Steven Feld | |
|---|---|
| Born | August 20, 1949 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
| Nationality | American |
| Known for | Study of poetics, emotion, song, and dialogical theories developed from work in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea |
| Awards | Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1994), Charles Seeger lecturer, Society for Ethnomusicology (2009) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Anthropology, Linguistics, Ethnomusicology, Poetics |
| Institutions | University of New Mexico, University of Texas, Austin, University of California, Santa Cruz, New York University, University of Pennsylvania |
| Thesis | (1979) |
| Doctoral advisor | Alan P. Merriam |
| Website | www |
Steven Feld (born August 20, 1949) is an American ethnomusicologist, anthropologist, and linguist, who worked for many years with the Kaluli (Bosavi) people of Papua New Guinea. He earned a MacArthur Fellowship in 1991.
Feld was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on August 20, 1949. He graduated with a BA cum laude at Hofstra University in anthropology in 1971.
He first went to the Bosavi territory in 1976, accompanied by anthropologist Edward L. Schieffelin, whose recordings of the Bosavi inspired him to pursue this work. [1] His work there fulfilled his dissertation (later published as Sound and Sentiment) for his PhD from Indiana University in 1979 (in anthropology/linguistics/ethnomusicology).
Feld later returned several times in the 1980s and 1990s to Papua New Guinea to research Bosavi song, rainforest ecology, and cultural poetics. He has also made briefer research visits to various locations in Europe.
He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, University of California at Santa Cruz, University of Texas at Austin, and University of Pennsylvania. He is currently (since 2003) a professor of anthropology and music at the University of New Mexico. Since 2001, he has also held a visiting appointment at the Grieg Academy, University of Bergen, Norway, as a professor of world music.
In 2002, he founded the VoxLox label, "documentary sound art advocates for human rights and acoustic ecology." His most recent book Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra (2012) is based on five years of research and collaboration in Accra, Ghana.
He is also a musician, and he has been active in the New Mexican music scene since the 1970s. [2]
Some of Feld's recordings are sampled on the track, "Kaluli Groove" on the 2007 album Global Drum Project by Mickey Hart, Zakir Hussain, Sikiru Adepoju, and Giovanni Hidalgo.
Schizophonic mimesis is a term coined by Steven Feld that describes the separation of a sound from its source, and the recontextualizing of that sound into a separate sonic context. The term in and of itself describes how sound recordings, split from their source through the chain of audio production, circulation, and consumption, stimulate and license renegotiations of identity in an ethnomusicological perspective.
The term is composed of two parts: schizophonia and mimesis. Firstly, schizophonia, a term coined by Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer, refers to the split between an original sound and the reproduction/transmission of this sound, be it in a recording, a song, etc. For example, any sound recording, radio, and telephone is a machine of schizophonia, in that they all separate the sound from its original source; in the case of radio, the source of a New York radio show is from New York, but a listener in Los Angeles hears the noises from Los Angeles. Secondly, mimesis describes an imitation or representation of that separated sound into another context. For example, mimesis has occurred if one places a recording of a baby's gurgle into a song.
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The music of Papua New Guinea has a long history.
The music of Solomon Islands has received international attention since before the country became independent from the United Kingdom in 1978.
Pygmy music refers to the sub-Saharan African music traditions of the Central African foragers, predominantly in the Congo, the Central African Republic and Cameroon.
Deep Forest is a French music project that originally began as a duo consisting of Michel Sanchez and Éric Mouquet. They compose a style of world music, sometimes called ethnic electronica, mixing ethnic with electronic sounds and dance beats or chillout beats. Their sound has been described as an "ethno-introspective ambient world music".
Mike Seeger was an American folk musician and folklorist. He was a distinctive singer and an accomplished musician who played autoharp, banjo, fiddle, dulcimer, guitar, mouth harp, mandolin, dobro, jaw harp, and pan pipes. Seeger, a half-brother of Pete Seeger, produced more than 30 documentary recordings, and performed in more than 40 other recordings. He desired to make known the caretakers of culture that inspired and taught him. He was posthumously inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2018.
"Papua New Guinea" is a 1991 song by the electronic music group Future Sound of London. It was the group's debut single and later appeared on their full-length album Accelerator. The single reached #22 on the UK singles chart.
Smithsonian Folkways is the nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian Institution. It is a part of the Smithsonian's Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, located at Capital Gallery in downtown Washington, D.C. The label was founded in 1987 after the family of Moses Asch, founder of Folkways Records, donated the entire Folkways Records label to the Smithsonian. The donation was made on the condition that the Institution continue Asch's policy that each of the more than 2,000 albums of Folkways Records remain in print forever, regardless of sales. Since then, the label has expanded on Asch's vision of documenting the sounds of the world, adding six other record labels to the collection, as well as releasing over 300 new recordings. Some well-known artists have contributed to the Smithsonian Folkways collection, including Pete Seeger, Ella Jenkins, Woody Guthrie, and Lead Belly. Famous songs include "This Land Is Your Land", "Goodnight, Irene", and "Midnight Special". Due to the unique nature of its recordings, which include an extensive collection of traditional American music, children's music, and international music, Smithsonian Folkways has become an important collection to the musical community, especially to ethnomusicologists, who utilize the recordings of "people's music" from all over the world.
