An internationally renowned anthropologist of sound, Steven Feld, is at UNSW for a series of public events looking at the way music is used to understand the environment.
An internationally renowned anthropologist of sound, Steven Feld, is at UNSW for a series of public events looking at the way music is used to understand the environment.
Professor Feld, who worked in Papua New Guinea for 25 years and is conducting ongoing research in Europe and West Africa, will give a public lecture Wednesday night (see details below).
Steven Feld at work in Ghana
“I don’t think that music and art are part of the superstructural fluff of the world,” says Professor Feld, who is based at the University of New Mexico. “It is part of the core political and environmental issues of the world. It is a pathway to understand the environment.
“All of the research that I’ve done concerns living in a damaged world,” he says. “Music and sound are diagnostic indicators of what it means to live in such a world.”
He’s on the inaugural Roger Covell Fellowship, which aims in part to investigate music’s power to critique and express contemporary social experience.
Roger Covell is an eminent Australian musicologist, critic and author. He is Emeritus Professor in the School of Arts and Media and was chief classical music reviewer for the Herald for many years. The Fellowship has been set up to publicly acknowledge the contribution he has made.
For more about the event, go to the website.
What: Keynote Lecture – The Ethics and Aesthetics of Cosmopolitan Listening
When: 6.30pm, Wednesday 13 May
Where: Io Myers Studio, UNSW
Registration is essential.