Comments:
Since leaving Graded I've had a very adventurous life. The first stop was in Paris for a year, where I went to the American College in Paris, and from there I went to Salzburg, where I finished Hochschuler in Music Educations. What does one do after college, no money, no visa? Well, one goes to live with one's parents, and mine at the time were in Bloomington, Indiana, where my mom was getting an MA in Communications.
Indiana University has a great music school, so I thought, what the heck, I'll just study some more. I soon discovered that 'music education' at an American university meant 'marching band' - and we didn't even have one of those back at Graded! But 'como Deus escreve certo em linhas tortas', I just happened to meet a young man at the home of a Brazilian pianist studying at IU, and this fellow had just returned from a year in the Amazon, where he had been studying the music of an indigenous group. The more he talked the more I realised that he was doing something that I could see myself doing - namely, studying 'ethnomusicology'. The very next day I marched over to the Folklore Department - that's where they taught ethnomusicology at IU - and told the professor there about my 'conversion experience', and she handed me some forms and told me to fill them out and bring them back, which I did. A few weeks later I got a letter saying I had been accepted into the Masters programme. So that's how I became an ethnomusicologist.
After the MA, it was back to Brazil, and a few years later I did my PhD in Social Anthropology at USP - no question about it, the best time of my life! - and during the PhD I spent a year on a 'sandwich scholarship' in Belfast. Well, the peace process had not yet gotten underway, but things here weren't as they had been in the 70s - just the odd bomb now and then to remind everyone that the IRA was still about. It just so happened that a position arose for an ethnomusicologist - something that doesn't come up every day - in Belfast as my 'sandwich' year was coming to an end, and I was offered a job. I spent nearly 25 years ethnomusicology at Queen's, though mercifully, there were very few bombs - just lots of rain.
To survive it, one had to take off to Brazil a few times a year. There's the family there, mine and my husband's, and the research site. Since around 1995 I've been documenting the musical life of a former mining town in Minas Gerais called Campanha. The book on that is due out soon, but there's one already on folia de reis, called Voices of the Magi (The University of Chicago Press, 2002).
I've also done work on brass bands (or 'bandas de música'), and that ended up in a collected volume, co-authored with Kate Brucher (DePaul University) titled Brass Bands of the World: militarism, colonial legacies and community music making (Ashgate, 2013). I've also been involved in co-editing a volume on music and world Christianities (Oxford University Press) and have just embarked on another co-edited volume on 'local muscling' (Routledge).
In July 2015 I changed job. I have been hired by the Universidade Estadual de Campinas - UNICAMP, to start up their ethnomusicology program. We are very excited with the move and with the prospect of living in Brazil.
