The Arab Avant-Garde: Music, Politics, Modernity

Contributors

275 Contributors : sami w. asmar is a nasa physicist specializing in research in the fields of planetary gravity and atmospheres. He has authored a book on techniques of Radio Science and is a recipient of several nasa medals and awards. A director of the ucla Near East Ensemble, he is also the founder of the Turath .org web resource on world music and has published numerous articles on Arab musicology. thomas burkhalter, an ethnomusicologist, music journalist, and cultural producer from Bern, Switzerland, runs the research project Global Niches—Music in a Transnational World at the Zurich University of the Arts. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of Norient—Network for Local and Global Sounds and Media Culture. He produced and tours with the audiovisual performances Sonic Traces: From the Arab World and Sonic Traces: From Switzerland and codirected the documentary film Buy More Incense (2002) about second- and third-generation Indian and Pakistani musicians in the uk. His first book, Local Music Scenes and Globalization: Transnational Platforms in Beirut, is published by Routledge (2013). kay dickinson is an associate professor at Concordia University, Montreal. She is the editor of Movie Music (Routledge, 2002) and the author of Off Key: When Film and Music Won’t Work Together (Oxford University Press, 2008). Her research intoArab culture has appeared in Screen, Camera Obscura, Framework and Screening the Past, and includes editorship of an “In Focus” section of the Cinema Journal on the Arab revolutions. Her monograph Arab Cinema Travels: Syria, Palestine, Dubai and Beyond is forthcoming. benjamin j. harbert is an assistant professor of music at Georgetown University. He has published peer-reviewed articles in the International Journal of Community Music and Pacific Review of Ethnomusicology and is currently working on a monograph about the history of music at Angola Prison. Be- Contributors / 276 fore returning to academia, he directed the guitar, percussion, and music theory programs at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music. Harbert is a concert-level performer on guitar, Near Eastern ‘ud, and Indian tabla. He has led a number of performance groups, including the LosAngeles Electric 8 and extended rock ensemble arrangements of Erik Satie’s musique d’ameublement. michael khoury is a Detroit-based violinist, bassist, and economist who is the author of several publications on economics and music. As a musician, he has recorded as a bass player in several psychedelic and garage rock bands. In the realm of the avant-garde, Khoury performs as a violinist, often in duet or ensemble with Ben Hall, Hans Buetow, Christopher Riggs, Will Soderberg, and Leyya Tawil. He has worked with Faruq Z. Bey, Wolfgang Fuchs, The Northwoods Improvisers, The Graveyards, Maury Coles, and Dennis Gonzalez. Khoury is also the proprietor of the Entropy Stereo record label, as well as the micro Detroit Improvisation label. saed muhssin is a performer of traditional and modern Arab art music, Turkish music, Arab folk music, and free improvisation. In addition to his solo work, Muhssin currently directs and performs with the Arab Orchestra of San Francisco and the Saed Muhssin Trio. He teaches ‘ud, Arab music theory, and ear training. His research interests include twentieth-century Arab musical forms and performance practice. marina peterson is an associate professor of performance studies in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts at Ohio University. An anthropologist, she is the author of Sound, Space, and the City: Civic Performance in Downtown Los Angeles (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010) and coeditor of Global Downtowns (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). kamran rastegar is an assistant professor of Arabic literature and teaches in the International Letters and Visual Studies program at Tufts University, where he also directs the Arabic program. His first monograph, Literary Modernity between the Middle East and Europe (Routledge, 2007), was the first book-length comparative study of modern Arabic and Persian literatures, and his second monograph, Surviving Images: Cinema, War, and Cultural Memory in the Middle East and North Africa, is forthcoming. caroline rooney is a professor of African and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Kent. From 2009 to 2012, she held an ESRC/AHRC Global Uncertainties fellowship with a research program entitled Radical Distrust. She is currently a Global Uncertainties Leadership fellow, conduct- Contributors / 277 ing a program that examines the roles played by utopian thinking and arts activism in the imagining of a common ground. Her books include African Literature, Animism and Politics (Routledge, 2000) and...