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ETHNOMUSICOLOGY Ben Harbert is an assistant professor of music at Georgetown University. He holds a Ph.D. and M.A. from University of California, Los Angeles and a Bachelor of Arts in music and anthropology from Wesleyan University. He has examined topics including Egyptian extreme metal, American prison music, 17th century musical exploration in the Near East, the Spanish nationalist avant garde, and mathematic principles of Indian rhythms. In 1997, Harbert was awarded the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship for a yearlong study in Egypt, India, and Spain. At Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music, he developed and directed a comprehensive world music department and served on the education committee for the Chicago World Music Festival. He has delivered papers and guest-lectured on music internationally including the International Council of Traditional Music, Society for Ethnomusicology, American Folklore Society, Kent State University, The Skirball Center, and University of New Haven. He was an Artist in Residence at the Los Angeles Music Center as an American Music specialist. At the University of California, Los Angeles, he focused on music in Louisiana prisons and developed a comprehensive archive of Arts in Corrections, the largest artist residency program in U.S. history, supporting fine arts in California prisons from 1977 to 2003. In addition, he has been a visiting lecturer in music at Pomona College and a teaching fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles. GUITAR Harbert represents a third generation of the Andrés Segovia school of guitar, having studied under three of his proteges: Benjamin Bolt (Knoxville), Philip Rosheger (Berkeley), and José Luís Rodrigo Bravo (Madrid). From 1998 to 2001, he directed the guitar department at Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music, where he taught classical, rock, and international fingerstyle guitar. He also developed a curriculum for music theory explicitly for guitarsists. He has been featured in Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers's Beginning Guitarists Handbook and is a contributor to Acoustic Guitar Magazine. He has played in large guitar ensembles with Marco Capelli and John King, in the Chicago rock outfits Mezodigm and OX, and chamber recitals. Adding to guitar repertiore, he has transcribed and arranged extensive works for guitar solo, duo and octet. He founded the Los Angeles Electric 8, an electric guitar chamber octet and has been producing and performing his chamber rock arrangements of Erik Satie's musique d'ameublement. 'UD His 'ud teachers include Cinuçen Tanrikorur (Istanbul), Hussein Labib Saber (Cairo) and A. J. Racy (Los Angeles). In Chicago, he served on the Arab Arts Council and helped develop classes in Arab music with Issa Boulos at Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music. Upon moving to Los Angeles, he has worked extensively with A. J. Racy as an assistant to his ensemble and typesetting over two dozen of his original works. Recently, he was a music advisor for Marketplace's Middle East @ Work, arranging and recording their theme music for a small Arab ensemble. TABLA Harbert is an exponent of the Lucknow tabla gharana, having studied under Pandit Swapan Chaudhuri (Calcutta & San Rafael, CA) and Ustad Zakir Hussein (Berkeley). He has accompanied classical Indian music and dance, including artists Aashish Khan, Pallavi Raisurana, and Pranita Jain. He has been featured on WBEZ's Eight Forty-Eight and WGN's Morning News. Harbert taught tabla classes at Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music from 1999-2002 and at the Claremont Community School of Music from 2002-2003. COMPOSITION Harbert studied composition under Neely Bruce and Alvin Lucier at Wesleyan University. His works have been performed at Chicago's Links Hall and Lula Cafe. He has written for guitar, string quartet, sitar, sarode, 'ud, contrabass clarinet, saxophones, and piano. His music aims at exploring specific musical concepts in unexpected ways. FILM As an extension of his deep interest in people making music, Harbert turned to documentary filmmaking, studying under renowned filmmaker Marina Goldovskaya. In 2007, he directed and produced a short film about the musicians at a California state prison entitled In a Day’s Time: Songs from the California Men’s Colony which has screened at the Northwest Film Center’s 2008 Reel Music Festival and the 2008 San Luis Obispo International Film Festival. As a film editor, Harbert has worked on Anthony Seeger’s Mouse Ceremony DVD for his book Why Suyá Sing for Illinois University Press and Ankica Petrovic’s John (Ivan) Filcich, Life in the Circle Dance. He is currently in post-production for a feature-length documentary film on music in three Louisiana prisons. REVIEWS “His attention to composition, his sense of beauty and responsibility of forms to deliver statements, and his thoroughness in maintaining technical skills to deliver these musical statements, exemplify both his musical and personal style. … He has an authentically globalized personal history that informs his every action and expression.” — David Roche, Ph.D. Former
Executive Director, "As director of the Los Angeles Electric 8, he reinvigorates the genre of classical music." — Colleen Koestner |
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