Dr. Michael Vercelli
Clinic/master class on West African Gyil Performance
Tuesday, October 25, 2016
2:00 – 3:00
Room B120
Dr. Michael B. Vercelli is the director of the World Music Performance Center at West Virginia University. Michael holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Percussion Performance with a minor in Ethnomusicology from the University of Arizona. While well versed in the classical percussion repertoire, Michael’s specialty lies in non-Western instruments. He has studied the traditional music of other countries and done fieldwork in Bali, Cuba, Brazil, and primarily, Ghana. Dr. Vercelli has received many awards for both his performance and study of indigenous music such including a WVU Faculty Senate Research Grant for his project – “Remembering the Hunters: Preservation through Performance of the Ritual Birifor Funeral Music of Ghana.” At WVU, Dr. Vercelli also directs summer study abroad courses to Ghana and Brazil, focusing on music, dance and cultural emersion. Dr. Vercelli is a contributing author to the World Percussion chapter in the third edition of Gary Cook’s Teaching Percussion. He is a participating member in the Society for Ethnomusicology and Percussive Arts Society where he serves on the World Percussion Committee. Michael has given lectures, performances and workshops, across the United States, Mexico, Brazil, China and Iceland, and is a founding member of the Zumbumba Percussion Trio.
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.
Decolonizing Strategies in Ethnomusicology, Teaching, and Performance
Perspectives from the US Southwest and Latin America featuring performances by J.D. Robb Trust. This symposium consists of an initial roundtable centered on decolonizing strategies in ethnomusicology followed by two shorter sessions: the first focusing on decolonizing pedagogies and the second on performance and activism.