| Six New Graduate Students Are Welcomed into the Program in Fall 2009 | | Print | |
Published: September 23, 2009  Ron Conner received his BA in Ethnomusicology from UCLA and MA in Music (Ethnomusicology) from the University of California, Riverside, where he studied festival musics from Brazil's Northeast. Most recently, he has investigated maracatu cearense, an Afrobrazilian carnival music from Fortaleza, Ceará, where he performed fieldwork that resulted in a thesis on local rhythmic branding and use of blackface. At UCLA, Ron will continue this research, focusing on intersections of race, gender, sexuality, locality, and nation in northeastern musical contexts. Ron regularly performs with the UCLA-based Brazilian percussion ensemble, BatUCLAda, and has been a member of UC Riverside's Andean ensemble, Mayupatapi. Additionally, he has taught courses in Latin American music cultures at California State University, San Bernardino and Western music history at UC Riverside, and has twice received the Gluck Fellowship for the Arts.  Meghan Hynson is an incoming graduate student in Ethnomusicology. For the past two years, Meghan has been conducting grant research on the gender wayang music of Mas village, in Bali, Indonesia. She has worked closely with famous shadow puppeteer, Ida Bagus Made Geria, who at 81 years old, is the 10th generation of puppeteer in his family. Through daily lessons, Meghan was able to learn and transcribe the complete repertoire of Mas gender wayang music. Meghan's musical journeys have taken her all over the world, including China, Peru, Thailand, Australia, and Indonesia.  Jeffrey Roy, a Milwaukee native, attended Washington University in St. Louis, earning a B.A. in Comparative Literature. He is a violinist of multiple disciplines, including Western classical and North Indian classical music, and a language enthusiast. His academic interests surround the semiotics of music, music in literature, and the heritage musicians of the North Indian classical music tradition.  Ty-Juana Taylor received a Bachelors of Music with an emphasis in Music History from the University of Louisville. She is originally from Smiths Grove, Kentucky. She is interested in African American sacred music and West African children's music. Her principle instrument is flute.  Alyssa Van Thoen holds a bachelor’s degree in Music and French from Swarthmore College. She has recently spent a summer in Côte d’Ivoire and a Fulbright year in Belgium studying the popular music of those countries. As a cellist, she is also interested in examining mindful awareness as it relates to listening to and playing music.  Iris Yellum recently began studying the Hindustani drum, tabla. Aside from a great interest in the Hindustani classical tradition, she also hopes to study philosophy and aesthetics of music, religion as a sociological role in music and the intersection of music and mind as a perceptual process. |