Participants of the conference

The list of participants of the conference has been compiled by the organising team, on the basis of work they have done in illuminating the path of cultural musicology. The extremely brief descriptions below have been written with the view of clarifying why they were included in the list, drawing partly on information about them floating around on the internet. The list was much longer, and we started by writing to the top 25 on the list, as we didn’t want to have a big conference but rather have a more intensive workshop with much room for discussion. Of this first round some couldn’t make it, which probably isn’t too bad since the program is quite full as it is.
Birgit Abels, Director, Department of Musicology, Georg August University, Gōttingen, Germany and Editor-in-chief of the journal The world of music (new series) is currently the only full-time professor of cultural musicology, which was sufficient reason for us to invite her to perform the conference intro.
Timothy Taylor is professor in the Departments of Ethnomusicology and Musicology, University of California, Los Angeles, USA. His books  Global Pop: World Music, World Markets (1997), Strange Sounds: Music, Technology and Culture (2001), Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World (2007) and The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture (2012) are very influential and he is the foremost scholar on world music and global popular music.
Stephen Amico, Assistant professor of popular music, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands.  Stephen is currently completing a monograph entitled Roll Over, Tchaikovsky:  Russian Popular Music and Post-Soviet Homosexuality (University of Illinois Press), and beginning work on a project devoted to female singers and the voice in Soviet and post-Soviet popular culture.
Laudan Nooshin, Senior Lecturer and Director of Music Research Degrees, Centre for Music Studies, City University, London, GB. Her books include Music and the Play of Power in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, Ashgate Press 2009. Her article Improvisation as ‘Other’: Creativity, Knowledge and Power – The Case of Iranian Classical Music (2003) is a jewel of cultural musicology.
Katherine Butler Schofield, Lecturer, Music department, King’s college, London, UK. Katherine’s research includes the history of Mughal India, music and Islam, music and colonialism, and music and empire. She is currently leading an exciting new major research project, “Musical Transitions to European Colonialism in the Eastern Indian Ocean” (2011-14), which aims to produce a history of transitions from pre-colonial to colonial musical fields in India and the Malay peninsula.
Barbara Titus, Associate professor of cultural musicology, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands and visiting professor of cultural musicology in Göttingen (fall 2013). Barbara’s recent research focusses on music as discourse of power, in particular in South Africa and Indonesia.
Thomas Solomon, Professor of Music in the Grieg Academy – Department of Music at the University of Bergen in Norway. His research includes ecology, place and identity in highland Bolivia and popular music in Turkey. New projects include work on music and race in American cartoons, music and multiculturalism in Norway, and music and postcolonialism.
Tony Langlois, Lecturer – Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland. Tony is editor of the volume Non-western popular music (Ashgate 2011). His research includes: Music and New Media, North Africa, Film Sound, Islam and Globalisation, Ireland, Cultural Politics.
Matthew Gelbart, Assistant professor, Art History and Music, Fordham University, NY, USA. Matthew is specialised in Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music, rock music, musical labels and identities, studies of folk music and disciplinary histories. His study The Invention of “Folk Music” and “Art Music” (Cambridge University Press, 2007) is groundbreaking.
Nicholas Cook, Professor of Music at University of Cambridge, UK is one of the most prolific and innovative musicologists of today. His work includes performance analysis, music and media, cultural encounters, musical analysis, empirical musicology and much more. Before coming to Cambridge he directed the AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music. His Very short introduction to music is certainly one of the best short introductions to this very rich field of study.
Edward Herbst, Department of Anthropology, Hunter college, NY, USA .His research involves voice and culture, kinesthetics and ethnopoetics of sound, soundscape studies, and musical anthropology focusing on the music, dance and theatre of Bali with other recent projects in Hungary and Romania, Mexico and Egypt. His book Voices in Bali: Energies and Perceptions in Vocal Music and Dance Theater is a mine of inspiration for the study of music and culture.
Sarah Weiss, Visiting Associate Professor, Yale-NUS College, Singapore. Her research involves issues of postcoloniality, hybridity, gender, and aesthetics. Her first book, Listening to an Earlier Java: Aesthetics, Gender, and the Music of Wayang in Central Java was published by KITLV in 2006. is currently finishing a second book entitled Ritual Soundings: Women Performers and World Religions.
Martin Clayton,  Professor in Ethnomusicology in Durham University, UK. Martin has published a very considerable number of books (and articles) with a wide range of interest. He is co-editor of The Cultural Study of Music, which went into the second and thoroughly revised edition last year. Although it doesn’t propose to be a ‘cultural musicology reader’ it could very well perform this purpose.
Richard Widdess, Professor of Musicology, Centre of South Asian Studies, SOAS, London, UK. His research focusses on music as a universal human activity, a non-verbal expressive system communicated primarily through sound. This involves studying how different musical systems work in the contexts in which they are performed, or were performed in the past, and developing tools for analysing their structure and meaning. His books on ancient Indian music and contemporary dhrupad are standard works in the field. He is currently working on ritual music in Nepal.
Dard Neuman, Assistant Professor of Music and Hasan Endowed Chair in Classical Indian Music at the University of California, USA. His research interests concern the musical cultivation, transmission and performance of Hindustani music in twentieth century North India.
Simone Krüger, Senior Lecturer in Music at Liverpool John Moores University, UK. Her research interests are ethnomusicology and music pedagogy, popular music and cultural studies, music in global culture, the music of Paraguay, and ethnography education and employability. She has nearly ten years teaching experience in popular music, ethnomusicology and related fields of musical study.
Pirkko Moisala, Professor of Musicology, department of Philosophy, History, Culture and Art Studies, Helsinki University, Finland. Pirkko’s first book Cultural cognition in music: Continuity and change in the Gurung music of Nepal is particularly interesting as it explores the interrelation of the cultural and the cognitive in musicology. Since then she has published a considerable number of important books and articles. Her current project, Deleuzian Study of Music as Culture, aims at developing a research model for ethnomusicology that examines “music as culture” as an assemblage of encounters between various kinds of fluidly moving forces. Pirkko is accompanied by the research team comprising Taru Leppänen, Milla Tiainen and Hanna Väätäinen
Lakshmi Subramaniam, Professor of History, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkatta, India. Lakshmi’s research on late colonial and postcolonial histories of Indian performing arts is unique in India (and outside). Her book From the Tanjore Court to the Madras Music Academy: A Social History of Music in South India (2006) exemplifies this new direction in the cultural history of India.
Annette Wilke, Professor of Religious Studies, Director of the Seminar für Allgemeine Religionswissenschaft, Universität Münster, Germany. Her Sound and Communication: An Aesthetic Cultural History of Sanskrit Hinduism (2011, with Oliver Moebus), is an extraordinary and enormous testimony to the way in which sound plays a central role in Hindu culture. Before this she has published numerous books and articles on South Asian religions.
Simone Mahrenholz, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, University of Manitoba, Canada. Her research focuses on the question of how artworks contribute to “cognition” or “understanding”, and how the answers to this question alter our philosophical conceptions of what epistemology, reason, and ratio consist of, leading to the more general question of how epistemology and aesthetics are interrelated. These issues are pursued in her books Musik und Erkenntnis (Music and Cognition, 2000) and Kreativität – Eine Philosophische Analyse (Creativity – A Philosophical Analysis, 2011) as well as in several articles on the philosophy of music, picture-theory and the philosophy of film.
Wim van der Meer, Associate Professor of Cultural Musicology, Department of Musicology, Faculty of Humanities, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, will be retiring in 2014 and suggested the theme of this conference in an endeavour to clarify ‘cultural musicology’ and perhaps apply an “unsharp mask” filter on it.