Music from prisons in the American South recieved a good deal of attention during the 1930s to the 1960s due to folklorists' efforts to collect chaingang songs. Songs like "Goodnight Irene" and "Midnight Special" were some of the prison songs that later became part of the American songbook. Since the demise of the prison farm, very little attention has been given to prison music. As part of the documentary film project, I am meeting today's incarcertated musicians in Louisiana State Penitentiary, Elayn Hunt Correctional Center, and Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women. There, I am looking for connections between musical experiences and prison experiences. Many convicted for life, their stories reveal ways that music can reconfigure ordinary life, form unlikey communities, and provide a way of coping with the bleakest of circumstances.

In 1997, close to 100 young, educated Egyptian youth were rounded up by state security and jailed for their involvment in the underground extreme metal scene. Most emerged from prison with their hair cut on order from the judge and spirits broken from weeks of torture. This act by Mubarak's government provided enough press about combating alleged Satanism to deflect accusations of being anti-Islam—a criticism leveled by exiled extremist leaders. The image makeover for the state was at the expense of innocent metal fans and musicians who left the country or disappeared into conventional lives following their release. This research sought to understand metal in this context, after 10 years of slow re-emergence. Metal provides both a communal and personal experience that couples the human and the grotesque to help comprehend the difficultly of being estranged in one's own country.

The encyclopedic urge of the Orientalist movement and the insatiable appetite for travel literature produced a myriad of documents describing the customs of the Arab people during Britain’s colonization of Egypt and the Levant. As British taste for the exotic grew, travel accounts flooded England. Documents that depicted early musical encounters are of particular interest to ethnomusicologists. A reservoir of 17th and 18th century colonialist literature survives in travelogues housed at the British Library. My investigation showed how European commentary on music that portrayed seemingly out-of-tune, cathartic expressions often revealed a deeper debate of music's scientific justness, emotional capacity and moral prescription as discussed in the British public sphere.

From 1977 to 2003, the Arts In Corrections program served countless inmates a pathway into the fine arts. Those incarcerated were given room to engage with art and music in authentic way, often yeilding self-discovery through aesthetic reflection. Two projects came out of this. First, a study of two programs, California Mens Colony in San Luis Obispo and Correctional Training Facility in Soledad. Interview of inmates and the facilitators who ran the programs revelaed music's role in the following critical existential binaries facing incarcerated musicians: freedom-restriction, alienation-socialization, growth-decay, desire-apathy, and lightness-heaviness. The second project has been developing a research archive of the Arts In Corrections program at UCLA with the cooperation of the William James Association and the support of the GRAMMY Foundation and the UCLA School of Arts and Architecture. This comprehensive archive stand to be the largest and most thourough documentation of fine arts in prisons.

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Following three years of tabla study under Pandit Swapan Chaudhuri, this research project aimed to historically contextualize my formal performance knowledge with the development of Hindustani music. The national project of "recovering" a Hindu music took a particular form given its political context. This structural analysis of tabla compositions supports the exclusive nature of the arts as a signifier of cultural difference—that translation of certain terms and musical concepts are beyond the English language becomes resistance to colonization.

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