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Graduate Students

A listing of current graduate students and their interests

Ethnomusicology

Dillon Bustin – evolutionary origins of music, modernization and musical antimodernism, African American song, Native American storytelling

David Fossum – Central Asian and Near Eastern musics, modernization, performance/improvisation, ethnography and cultural history.
Dave has a B.A. in English/Comparative Literature from George Mason University and an M.A. in Ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University. While serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Turkmenistan, he learned to play instrumental music on a two-stringed Turkmen lute called dutar. After returning to his home town of Washington, D.C., he began performing with Turkish folk musician Hüsnü Aydogdu, who taught him to play baglama. His M.A. thesis examines the Ahal School of instrumental Turkmen dutar performance. His broader research interests include the musics of Central Asia, Turkey, and the Near East, and anything with strings – strummed, plucked, bowed or otherwise. He has recently picked up the ud and leads a Middle Eastern ensemble at Brown. He also enjoys performing with Sekar Setaman, Brown's Javanese Gamelan.

Bradley Hanson – American vernacular music, applied ethnomusicology, public culture, radio, memory, heritage.
Bradley is a fourth year PhD student in ethnomusicology, with interests including American vernacular music, applied ethnomusicology,folklore, public culture, media, and memory. His dissertation field research, in Appalachian East Tennessee,centers onregional bluegrass, country, and gospel music-making, principally among devoted amateurs.He ispresentlycollaborating with agroup of musicians, most born between 1925 and 1950, to understand and document their musical, social, performance, and memory practices, especially as situated around post-WWII community radio, variety, and stage shows. Among this group, he is also researching current regional trends in cultural tourism, festival making, andheritage discourse. Since 2007, Bradley has worked asa cultural interpreter with the Cumberland Trail State Scenic Trail in eleven counties in East Tennessee. As part of the Cumberland Trail Music and History project he has conducted oral history interviews, developed web exhibits, collected archival material, produced a weekly radio program, and helped organize community concerts and festivals, including the Louie Bluie Music and Arts Festival in Caryville, TN.

Kathleen Haughey — South American music, applied ethnomusicology, memory, trauma, ethnotheory, performance and embodiment
Kate is a first-year graduate student in ethnomusicology, currently investigating DJ culture and the engagement of young people through community arts programs in Providence. Prior to Brown, Kate spent a year living in Orono, Maine, teaching special education and music at the local elementary school. Kate is a classically trained cellist, with a B.M. in Cello Performance and a B.A. in Hispanic Studies from Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, WA. At PLU she performed regularly in early music ensembles, the university symphony orchestra, and solo and ensemble recitals. She learned to play and dance tango while living in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She has taught music and performed in both Argentina and Brazil, most recently in Rio de Janeiro at the Rio International Cello Encounter. At Brown, Kate continues her passion of making music with others by playing cavaquinho in the Choro Ensemble and singing in the Sacred Harp ensemble. Her research interests include the intersections between music composition/performance and postmemory/trauma; community music programs as catalysts for social change; and the production, distribution, and performance of contemporary and colonial music of the Guaraní living near the Jesuit missions on the borders of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay.

Sheila Hogg –Anthropological linguistics; sociolinguistics, documentary film; sean-nós singing; Irish & Scottish Gaelic languages, Irish, Cajun, Cape Breton & French-Canadian musics and dance styles.With a B.A. in Anthropology (linguistics) from Brown, Sheila is continuing her research for the M.A. with an ongoing in the singing competitions at the Oireachtas na Gaeilge annual festival in Ireland. This work combines a look at local language communities celebrating their language and culture through performance. She has received several NEA Folk Arts Apprenticeships to work with U.S.-based Irish singers, Bridget Fitzgerald (Irish language traditions) and Josephine McNamara (English language). She has performed at local and New England festivals and at the Feis nan Eilean in Stornaway, Scotland. Language study has been undertaken at Harvard and at National University of Ireland, Galway. She has taught Irish Gaelic language in the community and at Brown for many years. As a dialect coach for many Brown and Providence College productions, she has teased ‘the blas’ or right accent from the players. Her roles in festival production include the Cajun & Bluegrass Festival in R.I.(now Rhythm & Roots) and the R.I. Irish festival in Providence. She is currently working full time in the Orwig Music Library as a Senior Library Specialist.

