Music, Sound Art, and the Contemporary: From Interdisciplinarity to Ontology

Georgina Born is Professor of Music and Anthropology at Oxford University. From 2013 to 2015 she is Schulich Distinguished Visiting Professor in Music at McGill University; in 2014 she was Bloch Visiting Professor in Music at the University of California, Berkeley. Earlier, she was active as a performer and improviser, playing with Henry Cow, Derek Bailey’s Company, and the Feminist Improvising Group among others.

Born’s work combines ethnographic and theoretical writings on music, sound, art, media, and cultural production. Her books are Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (1995), Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music (edited with D. Hesmondhalgh; 2000), Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke, and the Reinvention of the BBC (2005), Music, Sound, and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience (2013), and Interdisciplinarity: Reconfigurations of the Social and Natural Sciences (edited with A. Barry; 2013).

A new edited book, Improvisation and Social Aesthetics, will be published in 2016. Born directs the five-year research program Music, Digitization, Mediation: Towards Interdisciplinary Music Studies, funded by the European Research Council, which examines the transformation of music and musical practices by digitization and digital media through ethnographies in six countries in the developing and developed worlds.

(Department of Music and Whitney Humanities Center)