Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje, Professor Emerita and Director of the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive from 2000 to 2007, will be honored during a symposium and concert celebrating the re-opening of the Archive: “Documenting the Sounds of Africa: Archiving, instruments, and Researching the Local,” on Friday, January 11, 2019, 8 am — 7 pm.
A complete oral history of DjeDje is now available online as a part of UCLA’s Center for Oral History Research. The oral history includes a full transcript of an interview conducted by Donna Armstrong, administrative specialist in the Department of Ethnomusicology, as well as a table of contents, DjeDje’s curriculum vitae, and a biographical summary. To read the full interview, head on over to the UCLA Library’s Center for Oral History Research website.
The oral history covers Professor DjeDje’s life, beginning with her childhood in Jesup, Georgia, and includes the following: discussion of her early musical influences; family values passed to her from her parents and grandparents; her years at Fisk University where she received a B.A. in music, specializing in piano; her response to 1960s protests at Fisk; her early mentors including the person who introduced her to the field of ethnomusicology and those who influenced her to attend UCLA for graduate school; her selection of spirituals and gospel music, and later African music, as research areas; the influence of music department faculty members Peter Crossley Holland, David Morton, UCLA Institute of Ethnomusicology founder Mantle Hood, and DjeDje’s mentor, world-renowned African musicologist J. H. Kwabena Nketia; and her professional career as a scholar and faculty member in the Department of Music (1979-1989) and the Department of Ethnomusicology (1989-2013).