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MUSICS ABROAD
SPEAKER: RICHARD WOLF, HARVARD UNIVERSITY
On opposite sides of the Oxus River border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan live two poet-singers who share a common language, faith, and family network, and yet remain separated by vicissitudes of the Great Game, the 19th-century conflict between the British Empire and Czarist Russia. Ethnomusicologist Richard Wolf has been contemplating the rupture that exists across this divide in “Two Poets and a River,” a film in progress about poet-singers Qurbonsho in Tajikistan and Daulatsho in Afghanistan. Read more here.
Speaker bio: Richard K. Wolf, Professor of Music and South Asian Studies at Harvard University, has been conducting ethnomusicological research in South Asia since 1982 and in Central Asia since 2012. Author of two monographs and editor of three collections, Wolf has published on such topics as social-cultural “style” in South Indian classical music, conceptions of space, time and music among the Kota tribal people in the Nilgiri Hills of south India, and drumming, “recitation,” and music in public Islamic contexts in India and Pakistan. Wolf is currently preparing a monograph and an ethnographic film concerning music, language, and moral being among the Wakhi people of adjacent parts of Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and western China. From 2012-2018 Richard held a Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation During the 2018-2019 academic year he was the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Fellow at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. His most recent publication is Thought and Play in Musical Rhythm (OUP 2019), a volume he coedited with Stephen Blum and Christopher Hasty. Wolf is also a performer on the South Indian vina.
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