Francesca Inglese – Music of the African Diaspora, global circulation of black music, blackface minstrelsy, performance, subjectivity, the body and embodiment, music education, applied ethnomusicology, audio documentary 
Francesca is a Ph.D. student in ethnomusicology. She received her B.A. in music (with a focus on composition) from Vassar College and an M.A. in ethnomusicology from the University of Toronto. She has studied, performed, and taught Baroque, Jazz, and Carnatic violin while living in Scotland, India, and Iceland. Her M.A. thesis focused on the various musical interactions and encounters amongst African American and Jewish women vaudeville performers in the early 20th century as well as the sonic and embodied legacy of blackface minstrelsy in the performances of Sophie Tucker. Her current ethnographic dissertation research explores the music and embodied practices, public parades, and youth development projects of minstrel troupes in Cape Town, South Africa.  

Christopher Johnson-Roberson—Music of the African Diaspora, queer theory, feminism, music and technology
Chris is a first-year Ph.D student in ethnomusicology. He received his B.A. in History and Literature & Music from Harvard College, where he wrote a senior thesis on the political ramifications of Zulu women's music. His current research interests include black music from across the African Diaspora, commerce, queerness, and virtual communities. He aims to study how black musicians and their audiences incorporate technology into aesthetic practice, social interaction, and embodied experience.

Esther Viola Kurtz—Afro-Brazilian movement and music forms, African diaspora, body and embodiment, improvisation, race, gender, applied ethnomusicology.
Esther Viola is a first-year grad student, with a B.M. From the Eastman School of Music and an M.M. from the Utrecht Conservatory, in the Netherlands, both in oboe performance. With oboe, Esther has sought to push the boundaries of the repertoire, commissioning new works and improvising with groups in Amsterdam and Boston. She also studied choro in Rio de Janeiro, and since 2006 she has been practicing the Brazilian martial art capoeira, which is now the focus of her research. With capoeira, she is exploring embodied knowledge and music and movement as resistance practices, and further interests include gesture, communication and improvisation. Esther also dances forró and a little samba de gafieira, and co-produces the Junk Kitchen Concert Series in Cambridge, MA.

Nicholas Reeder – African percussion, Brazilian music and culture, Documentary film, Jazz performance (guitar), Music cognition, Poetics, Songs, Sound for multimedia/video
 Nick came back to Brown (where he was an undergrad, majoring in History/American Literature and a varsity lacrosse player and coach) after working as a freelance recording engineer/producer in San Francisco and Nashville for 7 years.

Shayn Smulyan – Yiddish song, music and language, performative speech (especially translation), American microcultural musics, D/diaspora, revivalism
Shayn came to Brown in 2005, after a year building hiking trails and two years in an egalitarian intentional community. Prior to that she did her BA at Smith College in anthropology and music. Her current research is on the performative and communicative strategies of Yiddish singers. Shayn is an active sacred harp singer and a dabbler on various stringed and percussion instruments. She does political and cultural work in the queer and Jewish-Secularist communities (sometimes both at once), and spends too much time reading their blogs.

