The UCLA Department of Ethnomusicology is thrilled to host the 66th Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology Southern California and Hawai’i Chapter (SEMSCHC) on Saturday and Sunday, 1-2 March 2025. The conference will be in honor of the 70th anniversary of the arrival of Mantle Hood to UCLA. There will be papers, panels, a special roundtable, workshops, concerts, and more, featuring over 100 presenters, including scholars, artists, faculty, students, and community members.
The Saturday keynote speakers will be Hazel Chung Hood and Made Mantle Hood.
The Sunday keynote speaker will be Nobuko Miyamoto.
For more information, including the detailed program, please visit the SEMSCHC website. https://www.semschc.org/conference.html
Bios
Hazel Chung Hood played a pivotal role in establishing the bi-musicality methodology at the UCLA ethnomusicology program by teaching World Dance studies. Hazel paved the way for students to study world movement arts at universities across the country. Hazel taught and trained Judy Mitoma who would later go on to become director of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Center for Intercultural Performance. Hazel taught in universities in Hawaii, Indiana, Maryland and New York, steadily planting seeds in the minds of young dancers in universities across the country that World Dance studies are crucial to cross-cultural understanding. Hazel was married to the late Prof. Dr. Ki Mantle Hood, who established the Institute of Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in the early 1960s. Hazel learned Ghanaian dances in West Africa in the mid-1960s and taught courses on Southeast Asian dance at UCLA. Hood and Chung equipped with audio-visual recording equipment filmed in Ghana the classic documentary on drumming and dancing called, Atumpan: The Talking Drums of Ghana (1964). Chung is a graduate of the Juilliard School of Music Dance Program and a recipient of awards from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Indonesian government.
Made Mantle Hood is professor of ethnomusicology, Chair of the Graduate Institute of Ethnomusicology and Director of the Asia-Pacific Music Research Centre at the Tainan National University of the Arts, Taiwan. He serves as Chair of the ICTMD PASEA study group. His research interests include ontologies of sounded movement, endangered forms of vocalisation, and music and social justice. He is currently the lead researcher in a Taiwan Ministry of Science and Technology-funded project (2022–2025).
Nobuko Myamoto is a songwriter, dance and theater artist, and founder of Great Leap. A child of Japanese American WWII relocation, early training led to a career in films and Broadway musicals. Becoming an activist in the 70’s, she found her own voice as a troubadour for the Asian American movement, co-creating album A GRAIN OF SAND. In 1978 she founded Great Leap to put the Asian American story on stage. In 1983 Nobuko began creating song and dances for Obon, the Japanese Buddhist tradition of ancestor remembrance. This led to the creation of FandangObon - Eco-Arts Festival, which builds cross-cultural solidarity through the sharing of participatory music and dance traditions from Latinx, Asian, African, and Muslim traditions. In 2021, her album 120,000 Stories (Smithsonian Folkways) and memoir Not Yo’ Butterfly (UC Press) were published. In 2024, she was the subject of the documentary Nobuko Miyamoto: A Song In Movement.
This event is sponsored by the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive, the UCLA Department of Ethnomusicology, the UCLA Center for Community Engagement, the UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies, the UCLA Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies, the Mohindar Brar Sambhi Chair of Indian Music, UCLA, the Armenian Music Program at UCLA, the UCLA Iranian Music Program, and the Lowell Milken Center for American Jewish Music at The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.
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We invite you to join with colleagues and friends for what promises to be an exciting weekend of research, colloquy, camaraderie, and performance.
Thank you and best regards,
The Local Arrangements Committee
Supeena Adler, Co-chair
Donna Armstrong
Paul Bancel
Kathleen Hood
Maureen Russell, Co-chair