arts. In the remainder of the 80s, Andy co-founded Rakumi Arts, a non-profit dedicated to presenting African arts. In 1990 Andy took a hiatus from his academic career to work for the City of Seattle, producing an annual cycle of community cultural festivals called "Festal", a position he held until 1999. As a sideline, Andy has long worked in management and production with a variety of African artists. Since 1987, he has managed I.K. Dairo, King Sunny Ade and Thomas Mapfumo, among others, and has produced several records of African music including the 1999 Grammy nominee "Odu". Andy is currently working on a project to bring the Internet to African artists, through training, expanded access and infrastructure development. He is working on this in partnership with the Ford Foundation, and several Internet companies based in the US and Europe.
Sharon Friedler, Professor and Director of Dance at Swarthmore College,
has also served on the faculties of the Universities of Minnesota and Missouri. A choreographer, performer, and dance writer, she is the coeditor of the book "Dancing Female: Lives and Issues of Women in Contemporary
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Dance". A member of the board of CORD (Congress on Research in Dance) and co-director of the dance steering committee for IBO (International Baccalaureate Organization), she is currently working with Professor J.H. Kwabena Nketia and the ICAMD on the establishment at Swarthmore college of an archive and study center for African dance.
Steven M. Friedson is Professor of Music and Adjunct Professor of
Anthropology at the University of North Texas. He is author of Dancing Prophets: Musical Experience in Tumbuka Healing (1996), and producer of the documentary Prophet Healers of Northern Malawi (1989). He is currently working on a book on music and healing in West Africa, based on his research in the Volta Region of Ghana.
Frank Gunderson received a B.A. from the Evergreen State College, an
M.A. in World Music at Wesleyan University, and a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University (1999). He has taught at the University of Michigan and the University of Oklahoma, and has taught in a secondary school in Kenya. Besides being the coordinator for the U.S. Secretariat of the International Center for African Music and dance, he has been the program manager for the University of Michigan Center for World Performance Studies. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in Tanzania, and has produced the CD Tanzania: Farmer Composers of North West Tanzania (Multicultural Media), and recently co-edited with Gregory Barz the book Mashindano!: Competitive Music Performance in East Africa (2000, Mkuki na Nyota Press/African Books Collective LTD). He is currently writing a book about compositional processes and musical labor practices in northwestern Tanzania.
Joseph Mbele is a Professor of English and Folklore at St. Olaf College,
Northfield, Minnesota. Formerly he taught in the Literature Department at the University of Dar es Salaam. Interested in epic folklore, the folktale, and traditions about heroes, tricksters, and outlaws, he has done fieldwork in Kenya and Tanzania and the U.S.A. He recently published Matengo Folktales. Details of his work are available at www.stolaf.edu/people/mbele
Isaac Kalumbu is an Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology. He has
received a Bachelor of Arts and Diploma from the University of Zimbabwe, and a Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy in Folklore and Ethnomusicology from Indiana University. Dr. Kalumbu is interested in popular music and the recording industry in Africa, the Carribean and the U.S., the history of popular music in Zimbabwe, the history and genres of African American music, and black music and aesthetics. He was formerly an Instructor at Indiana University.
Jean Kidula is an Asssistant Professor of Ethnomusicology in the Music
Department at the University of Georgia. She received her Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology at UCLA. She has taught at Kenyatta University in Kenya, and Pomona College in Claremont, California. Her current research interests and publications address religious and popular musics with a focus on Christian music genres, specifically gospel in Africa, Sweden and the
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USA. She also has an interest in pedagogical issues, women as music educators for cultural continuity, and innovation in ethnic socio-cultural situations, and contemporary religious institutions and the academy. Other research focuses on traditional African rites of passage, and the appropriation of alternative music for these rites in the contemporary space, issues of hermeneutics and music aesthetics, the music industry, theory, method and history of African music, Africans in/and music education, and multicultural music education
Cynthia Tse Kimberlin received her B.A. in music from the University of
California, Berkeley and M.A. and Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from the University of California, Los Angeles. She has taught at San Francisco State University, University of California, Berkeley, Addis Ababa University, and the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University). She is Executive Director of the Music Research Institute and Publisher of MRI Press in Richmond, California; and she is affiliated with the University of California, Office of the President, Academic Affairs, Berkeley. Her areas of expertise include Africa, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and the USA. Recent publications include "The US Government: Arbiter or Catalyst for the Arts?", Intercultural Music 2, MRI Press (1999); "The Scholarship and Art of Ashenafi Kebede (1938- 1998)" , Ethnomusicology (1999); "Make Army Tanks for War into Church Bells for Peace: Observations on Musical Change and Other Adaptations in Ethiopia during the 1990s,"Turn Up the Volume! A Celebration of African Music, Fowler Museum of Natural History, UCLA (1999); "Women, Music and Chains of the Mind: Eritrea and the Tigre Region of Ethiopia 1972- 1993", in Music and Gender, University of Illinois Press, (July 2000), and "Issues in Organology: The Musical Instrument Collection at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies' Museum, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia"(Nov. 2000). She is co-editor of a book series on intercultural music and of the bulletin Intercultural Musicology.
Zabana Kongo is a senior fellow at the International Center for African
Music and Dance (ICAMD/Legon), and teaches theory and composition in the University of Ghana's music department. His current research deals with creative performance and planned composition with African musical styles.
David Locke received the Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from Wesleyan
University in 1978. At Wesleyan, his teachers of traditional African music included Abraham Adzinyah and Freeman Donkor. He conducted doctoral dissertation fieldwork in Ghana from 1975-1977 under the supervision of Prof. J.H.K. Nketia. In Ghana, his teachers and research associates included the late Godwin Agbeli, Midawo Gideon Foli Alorwoyie, and Abubakari Lunna. He has published three books on items in the repertories in the Ewe and Dagbamba musical heritage and is the author of the chapter on music- cultures of Africa in Worlds of Music (3rd edition). At Tufts University, he currently serves as chair of the Department of Music, Director of Graduate Studies in Music, and faculty advisor to the Tufts-in-Ghana Program Abroad. His current research project focuses on ethnomusicological documentation and analysis of the music-culture of the Dagbamba people of northern Ghana.
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James Makubuya, Associate Professor With a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology
from the University of California, Los Angeles, James K. Makubuya is by profession both a teacher and musician with dual training in both African and Western music theory, practice and performance. His current research focuses on organological studies of East Africa. With the ndongo (8-string bowl lyre) as his main instrument, James Makubuya is also an outstanding exponent of a number of African instruments and dances having studied with several master musicians. James is the founder and artistic director of the Kiyira Ensemble a non profit performance organization that focuses on the