Thanks to Dr. Mei Han for information about this upcoming symposium on world musics at Northern Illinois University. The orange LP cover above was for a 1981 Folkways LP entitled West Meets East, which featured world music ensembles from NIU, including the Chinese ensemble that was directed by Dr. Han Kuo-huang. *************************** 2015 Teaching World Music Symposium: From the Exotic to the Global (April 9-11, 2015 at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois) To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the first NIU world music concert and the establishment of NIU’s world music curriculum, the purpose of the symposium is to provide a platform for music educators, ethnomusicologists and musicologists, composers, performers, and interdisciplinary scholars in cultural studies to exchange innovative ideas about globalization in music practices in the 21st century. The first world music concert at NIU on April 8, 1975 was a result of the Music Department’s pioneering establishment of a world music program. To attract a large audience, Dr. Kuo-Huang Han (now NIU Presidential Teaching Professor Emeritus) and his graduate student Jeff Abell (now a professor and the Coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Arts Program at Columbia College in Chicago) titled the first concert “Musica Exotica” to suggest the “exotic” excitement of the non-western classical music featured in the concert. This first concert performance was well received by the NIU community because many instruments and music styles featured in the concert were seen and heard for the first time. Forty years later, as a result of the many efforts of enthusiastic scholars, performing artists, and educators on and off the NIU campus, the practices and repertoire of non-western classical music are no longer “exotic” to the NIU community. The world music program has developed into a distinctive and now familiar component of the NIU tradition representing its unique culture and identity through hundreds of concert performances and outreach programs by the Chinese ensemble, Middle Eastern ensemble, Afro-pop ensemble, Afro-Cuban folkloric ensemble, Latin jazz ensemble, and the steel band. This pioneering history, a reflection of the broadening trends in musical idioms and practices since the 70s, is the genesis of the theme of the symposium. niu.edu/worldmusic/symposium/index.shtml
Posted on: Tue, 09 Dec 2014 18:09:58 +0000
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