Event overview
'Head Voice Chest Voice' (1987 ) and 'Glattalp' (1986), directed by Hugo Zemp.
Conducting his fieldwork between 1961 and 1967 in the Côte d'Ivoire, mostly among the Dan people, Zemp wrote a doctoral thesis that garnered interest among French- and English-speaking ethnomusicologists studying West African music. He also made shorter stays among other peoples to document and record their music, among these the Senufo, whose balafon music impressed him so much that he returned to Côte d'Ivoire forty years after his first encounter to make the four-film series Masters of the Balafon.
An esthetic shock was watching Rouch's film 'Tourou et Bitti', a nine-minute sequence shot on a possession ritual in Niger. This film and the writings of Jean Rouch persuaded him that long takes with a moving camera, and without zooming, could be the ideal strategy for filming music in the field.
Zemp went on to make a series of four films about the traditional local yodelling of a mountain valley in his home country Switzerland. At the invitation of Georgian anthropologists met at a film festival in Estonia, he shot his two first videos in the Georgian Caucasus in 1991 and then returning to his first love, African music, he made his series on Senufo balafons, and two films on urban music of Côte d'Ivoire.
Besides his many publications and 18 recorded discs Zemp has written several articles on filming music and taught analysis and production of ethnomusicological films at the University of Paris X-Nanterre. He has presented his work at many ethnomusicology conferences and universities in Europe and America, and many of his films have received awards at international festivals.
All welcome
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 25 Jan 2011 | 6:30pm - 8:00pm |
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