I am a scholar of music and sound with ongoing ethnographic commitments in Japan, Okinawa, Ethiopia, and the US. Broadly speaking, my research explores the political and affective affordances of (musical) sounds in contexts ranging from everyday life to social movements, primarily in contemporary Japan. My scholarship is driven by my interest in exploring how auditory culture produces social space, and how sound’s materiality and ephemerality are entangled with affect and sociality. In other words, I investigate how the culturally particular ways in which people listen to and make (musical...
I am an ethnographer and anthropologist of music from Mexico City. My work deals with the intercalations of music, difference, and power in Latin America and, broadly speaking, with the politics of sound. I think about the ways music reveals latent registers of feeling, sense, and history; and sound’s intersections with media and technology, law and governance, movement and migration, faith and cosmology, and other dimensions of social life. My long-term ethnographic research commitments are in Michoacán, Mexico. I also work in Mexico City and in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Edmund Campion is currently a Professor of Music Composition and Co-Director at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been active as a performing artist, composer, software developer and collaborating artist for over 25 years.
In 2023, Campion composed The Velvet Algorithms composed for large ensemble and electronics, premiered by the ECO Ensemble with David Milnes, as well as a new commission for Marimba and Electronics premiered at the Festival Empreintes in Lyon, France. As a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, Mr. Campion composed...
Carmine-Emanuele Cella is an internationally acclaimed composer with advanced studies in mathematics who serves as Co-Director of the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies at the University of California, Berkeley. For many years he has worked on the poetical relationships between the structured world of mathematics and the chaotic world of artistic expression, using music as a medium. His music is not based on melodies, chords or rhythms but is more about writing the sound itself. Each note and each musical figure are the components of a global sonic image, unified and physical,...
Dr. Wei Cheng is the Director of the Choral Program and an Associate Professor of Teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, Department of Music. She oversees the UCB Chamber Chorus, University Chorus, Vocal Program, and conducting instruction. For her outstanding contributions, she has been named the Virginia Chan Lew Distinguished Professor in Music for 2023-2028, following her tenure as the Jerry and Evelyn Hemmings Chambers Distinguished Professor in Music from 2020-2023. Originally from Beijing, China, Dr. Cheng earned her Master’s and Doctoral degrees in...
In my work, I think about what music is and has been made out of – broadly about poietic matters in musicmaking. I am from Johannesburg and pursued piano performance there at the University of Witwatersrand. Performance scholarships brought me north: RNCM in Manchester UK and then the University of Cambridge. My PhD, completed at Gonville & Caius College where I was later a Research Fellow, was a microhistory entitled...
Across a range of ethnographic and other projects my work focuses on questions of indeterminacy and those aspects of social and material worlds that lend insight into their unfinished, plastic character. In part this has meant an ethnographic and analytical focus on the political, epistemic and worldly work of undecidabilty. These conceptual interests animate writing that concerns sound, image, fire, and the emergent material, ecological, and social coordinates of the urban.
I am currently pursuing several ethnographic and archival projects, grounded in my long term...
A historian of music and music theory, I focus my research on music and state-building—empire-building, to be more specific. Empires are by default players and products of transregional processes encompassing diverse peoples, territories, and traditions. Hence the other throughline of my work: a comparative perspective, informed by my current expertise in early modern Europe and late-imperial China (16th to 18th centuries) and by my new pivot to ancient and early imperial China (8...
Composer (/curator/writer/researcher) Mu-Xuan Lin (林慕萱) (b.1984, Taiwan/USA) defines her life as a quest for an artistic autonomy poetically engendered by both its will and its vulnerability to one’s corporeal experience and to the world one lives in. Having extensive training in the visual arts and creative writing and frequent exposure to theatre, dance, and literature from an early age, and profound influences from the cinema, Mu-Xuan is interested in the montage and the mise-en-scène of contemporary individuals’ fragmented yet interlaced truths, of the confusion of time and place, and...
Nicholas Mathew is Professor of Music and Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Humanities. Born in Norwich, in the UK, he was educated at his local comprehensive school, and went on to study music history and the piano at Oxford University, the Guildhall School of Music, and Cornell University. He joined the faculty at Berkeley in 2007. His publications include the books Political Beethoven and The Haydn Economy.