Alex Stein – Jazz and Black Music, Africana Studies, improvisation, performance, pedagogy
Alex is a professional jazz saxophonist and longtime student of master jazz educator Barry Harris.  He has performed at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Smalls, the Kitano Hotel, and the Cape May, Mackinac Island, and Sarasota Jazz Festivals with the Stein Brothers Quintet, which he co-leads with his brother, Asher.  His earliest performing experiences at the Peppermint Lounge in Orange, NJ  illuminated firsthand the inseparability of music and the larger milieu of its production.  Alex holds a BA in History and Music Performance from UNC-Chapel Hill and an MM in Jazz Performance from William Paterson University. www.steinbrothersjazz.com

Benjamin Teitelbaum – Musics of Scandinavia and Scandinavian America, music cognition, music theory, music and ideology, musics of the Caspian region.
Benjamin entered Brown's ethnomusicology program after earning a B.M. in nyckelharpa from Bethany College, with auxiliary studies at the Royal Conservatory of Music, Stockholm and the Eric Sahlström Institute in Sweden. His current research projects focus on the role of music in the rise of radical nationalism in Scandinavia, rhythmic asymmetry in Swedish traditional music, and music and gender in Azerbaijan and Dagestan. Speaking to Scandinavian media about Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik and his appreciation for white nationalist music. [Note: use GOOGLE translate tools] Ben lives in Warwick, RI with his wife Kajsa and dog Levi.

Triin Vallaste – post-Soviet Eurasia, poetics and politics of hip-hop in Europe, globalization, technology and media in postcolonial contexts, gender 
 Triin is a PhD student in ethnomusicology. Before coming to Brown, she received a BA and MA in musicology from the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre in her native Estonia. Triin is a classically trained pianist and choral singer and has a number of Estonian scholarly publications and translations. Triin is interested in the interrelationship of popular music, identity, and politics, especially in European hip-hop scenes. 

Aleysia Whitmore – music of the African diaspora, transnational movement of music, music of the Caribbean, dance and embodiment
Aleysia is a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology currently researching the influence of Cuban music in Senegalese and Malian popular music and this music’s presence on the world music scene. For her masters degree, she looked at the transnational movements and practices of salsa and the ways in which various conceptions of race and gender come together on dance floors in which diverse groups of people participate. Aleysia completed her Bachelors of Music at the University of Toronto where she enjoyed playing the oboe in a Serbian Orchestra and learning how to dance.

David Wood – Appalachian Music, acculturation, American popular music, micromusics, music cognition, psychology of music, revivals
Dave is returning to the ethnomusicology doctoral program after teaching a music cognition course for the University of Virginia’s Semester at Sea Spring 2011 voyage.  He completed his M.A. in Appalachian Studies (emphasis on Appalachian music) from Appalachian State University and has a B.A. in music from the College of William & Mary. Dave had formal instruction on trombone and piano but also plays fiddle, guitar, bass, dulcimer, mandolin, and percussion. He also has experience with recording, live sound engineering, and computer music programming. A native of southeast Virginia, Dave first learned about Appalachian music while at William & Mary and wrote his master's thesis on the shifting ambassadorship of old-time music in western North Carolina. His current research uses methods from cognitive ethnomusicology to help understand the American traditional music revival – specifically, whether or not emotional response to music differs between Appalachian natives and non-Appalachian revivalists and how this could reinforce the cultural division between these two groups.

Computer Music and Multimedia

Freida Abtan –
Freida is a Canadian multi-disciplinary artist and composer. Her music falls somewhere in between musique concrete and more modern noise and experimental audio and both genres are influential to her sound. Her work has been compared to bands such as Coil, and Zoviet France, because of her use of spectral manipulation and collage. She primarily works with samples of both musical and non-musical objects that she records herself and then manipulates, often beyond recognition, through techniques derived from musique concrète and through successive layers of digital signal processing. She uses structures reminiscent of popular music and more abstract compositional variants to sequence these sounds into melodic songs before incorporating her own treated voice. As well as having created visual shows for and performed with the internationally renown group Nurse with Wound, Freida has presented her own sound and visual work at festivals across North America and Europe. Her first album “subtle movements” is available on United Dairies / Jnana Records. Her upcoming release “the hands of the dancer” will be available on finite state and through Jnana Records.

