Faculty: Anthropology of Music

Carol Muller

email: camuller@sas.upenn.edu
Ph.D., New York University, 1994
Associate Professor Music, Director of Graduate Studies

Specialist in South African music, critical ethnography, comparative religion, gender studies, diaspora and historiography. Fellow (National Humanities Center 1999-2000), numerous research and publication grants (Human Sciences Research Coucil, South Africa, Penn Research foundation). Muller has published several books: Rituals of Fertility and the Sacrifice of Desire: Nazarite Women's Performance (with CD Rom, Chicago 1999); South African Music: A Century of Traditions in Transformation with compact Disc (ABC-CLIO, 2004; Second edition, Routledge 2008); Musical Echoes, with Sathima Bea Benjamin (Duke, 2008, with Compact Disc); she has edited four volumes of the Symposium on Ethnomusicology (South Africa, 1996); Edited and Introduced Shembe Hymns (Translated by Bongani Mthethwa, forthcoming with Compact Disc University of KwaZulu Natal Press). Muller is currently working on two further books, Musically Connected (Oxford 2008 with accompanying website) and "The Power to Fly: " Zulu Women Stories (1910-2007). She has published widely in a range of journals including Ethnomusicology, Worlds of Music, African Music, Forum for Ethnomusicology, British Journal of Ethnomusicology, Research in African Literatures, Safundi, History Compass, Current Writing, with contributions in several edited volumes. Muller's pedagogical interests include Academically Based Community Service<http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/music/westphillymusic>. She is also a gumboot dancer.

Timothy Rommen
email: trommen@sas.upenn.edu
Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2002  
Assistant Professor of Music

Specialist in the music of the Caribbean with research interests that include folk and popular sacred music, popular music, critical   theory, ethics, diaspora, and the intellectual history of ethnomusicology. Rommen is particularly interested in exploring the connections that have been created and continue dynamically to grow between Africa, the Caribbean, and North America. Rockefeller Resident Fellow at the Center for Black Music Research (2004-2005).   Rommen's publications include "Mek Some Noise": Gospel Music and the Ethics of Style in Trinidad (University of California Press, 2007), and his articles and reviews appear in Ethnomusicology (forthcoming), Popular Music, the Black Music Research Journal, The World of Music, the Journal of Religion, The Yearbook for Traditional Music, the International Dictionary of Black Composers, and the Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World. His current projects include a book on the popular musics of the Bahamas and research on the rock music scene in Trinidad.

Gary A. Tomlinson

email: gatomlin@sas.upenn.edu
Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley, 1979
Annenberg Professor in the Humanities

Specialist in music of the late Renaissance and early Baroque, opera, music and cross-cultural contact, and cultural history and historiography. Alfred Einstein prize of the American Musicological Society, 1982. Guggenheim fellowship, 1982. MacArthur fellowship, 1988-93. Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, 1997-98. Tomlinson publishes in a number of fields. In his book Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance he deals with the impact of literary forces on changing musical styles around 1600. His work on opera, especially in Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera, treats the connections of music drama to changing models of European subjectivity. His book Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others brings poststructuralist historical approaches to bear on sixteenth-century musical magic. His current work concerns New World song and theories of European colonialism.