About the Contributors
Shino ArisawaChapter 1 - Akiko Fujii: Telling the Musical Life Stories of a Hereditary Jiuta Singer of Japan
Shino Arisawa is a Lecturer in Japanese Studies at the Tokyo Gakugei University. She received her doctoral degree in Ethnomusicology from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London with the thesis "Changes in the Transmission of 'Traditional' Music: The Case of Japanese Jiuta-Sōkyoku." Prior to her current position, Arisawa was a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at SOAS, where she also taught Japanese music courses in the Department of Music.
Katelyn Barney
Chapter 6 - Lexine Solomon: Songs of Connection and Celebration by a Torres Strait Islander
Katelyn Barney is a Project Manager and Research Fellow in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit at the University of Queensland, Australia. Her main research interests include collaborative research with Indigenous Australian women performers, teaching and learning approaches in Indigenous Australian studies, and facilitating support for Indigenous Australian postgraduate students. She has published across these areas and also teaches piano privately. Her recent publications include articles in Perfect Beat: The Pacific Journal of Research into Contemporary Music and Popular Culture, Teaching in Higher Education, Music and Politics and she coedited the volume Musical Islands: Exploring Connections Between Music, Place and Research (2009).
Gay Breyley
Chapter 9 - Sima's Choices: Negotiating Repertoires and Identities in Contemporary Iran
Gay Breyley is an adjunct research associate in the School of Music--Conservatorium at Monash University in Australia. With Sasan Fatemi she is coauthor of Iranian Music and Popular Entertainment: From Motrebi to Losanjelesi and Beyond (Routledge, 2011). Her other publications include articles in Musicology Australia, New Formations, Antipodes, Life Writing, Ethnomusicology Forum, Prose Studies, Journal of Australian Studies and Borderlands.
Nicoletta DemetriouChapter 5 - Kyriakou Pelagia: The Housewife/Grandmother-Star of Cyprus
Nicoletta Demetriou is currently the Alistair Horne Visiting Fellow at St. Antony's College, Oxford University, where she is working on a book of creative nonfiction. She holds an MA in Life Writing from the University of East Anglia, and a PhD in Ethnomusicology from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. A trained classical singer, she has also been a performer of Cypriot folksong since childhood.
Veronica Doubleday
Chapter 10 - Zainab Herawi: Finding Acclaim in the Conservative Islamic Culture of Afghanistan
Veronica Doubleday is a visiting lecturer in the School of Historical and Critical Studies at the University of Brighton, United Kingdom. Her numerous publications on Afghanistan include a narrative ethnography, Three Women of Herat (1988), and I Cried on the Mountain Top (2010), a volume of archive photographs accompanied by traditional Persian-language lyrics with her own English translations. Other research revolves around women's music, gender issues, and musical instruments, and she guest-edited a themed issue of Ethnomusicology Forum on musical instruments and gender (2008). As a vocalist and drummer Doubleday is an acclaimed performer of Afghan traditional music, and over the years she has given concerts all over the world.
Ruth Hellier
Introduction - Vocal Herstories: Resonances of Singing, Individuals,
and Authors
Chapter 4 - Ixya Herrera: Gracefully
Nurturing "Mexico" with Song in the USA
Ruth Hellier [Hellier-Tinoco] is a professor in the Departments of Music, Theater and Dance at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she engages areas of performance studies, ethnomusicology, theater and dance studies, applied arts, and Mexican and Latin American performance. After childhood training at the Guildhall School of Music in London (piano and violin), she gained a degree in Music, Drama and Dance (Birmingham 1983), which included opera training at Birmingham Conservatoire. She undertook a successful career as an actress, singer, and community arts facilitator, followed by positions as Head of Music at two large high schools. With a fascination for Mexican cultural history, she undertook a PhD in Mexican performance and politics, leading to an academic position at the University of Winchester, United Kingdom. She has published widely, including Embodying Mexico: Tourism, Nationalism and Performance (OUP 2011), chapters and articles on power relations, ethics, and cultural memory, and Performing Memory and History: Contemporary Theatre and Performance in Mexico (forthcoming).
Ellen Koskoff
Ellen Koskoff is Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Rochester's Eastman School of Music and is the director of ethnomusicology programs. She also directs and performs with the School's Balinese Gong Kebyar and Angklung gamelans. She has published widely on Jewish music, on gender and music, and is the editor of Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective (1987). Her book, Music in Lubavitcher Life (2000) was the winner of the 2002 ASCAP Deems-Taylor award. Koskoff is a contributor to the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, is the general editor of the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, vol. 3, "The United States and Canada," and the series editor of the University of Rochester Press's, Eastman/ Rochester Studies in Ethnomusicology. She has just completed a collection of essays on music and gender to be published by the University of Illinois Press entitled, A Feminist Ethnomusicology: the Ellen Koskoff Reader. She is a former President of the Society for Ethnomusicology.
Carol Muller
Carol Muller is a Professor of Music (ethnomusicology), at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia who has published widely on South African music, both at home and in exile. Her intellectual interests include the relationship between music, gender and religious studies, migration and diaspora studies, and critical ethnography. Muller has published on South African jazz, religious performance, traditional and popular musics including: Shembe Hymns (Univ. of KwaZulu Natal 2010); Focus: South African Music (Routledge 2008); Rituals of Fertility and the Sacrifice of Desire: Nazarite Women's Performance in South Africa (Chicago 1999). In 2011 Muller lead a combined online and live summer abroad program in South Africa at one of the world's largest arts festivals. Muller is also a seasoned gumboot dancer.
Thomas SolomonChapter 3 - Ayben: The Girl's Voice in Turkish Rap
Thomas Solomon is a Professor in the Grieg Academy--Department of Music at the University of Bergen, Norway. He has previously taught at New York University, University of Minnesota and Istanbul Technical University. He has done field research in Bolivia on musical imaginations of ecology, place and identity, and in Istanbul on place and identity in Turkish hip- hop. His publications include articles in the journals Ethnomusicology, Popular Music, European Journal of Cultural Studies, and Yearbook for Traditional Music, as well numerous papers in edited volumes. He is also editor of Music and Identity in Norway and Beyond: Essays Commemorating Edvard Grieg the Humanist (Fagbokforlaget 2011).
Amanda VillepastourChapter 2 - Amelia Pedroso: The Voice of a Cuban Priestess Leading from the Inside
Amanda Villepastour is an ethnomusicologist with a focused research interest in Yorùbá music and religion in Africa and the African diaspora. Villepastour completed her MMus (1998) and PhD (2006) at the School of African and Oriental Studies in London and has since published her first monograph, Ancient Text Messages of the Yorùbá Bàtá Drum: Cracking the Code (Ashgate 2010). Her past research and teaching positions include Goldsmiths College, University of London, The Smithsonian Institution, Bowling Green State University (Ohio) and The Musical Instrument Museum (MIM) (Arizona). Villepastour is currently an ethnomusicology lecturer at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom.
Louise WrazenChapter 7 - Marysia's Voice: Defining Home through Song in Poland and Canada
Louise Wrazen is Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of Music at York University, Toronto. Her research on the music and dance of the Górale of southern Poland has focused on transnationalism, transmission and gender and has been published in various journals, including Yearbook for Traditional Music, Ethnomusicology, Intersections, and The Anthropology of East Europe Review. She is currently coediting a volume on performing gender, place, and emotion.
Website Manager: George Blake, Doctoral candidate, Ethnomusicology, UC Santa Barbara
Website Designer & Developer: Linda Shaver-Gleason, Doctoral candidate, Musicology, UC Santa Barbara