"Watermelon Man" is a jazz standard written by Herbie Hancock for his debut album, Takin' Off (1962).
Mount Bosavi is a mountain in the Southern Highlands province, Papua New Guinea. It is the collapsed cone of an extinct volcano on the Great Papuan Plateau, part of the Kikori River basin. The crater is approximately 4 km wide and 1 km deep; it is home to a number of endemic species.
Theodore Craig Levin is an American ethnomusicologist. He is a professor of music at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and earned his undergraduate degree at Amherst College and obtained his Ph.D. from Princeton University. Levin has focused his research on the people of the Balkans, Siberia, and Central Asia. His recordings from these regions have been released on various labels.
"Sweet Lullaby" is a song by French musical group Deep Forest that originally appeared on their eponymous album (1992). The song gained popularity in 1992 and 1993 when it was released as a single, becoming a top-30 hit in many European and Oceanian countries. In 1994, it was re-released in remixed versions. Its accompanying music video was directed by Tarsem Singh and nominated for several awards at the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards.
Bambi B. Schieffelin is a linguistic anthropologist and professor emerita at New York University (NYU) in the department of Anthropology. Along with Elinor Ochs, she pioneered the field of language socialization. In addition, she has written extensively about language contact, language ideology, literacy, Haitian Creole, and missionization.
The Kaluli are a clan of indigenous peoples who live in the rain forests of the Great Papuan Plateau in Papua New Guinea. The Kaluli, who numbered approximately 2,000 people in 1987, are the most numerous and well documented by post-contact ethnographers and missionaries among the four language-clans of Bosavi kalu that speak non-Austronesian languages. Their numbers are thought to have declined precipitously following post-contact disease epidemics in the 1940s, and have not rebounded due to high infant mortality rates and periodic influenza outbreaks. The Kaluli are mostly monolingual in an ergative language.
Kaluli is a language spoken in Papua New Guinea. It is a developing language with 3,100 speakers. Some people refer to this language as Bosavi, however the people themselves refer to the language as Kaluli. There are four dialects, Ologo, Kaluli, Walulu, and Kugenesi. The differences between the dialects are not clear. Their writing system uses the Latin script. Kaluli belongs to the Trans-New Guinea language family. Kaluli was first analyzed by Murray Rule in 1964 who wrote a preliminary phonological and morphological analysis. A dictionary of Kaluli has been compiled by Schieffelin and Feld (1998).
Folkways Records was a record label founded by Moses Asch that documented folk, world, and children's music. It was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution in 1987 and is now part of Smithsonian Folkways.
Moses Asch was an American recording engineer and record executive. He founded Asch Records, which then changed its name to Folkways Records when the label transitioned from 78 RPM recordings to LP records. Asch ran the Folkways label from 1948 until his death in 1986. Folkways was very influential in bringing folk music into the American cultural mainstream. Some of America's greatest folk songs were originally recorded for Asch, including "This Land Is Your Land" by Woody Guthrie and "Goodnight Irene" by Lead Belly. Asch sold many commercial recordings to Verve Records; after his death, Asch's archive of ethnic recordings was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution, and released as Smithsonian Folkways Records.
Hugo Zemp is a Swiss-French ethnomusicologist. A prolific recorder of ethnic music and a writer on the subject, he has also shot a number of films about music of various regions, including 1988 film Voix de tête, voix de poitrine and 2002 film An African Brass Band filmed by him in Ivory Coast in 2002. His wide musical expertise includes music notably in Africa, Oceania and Switzerland. He also had particular interest in yodeling and lullabies. His recordings of lullabies from Solomon Islands were later released by UNESCO as part of their Musical Sources collection. One famous lullaby he recorded, a traditional Baegu lullaby from the Solomon Islands called "Rorogwela" was sung by Afunakwa, a Northern Malaita old woman. The recording was later used, apparently without permission, in Deep Forest's song "Sweet Lullaby".
Ecomusicology is an area of study that explores the relationships between music or sound, and the natural environment. It is a study which encompasses a variety of academic disciplines including musicology, biology, ecology and anthropology. Ecomusicology combines these disciplines to explore how sound is produced by natural environments and, more broadly how cultural values and concerns about nature are expressed through sonic mediums. Ecomusicology explores the ways that music is composed to replicate natural imagery, as well as how sounds produced within the natural environment are used within musical composition. Ecological studies of sounds produced by animals within their habitat are also considered to be part of the field of ecomusicology. In the 21st century, studies within the field the ecomusicology have also become increasingly interested in the sustainability of music production and performance.
A hugu is a sago-palm weevil in Papua New Guinea that has been used by men of the Onabasulu people as a musical instrument. The musicians pin the beetle onto a sharpened stick and hold the beetle up to their mouths, spinning the stick and beetle. If they do this during daylight, the beetle will beat its wings and provide a buzzing sound. The musicians' mouths act as a variable resonance chamber, in the same way as it does for a musician playing a Jew's harp or musical bow. By opening and closing their mouths and changing the shape, musicians can raise and lower the pitch, and make the music louder or softer.
The Meeting Pool is an album by Baka Beyond, released in 1995. It was a collaboration between British musicians and the Cameroonian Baka. Martin Cradick, the founder and guitar player for the group, decided to make a second album after the success of the first, Spirit of the Forest.
