SEMSCC 1998

To all current and prospective members of SEMSCC:

On behalf of the SEMSCC Program and Local Arrangements Committees, and UCR Department of Music, I am proud to announce the 1999 Annual Meeting of the Southern California Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology. This year’s meeting will be held at the Department of Music, February 26-27, Olmsted Hall, University of California, Riverside.

In a few days you will receive a packet of materials for the SEMSCC 1999 Meeting. In this packet you will find directions for getting to UCR and information on lodging, prepared by Deborah Wong, local arrangements committee chair. In addition to preparing the enclosed material, Deborah has been working with Dr. Terry Liu to arrange an extraordinary concert for you on Friday night (see enclosed poster), featuring outstanding Hmong, Chinese, Persian, and Oaxacan performers from the southern California area.. When you register, we will provide you with a list of restaurants—all close enough to allow you plenty of time for dinner before the concert.

Use Deborah’s directions and the maps to get to UCR Parking Lot 6. When you get to Olmsted Hall you will find signs to help you find the registration desk. We hope to offer you refreshments during registration and the welcome reception, so please try to arrive around 12:00 on Friday so that you can meet old friends and make new ones before the first paper session begins. On Saturday, we hope to offer you a catered lunch at a minimal cost of $5. Thus, registration fees are as follows: $5 for SEMSCC membership, $5 for meeting registration, $5 for lunch (optional), and $7/4 for the concert (optional: $7 general, $4 students and seniors). Note that we have been able to keep costs down to a minimum. This is due to generous support by UCR Department of Music and the Dean of the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

A note about the papers. The program committee has already accepted a total of 23 promising abstracts but we are presently still organizing them into sessions. Thus, the tentative program below does not include session titles and the names of individual papers. We apologize for this delay. We will, however, have a more detailed program in about one week and will post it here:

SEMSCC Program 1999.

Finally, program committee chair Nancy Guy has arranged for eminent scholar George Lipsitz to present the SEMSCC 1999 keynote address on Saturday the 27th. George Lipsitz is Professor of Ethnic Studies at UCSD and has written several important books on race, politics, and popular culture. His most widely known work is Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Poetics of Place.

I’m especially excited about this meeting of SEMSCC. By coming, you will be helping me, Deborah Wong, and all our colleagues at the UCR Department of Music celebrate our new graduate program in ethnomusicology. See you on Friday the 26th!

Best wishes,

René T.A. Lysloff
SEMSCC President

The Local Arrangements Committee for the meeting is Deborah Wong (Chair), René T.A. Lysloff, and Eric Usner. Please contact Deborah Wong with local arrangements questions or requests at the Department of Music, UCR, Riverside, CA 92521-0325; (tel.) 909-787-3726; (fax) 909-787-4651; (e-mail) dwong@mail.ucr.edu.

Ki Mantle Hood Student Prize


The Society for Ethnomusicology Southern California Chapter awards the Ki Mantle Hood Student Prize for the most distinguished paper read by a student at the Annual Meeting. Students wishing to be considered for the prize must follow the following procedures:

  1. Candidates for the Student Prize are asked to indicate on the abstract form that they wish to have their papers considered for the prize.
  2. Each candidate for the Student Prize must submit three copies of the paper to the Program Chair, Nancy Guy, at the meeting. The papers are to be of delivery length and may not exceed 12 pages, double-spaced.
  3. Immediately prior to the session at which the paper is to be delivered, the candidate must present an additional copy of the paper to the Session Chair.

    *For a full description of the prize and procedure, click here.

    Further conference information will appear on this SEMSCC website, posted over SEMSCC-L, and will be snailmailed to current members around February 9, 1999.