With paper sessions, panel discussions, award ceremonies, film screenings, and jam sessions, this free conference will deepen our awareness of the rich and diverse musical traditions of people in North Carolina and the means by which these traditions are preserved and presented to the broader public.
The “Music in Our World” conference will kick off on Friday, April 1, at 9 a.m., with three consecutive paper sessions exploring the past, present, and future of traditional music in North Carolina and beyond. A particular focus of these sessions and other conference activities will be the ways in which modern media interact with, preserve and present traditional music, making it available to listeners around the nation and world, far from its communities of origin.
On Saturday, April 2, at 9:30 a.m., a panel of prominent Triangle-area radio hosts will discuss the rewards and challenges of broadcasting music that deserves a wider audience, but falls outside of the moneyed mainstream of the commercial recording industry. The panelists of “Music Radio: Bringing Music to the Folk” are four DJs who have introduced millions of North Carolinians to worlds of music they might otherwise never have had the opportunity to explore.
Senegalese-born Bouna Ndiaye, the host of WNCU’s “Bonjour Africa,” broadcasts the music of his native Africa. Tim Woodall is one of the hosts of the “Pinecone Bluegrass Show” on WQDR, which for over 15 years has played bluegrass music to an audience of over four million. Robbie Ernhart comes from WPAQ, the legendary hometown station in Mt. Airy, famous for its live music broadcasts of local musicians. Jon Bloom is a general manager at La Ley, the largest Spanish-language radio station between New York and Miami, and a wonderful source of Latin American music. The panel will be hosted by Tom Hanchett, staff historian at the Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte.
At 1:30, the North Carolina Folklore Society will honor several of the state’s most eminent folk artists and community scholars with the presentation of the 2005 Brown-Hudson Folklore Awards and the Community Traditions Award. Past award recipients include musicians Doc and Merle Watson, Etta Baker, and Tommy Jarrell.
Beginning at 3:30, Sound and Image Librarian Steve Weiss will present “Archival Resources and Access: A Multimedia Visit to the Southern Folklife Collection.” With over 160,000 recordings of Southern folk and popular music, as well as an enormous collection of films, photographs, and ephemera, the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is one of the most important music archives in the United States.
Saturday night, beginning at 7 p.m., filmmaker Tom Davenport will give a screening of several documentary films featuring North Carolina music and musicians. Davenport will speak about his career in documentary film-making, and about his current efforts to build an online archive of documentary films about American folklife, making those films available to the public through streaming video at www.folkstreams.net.
For more information call (919) 660-3676, or visit the Web site www.ecu.edu/ncfolk.
