The Musicology Colloquium series kicks off Thursday, Oct. 2 at 2 p.m. in Zimmerman Library, Waters Room on the UNM campus. The opening program features David Samuels, delivering "The Oldest Songs They Remember: Frances Densmore, Mountain Chief, and Ethnomusicology's Ideologies of Modernity."

Thursday, Oct. 30, at 2 p.m. Sarah Ann Long presents, "Deflecting Disease: Musical Devotions in Honor of Plague Saints in Fifteenth-Century Northern French Confraternity Manuscripts" in the Center for Arts building, room 1108.

Professor Samuels’ discussion focuses on ethnomusicology’s perplexed relationship with vernacular Indigenous modernities. Focusing on an image of “the ethnomusicologist at work” that circulates as an icon of the discipline, Samuels explores ethnomusicology’s ethical discourses of the humanly musical and musically human.

Samuels is a linguistic anthropologist, folklorist and ethnomusicologist teaching in the Music Department at New York University. His book, “Putting A Song On Top of It: Music and Identity on the San Carlos Apache Reservation” (University of Arizona Press, 2004) was the first book-length monograph exploring popular music’s place in the formation of contemporary indigenous identities.

Long discusses how confraternities or lay brotherhoods in Northern France and the Low Countries constructed specialized musical devotions in response to the plague and other epidemics in the fifteenth century.

Long is assistant professor of Musicology at Michigan State University. From 2008-2013, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Alamire Foundation and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium.

Other events during the Musicology Colloquium include:

Wednesday, Oct. 8 - UNM Songwriting Class Showcase at Winning Coffee, 7-8:30 p.m., free admission but please plan to purchase a beverage.

Friday, Nov. 14 - UNM Songwriting Class Showcase at Outpost Performance Space, 7:30-9 p.m., $5 admission and free with UNM ID.

The colloquium is sponsored by the UNM departments of music and anthropology. All events are free and open to the public.