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...
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...
My research in Aboriginal Northern Australia proceeds in two, related domains that bring together my interests in music, media, and the close ethnography of an urbanising Northern Territory. The first looks to the tremendous successes of Aboriginal media production in order to understand its ramifications across Australia’s north. In privileging music and sound in this work I seek to analyze the power of audio media as an everyday presence in Aboriginal lives and to relate this to both enduring and historically emergent understandings of relatedness and of mediation itself. My...
Matthew Hough is a composer, theorist and performer working on new and popular music.
His compositions have been described as “unnervingly exacting” (Time Out: New York), “mood music if you’re in a mental home” (Howard Stern) and “awful but also kind of brilliant” (Richard Danielpour) and performed and recorded by groups including the Wet Ink Ensemble, Yarn/Wire, loadbang, the Locrian Chamber Players and Iktus Percussion.
Hough’s research on music theory and pedagogy has been published in Music Theory Online and presented in papers to the College Music...
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...
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.
Originally from Chicago and classically trained, Myra Melford is a composer with a singular, kinetic, and lyrical voice in piano improvisation. Chicago blues, architecture, jazz and experimental music inspire her work. She has released over 40 recordings, including more than 20 as a leader or co-leader, and maintains three bands: the celebrated quintet Snowy Egret, the collective Trio M, and the duo Dialogue with clarinetist Ben Goldberg. She is a Guggenheim Fellow for “Language of Dreams,” (2013), a Doris Duke Performing Artist (2013) an Alpert Award in the Arts...