Jordan Bartee - Audio / visual art, object oriented ontology, game (re)design, experimental electronics engineering, techno-archaeology. Jordan is an experimental artist, philosopher, and engineer. His work explores the nature of objects large and small through the lens of video game culture. By constructing inter-dimensional junctions between various microgardens and their shadows, he hopes to draw strange and wonderful creatures out of hiding. Under the alias Special Stage, he designs and manufactures avant-garde electronics for modular synthesizer enthusiasts.He has received a B.M. from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, an M.F.A. from CalArts, and an A.M. from Brown University, where he is currently pursuing his Ph.D. On the rare occasions that he is not surrounded by blinking lights and disassembled machines, he enjoys long distance running, sci-fi movies, and stuffed animals.

Peter Bussigel – Sound and LightPeter is a composer and intermedia artist who works with sound and light to explore the areas between art, science, performance and technology. He is interested in multiples, science fictions, iteration, waiting, noise, wormholes, accordions, mapping, processes and action. He has performed at concerts, festivals, galleries and dinner parties throughout North America and Japan.

Robert Griffin Byron – Digital transmedia through kinetic movement, installation, audiovision, real-time 3D animation
Robbie is a multimedia artist working with sound, painting, sculpture, cast glass, textiles, and video to create interactive installations and audiovisual art that explores the relationship between the organic and the synthetic, often through the deconstruction and abstraction of the world through physical computing technologies. Drawing inspiration from natural forms, from molecular mechanisms to the five elements of traditional philosophy, he attempts to understand through his art the hidden structures of manifest nature. Byron has a B.Mus. in composition from the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, his M.M. in computer music composition from Indiana University while on a Fulbright, and his M.A. in creative arts from Edith Cowan University. In 2000, he received a Peggy Glanville-Hicks Composer’s Fellowship-in-Residence. At Indiana, he won the 2005 Dean’s Prize for Electroacoustic Composition. His chamber music and orchestral works have been heard all across Australasia and the United States. To date, he has received four commissions. In 1997, the Western Australia Ballet commissioned the score for the full-length ballet Orlando. In 1998, Future Films commissioned a soundtrack for an art film by Glen Eaves called Structures. The score won the Australian Screen Music Award in 1999. Also in 1999, the Australian Ballet commissioned the full-length ballet Mirror Mirror. In 2002, the Ensemble Arcangelo commissioned the chamber work Kaleidoscope, with support from ArtsWA. In addition to these commissions, his Piano Sonata No. 2 (Cobalt) premiered by Michael Kieran Harvey in 1999 at the Calloway Auditorium, U.W.A. His most recent dance work, Enlightenment, premiered in Bloomington, Indiana, at the Black Box Theater in 2004. His work The Moon Methinks Looks with a Watery Eye won second place in the Australian National Harp Composition Competition in 2004. Further information can be found at robbiebyron.com

Mark Cetilla – Electroacoustic improvisation, audio / visual installation + performance
Mark Cetilia is a sound / media artist working at the nexus of analogue and digital technologies. Exploring the possibilities of generative systems in art, design, and sound creation, Cetilia’s work is an exercise in carefully controlled chaos. Over the past decade, he has worked to develop idiomatic performance systems utilizing custom hardware and software, manifesting in a rich tapestry of sound and image. Mark is a member of the electroacoustic ensemble Mem1, recipients of a 2008 Rhode Island State Council on the Arts Project Grant Award and the experimental media art group Redux, recipients of a 2006 Creative Capital grant for their Callspace project. He received his MFA with honors from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008, and is currently pursuing his Ph.D in computer music and multimedia at Brown University. He has taught classes and workshops on programming, sound and video art at the Rhode Island School of Design, TELIC Arts Exchange (Los Angeles), and Spullenmannen (Amersfoort, NL). Cetilia's work has been screened / installed at such galleries and festivals as Laptopia (Tel-Aviv), the Sol Koffler gallery (Providence, RI), the Atlantic Center for the Arts (New Smyrna Beach, FL) and SoundWalk (Long Beach, CA). He has performed widely at venues including REDCAT (Disney Hall), the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Roulette (NYC), Spectacle (Boston), and Electronic Church (Berlin). His solo sound works have been published by Iynges, Anarchymoon and Quiet Design. Throughout their career, his group Mem1 has collaborated with a variety of artists including the Penderecki String Quartet, Steve Roden, Jan Jelinek, Frank Bretschneider, and Stephen Vitiello. Age of Insects, a full-length album with Vitiello, is now available by Dragon's Eye Recordings. Together, Mem1 curates the experimental music series Ctrl+Alt+Repeat and the record label Estuary Ltd. More at: http://mark.cetilia.org

