Madison World Music Festival Features Talks About World Music, Musicians

Madison (Wisconsin), USA – The Third Annual Madison World Music Festival, with a line-up of a dozen international musicians performing September 21-23, will kick off with a series of talks about world music and musicians, “Conversations on World Music,” the week before the festival. For more information on the festival line-up, go to www.union.wisc.edu/worldmusic.

The talks, co-sponsored by the UW-Madison Division of International Studies and the International Institute, will offer festival-goers an opportunity to learn more about musical traditions and cultures, even to hear local specialists perform.

All events are from 12:00 noon to 1 p.m. in the Memorial Union, 800 Langdon St. Check TITU. Monday, September 18 – “Yid Vicious on the Art of Klezmer Music.” Members of Madison’s Klezmer band, including saxophonist and UW-Madison graduate student Melissa Reiser, will discuss the origins of Klezmer or Yiddish folk music.

Reiser has a master’s in ethnomusicology and has conducted field research on Tuareg music festivals in northern Mali. She plays or has played in the Afro-pop band Kweku Ananse and the Sweet Vibrations, the big-band Ladies Must Swing, the Milwaukee-based contemporary ensemble Present Music, and classical venues such as the Milwaukee Symphony and the Milwaukee Chamber Orchestra.

Tuesday, September 19 – “Global Percussion: Curricular Integration and Performance Demonstration,” presented by UW-Madison percussionists Anthony Di Sanza, Tim Patterson, Tom Ross, Jamie Ryan and Robert Schoville. They will discuss the integration of global percussion into the Western percussion curriculum, as well as perform various examples of music from Cuba, Brazil, India and the Middle East. Anthony Di Sanza currently serves as Associate Professor of Percussion at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Tim Patterson, Tom Ross and Jamie Ryan are DMA percussion students in the School of Music and Robert Schoville is a Ph.D. student in Curriculum and Instruction. Together they co-direct the UW World Percussion Ensemble which performs percussion based music from Cuba, Brazil, India and the Middle East.

Wednesday, September 20 – to be announced

Thursday, September 21 – “The Cultural Traditions of the Swedish-Speaking Finns,” a talk by Thomas Dubois, UW-Madison professor of Scandinavian Studies.
Dubois teaches, writes, and researches on a variety of Nordic topics, particularly Finnish folklore and literature, Sámi culture and lyric songs in Northern Europe.

Friday, September 22 – “Following Threads on the Silk Road – The Tapestry of Central Asian Music,” a talk by Anna Senarslan, a Fulbright scholar and Dana-Allen Dissertator Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities. Senarslan is a UW-Madison Ph.D. student in the department of Languages and Cultures of Asia. She has just returned from Baku, Azerbaijan where she conducted research on women ashugs or minstrel poets and storytellers performing in the epic tradition of Azerbaijan.