Overview

Jeff Todd Titon received his Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Minnesota, where he studied ethnomusicology with Alan Kagan and musicology with Johannes Riedel. He has completed fieldwork in North America on religious folk music, blues music and old-time fiddling with support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. For two years he was the guitarist in the Lazy Bill Lucas Blues Band, a group that appeared in the 1970 Ann Arbor Blues Festival. The author or editor of seven books, including EARLY DOWNHOME BLUES (which won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award) and the five-volume AMERICAN MUSICAL TRADITIONS (named by Library Journal as one of the outstanding reference works of 2003), Titon is also a documentary photographer and filmmaker. In 1991, he wrote a hypertext multimedia computer program about old-time fiddler Clyde Davenport that is regarded as a model for interactive representations of people making music. He founded the ethnomusicology program at Tufts University, where he taught from 1971 to 1986. From 1990 to 1995, he served as the editor of ETHNOMUSICOLOGY, the journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology. A Fellow of the American Folklore Society since 1986, he has been Professor of Music and the director of the Ph.D. program in ethnomusicology at Brown University.Timothy J. Cooley is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he teaches courses in Polish and American vernacular, and folk and popular music. He also is affiliated faculty with the university's Global and International Studies Program. He earned a masters degree in Music History at Northwestern University, and received his Ph.D in Ethnomusicology at Brown University, where he studied with Jeff Todd Titon. His book, MAKING MUSIC IN THE POLISH TATRAS: TOURISTS, ETHNOGRAPHERS, AND MOUNTAIN MUSICIANS, won the 2006 Orbis Prize for Polish Studies, awarded by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. He enjoys playing Polish mountain fiddle music, American old-time banjo, and singing in choirs. A revised second edition of his book SHADOWS IN THE FIELD: NEW PERSPECTIVES FOR FIELDWORK IN ETHNOMUSICOLOGY, edited with Gregory F. Barz, is being prepared for publication in 2008. Cooley is the editor of Ethnomusicology, the journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology, and serves as the Society's Southern California Chapter president. His recent research considers how surfers, especially in California, musically express their ideas about surfing and the surfing community, and how surfing as a sport and lifestyle is represented in popular culture.David Locke received the Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University in 1978, where he studied with David McAllester, Mark Slobin, and Gen'ichi Tsuge. At Wesleyan his teachers of traditional African music included Abraham Adzinyah and Freeman Donkor. From 1975 to 1977, he conducted doctoral dissertation fieldwork in Ghana under the supervision of Professor J.H.K. Nketia. In Ghana his teachers and research associates included Godwin Agbeli, Midawo Gideon Foli Alorwoyie, and Abubakari Lunna. He has published numerous books and articles on African music and regularly performs the repertories of music and dance about which he writes. He teaches at Tufts University, where he currently serves as the director of the master's degree program in ethnomusicology and as a faculty advisor in the Tufts-in-Ghana Foreign Study Program. His current projects include an oral history and musical documentation of dance-drumming of the Dagbamba people and an in-depth musical documentation of Agbadza, an idiom of Ewe music, in collaboration with Professor Gideon Foli Alorwoyie. He is active in the Society for Ethnomusicology and has served as the president of its Northeast Chapter.David P. McAllester received the Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University, where he studied with George Herzog. A student of American Indian music since 1938, he undertook fieldwork among the Comanches, Hopis, Apaches, Navajos, Penobscots, and Passamaquoddies. He was the author of such classic works in ethnomusicology as Peyote Music, Enemy Way Music, Myth of the Great Star Chant, and Navajo Blessingway Singer (with coauthor Charlotte Frisbie). He was one of the founders of the Society for Ethnomusicology, and he served as its president and the editor of its journal, Ethnomusicology. Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Music at Wesleyan University, he passed away in 2006.Anne K. Rasmussen is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the College of William and Mary, where she also directs a Middle Eastern Music Ensemble. She received her Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from the University of California where she studied with A. J. Racy, Timothy Rice, and Nazir Jairazbhoy. Gerard Behague and Scott Marcus also are among her influential teachers. Her first area of research is Arab music and culture in diaspora enclaves of North America, and her current project, based on two years of ethnographic research in Indonesia, concerns Islamic ritual and performance. Her book, WOMEN'S VOICES, THE RECITED QUR'ÂN, AND ISLAMIC MUSICAL ARTS IN INDONESIA, is forthcoming with University of California Press, and she is the contributing co-editor of MUSICS OF MULTICULTURAL AMERICA (Schirmer, 1997). Professor Rasmussen has written articles appearing in ETHNOMUSICOLOGY, ASIAN MUSIC, POPULAR MUSIC, AMERICAN MUSIC, THE WORLD OF MUSIC, THE GARLAND ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WORLD MUSIC, and the HARVARD DICTIONARY OF MUSIC; she also has produced four CD recordings documenting immigrant and community music in the United States. She is a former Fulbright senior scholar, served as the First Vice President of the Society for Ethnomusicology, and received the Phi Beta Kappa Award for Excellence in Teaching, as well as the Jaap Kunst Prize for the best article published annually in the field of ethnomusicology.