Akiko Hatakeyama — Multimedia / electroacoustic composition, audio-visual performance, Improvisation
Akiko is a composer, a singer, a flutist, and a video artist who is a native of Yokohama, Japan. She is interested in crossing boundaries between traditionally written music, electronics, improvisation, and visual components. Now, she incorporates real-time elements into her multimedia works, and working on computer based interactive pieces. Storytelling, memories, nature, and food often take important role in Akiko's work, and she most often finds beauty in simplicity. http://akikohatakeyama.com

Brian House— Rhythmanalysis, data sonification, acoustic ecology, sensor systems, feedback
Brian is a bricoleur whose work traverses alternative geographies, experimental music, and a critical data practice. By constructing embodied, participatory systems, he seeks to negotiate between algorithms and the serendipity of everyday life. His work has been shown by MoMA (NYC), MOCA (LA), LACE, Eyebeam, Rhizome, Conflux Festival, the Beall Center, and Stockholm's Kulturhuset, among others, and has been featured in publications including WIRED, TIME, The New York Times, SPIN, Metropolis, and on Univision. He holds degrees in computer science and religion from Columbia University and design from Chalmers University (Sweden). http://brianhouse.net

Bevin Kelley – Electronic Music Composition, Multimedia Music-based ExperimentalTheater, Interactive Sound Installation
Bevin Kelley is an electronic musician and multimedia composer-performer. Her performances are loosely narrative, incorporating live interactive electronic sound and video, film, field recording, heavy sampling, action and costume. Her recent works are often based on speculative sonic fiction texts. She performs solo and as half of the duo Blectum from Blechdom (awarded the Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction for digital music in 2001) with electronic musician Kristin Erickson. She has released four critically acclaimed solo albums under the Blevin Blectum nom de guerre, and many more in collaboration. Her fifth solo release, EMBLEM ALBUM, will be released on the Aagoo label in September of 2012. She continues to perform extensively throughout the United States and Europe. Her work can also be heard in toys, soundtracks, and theater productions. She entered the MEME program in the Fall of 2009.  http://www.blevinblectum.com

Stephan Moore – interactive/generative composition and multichannel sound design for installation/dance/theater, improvisation, games.
Stephan Moore is a composer, performer, audio artist, sound designer and curator. His creative work currently manifests as electronic studio compositions, improvised solo performances, sound installation works, scores and sound designs for collaborative performance pieces, and sound designs for unusual circumstances. Evidence, his long-standing project with sound artist Scott Smallwood, has performed widely and released several recordings over the past decade. He has created custom music software for a number of composers and artists, and has taught workshops and numerous college-level courses in composition, Max/MSP programming, sound art and electronic music. He curates the annual Floating Points Festival at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, where he also serves on the Art Advisory Board. From late 2004 to mid-2010, he performed over 250 concerts with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, serving as their sound engineer and music coordinator, and as a touring musician http://www.oddnoise.com/ . 

