The volume will present by Maurizio Agamennone e Serena Facci

 

11 November, 2014
4pm, Aula “Mario Baratto”
Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Dorsoduro, 3246

 

Curated by Fondazione Ugo e Olga Levi, Istituto Interculturale di Studi Musicali Comparati della Fondazione Giorgio Cini and Dipartimento di Filosofia e Beni Culturali dell’Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia.

This book contains the Italian translation of ten essays by the French-Israeli ethnomusicologist Simha Arom. Written from 1968 to 2009, the essays are representative of his research, methodological ideas, technological inventions and dialogic interactions.

In the introduction entitled Conversazione con un Maestro (“Conversation with a Master”), Arom describes some of his main research activities, often conducted in situations of statu nascenti, as he addressed some almost unknown practices, or only known to local practitioners, which had never been the subject of studies capable of grasping their internal rules.

The book is accompanied by invaluable audio and film documents, collected between 1965 and 2001, in the enclosed CD and DVD. This recorded material constitutes a vital documentary compendium for the “writings on Africanist musicology” contained in the book, and are indispensable examples from a long research career that has yielded an enormous documentation, now safely preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

 Simha Arom (Düsseldorf 1930) is emeritus director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, a founder member of the Société française d’ethnomusicologie, the Société française d’analyse musicale, the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music, and the European Seminar in Ethnomusicology. A Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, in 2008 he was awarded the Koizumi Fumio Prize for Ethnomusicology (Tokyo) and the Prix International by the Fondation Fyssen (Paris). In 2012 he was made an honorary member of the International Musicological Society.

He has written numerous monographs and hundreds of essays and has made over twenty records of sound documents and five ethnographic films, in various formats. In his long career he has worked in many different fields, from Central Africa to Georgia, Greece and Israel. His African Polyphony and Polyrhythm: Musical Structure and Methodology (Cambridge 1991) is a seminal text for Africanist studies. He is considered to be one of the most distinguished ethnomusicologists on the contemporary scene.

Maurizio Agamennone and Serena Facci teach ethnomusicology at the University of Florence and Tor Vergata University, Rome, respectively.