Dr. Kristina Jacobsen, Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology, was recently awarded the Fulbright Con Il Sud Award for Teaching and Research to support her upcoming research during her sabbatical on the Italian Island of Sardinia [Sardigna]. As a Fulbright Scholar, Dr. Jacobsen will be doing fieldwork for a new book project focusing on country music in Sardinia, titled “Sing Me Back Home: Songwriting, Language Reclamation and Italian Colonialism in Sardinia.” She will also be writing songs and recording a new Americana album of cowrites with Sardinian songwriters to accompany this book, presenting her research at Universities on the Italian continent, and teaching a class at the University of Cágliari in Sardinia.
Dr. Ana R. Alonso-Minutti Releases Book of Co-Edited Collection of Essays
A Book Presentation & Signing event for Dr. Alonso-Minutti co-edited collection of essays, Experimentalisms in Practice: Music Perspectives in Latin America, published by Oxford University Press earlier this year, at the UNM Bookstore.
Cuncordu Sas Bator Colonnas perform at Outpost
Sas Bator Colonnas is a multipart singing group from the Scano di Montiferro, a mountainous region in central Sardinia, Italy. Antioco Milia, Antonio Carboni, Stefano Desogos and Francesco Fodde started singing together in 2002, carrying on the vernacularmultipart singing practice, one of the most representative cultural forms of their village and their island, which is performed by four male singers and called cuncordu.
Different Rivers: Sardinian Hill Country and the DIY Ethos of River of Gennargentu
In the summer of 2014, the Bluesman “River of Gennargentu” released, on his SoundCloud page, three songs of hill country blues, sung in English and played with a technique like those of historical Delta blues artists, recorded in low-quality sound. Within a few months, the web page collected dozens of comments from users who were amazed by this new “discovery” and demanded the real artist’s origin, as-yet-not-specified.