Caroline Park – audio/video installation, time/space, design
Caroline is an electroacoustic composer + multimedia artist working primarily with sparse materials.  She has been involved with the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, Saint Louis Symphony, Callithumpian Consort, Together: New England Electronic Music Festival, Musicacoustica Beijing, SICPP (Summer Institute of Contemporary Performance Practice), Boston Microtonal Society, Boston CyberArts, and the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus.  Her works are for sound/video/installation, with or without instruments.  Other interests include metamorphoses, elevation, linguistics, micro-objects, re-calibration, and sonic design.  Park received her B.M. and M.M. degrees in composition at the New England Conservatory studying with Malcolm Peyton, John Mallia and Paul Burdick.  She has had performances in the U.S., U.K. and in China.  She is now pursuing her Ph.D. at Brown University (MEME@Brown).

Jacob Richman – multimedia composition
Jacob Richman is a multimedia composer whose work explorers the relationship between sight and sound in live performance. His pieces mix live-processed moving images (film and video), music, and sound to create interactive, multimedia settings in which performers can interact. He has played jazz bass and classical trombone since his youth, and graduated with a joint BA in music composition and film/video from Harvard University. He later received his MA in Media Arts from the University of Michigan, was a Lecturer in Video at the School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan, and has been awed by the opportunity he has had to learn from his many talented students. He is currently a PhD student in Multimedia & Electronic Music Experiments at Brown University. Jacob’s use of mixed-media is always in an attempt to express a certain subject or experience to which he is deeply drawn, which at this point they have included such disparate things as a favorite poem, an old lullaby, Sardinian folk singing, and a herd of elk. He is fascinated by what he sees in his subjects as the interconnectedness of things: people with places, sounds with textures, humans with animals, plants and the natural world. He feels that exploring the relationships between sounds and images in performance is an effective way to both investigate and convey these greater inherent connections that surround us. http://www.jacob-richman.com/

Asha Tamirisa— sound, video, movement
Asha is an interdisciplinary artist that considers the expressive possibilities of computing through sound, video, and movement. Most recently her work was show at The Tank in NYC, The Santa Fe Complex, and on various buildings in downtown Akron. She has a B.A. from Oberlin College, where she studied TIMARA (Technology in Music and Related Arts).

Seth Thorn —
Seth studied viola performance with Roland Vamos at Northwestern University, and spent summers on scholarship studying with the principal violists of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Chicago Symphony Orchestra.  He has performed throughout the United States, Switzerland, Austria, Germany - including Leipzig's prestigious Gewandhaus - and South Korea.  Seth is interested in the practice of mediating acoustic sound material electronically and algorithmically.  Seth is a Fulbright Scholar and holds a B.A. in philosophy and critical theory from Northwestern University, and an M.A. in political theory from the Goethe-University in Frankfurt, Germany.  His work in MEME is supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation.  In addition to his work in music and multimedia at Brown, Seth is concurrently pursuing a Ph.D. in Brown's Department of German Studies.

Matthew Peters Warne – Gesture, sensors systems, responsive media installation, latent performance phenomena
Matthew is a composer, installation artist, and doctoral candidate in the Multimedia and Electronic Music Experiments (MEME) program at Brown University where he uses custom digital musical instruments in the live performance of soundscape recordings. His dissertation creates auto-ethnographic musical works based on fieldwork in Luanda and Huambo, Angola that aim to understand that country's situation as a post-war, resource-rich, developing nation in a globalizing world. His written work examines the impacts of using digital performance technologies in making studies of place. He holds an MS in Digital Media from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a BA from Grinnell College with majors in music and economics.

Kristina Wolfe
Kristina is a first-year graduate student at Meme. Her work has been performed at many festivals, conferences, and concerts, including the Third Practice Electro-Acoustic Festival, International Alliance for Women and Music conference, International Computer Music Conferences, and others. In 2007, she worked as the Greg Altman Media Intern for Pauline Oliveros at the Deep Listening Institute. She received her B.A. in Music Technology from Florida International University and her Masters of Arts in Digital Musics at Dartmouth College.