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 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 enclosed 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 on the SEMSCC Website as soon as it becomes available. To visit the SEMSCC Homepage, point your browser to http://www.ucr.edu/ethnomus/semscc.html and follow the links to the 1999 meeting information pages.
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, 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
*For a full description of the prize and procedure, click here.
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.
Further conference information will appear on the SEMSCC website, posted over SEMSCC-L, and will be snailmailed to current members around February 1, 1999.