DIALECTS OF DHOL
Sounding Subaltern Memory and History through a Himalayan Drum
How can we hear the music produced by Dalit bodies in contemporary South Asia as more than a premodern relic? This multi-modal project, funded by a National Endowment for the Humanities and AIIS Senior Research Fellowship (2023-24), focuses on Dalit drummers in central Himalayan villages as agents of collective memory and history.

LET THE GODS DANCE
A Documentary Film Series
This series, co-produced with my former student Jarrod Welling-Cann, explores musicianship in the Garhwal Himalayas in relation to a range of complex issues including gender and cast discrimination, religiosity, and social mobility.
Episode List
E1 | Pritam Bhartwan
A village drummer becomes an icon.
E2 | Saloor-Dungra
The story of one village through musical practice.
E3 | The Dholi & The Dhol
Hereditary relationships to drumming and labor.
E4 | Hidden Voices
Stories of women in Garhwali music.
E5 | Beating Through Caste
Oppression and and liberation through drumming.
E6 | Generations
Drummers young and old speak out on Garhwal’s future.
E7 | COVID19
How the global pandemic affected the livelihood of musicians.

THE INTANGIBLES OF CULTURAL HERITAGE
Ramman is an festival of “ritual theater” performed annually with masked dancing and drumming in the Indian Himalayan village of Salood-Dungra. Since the festival was designated as UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2009, it has gone through dramatic reforms resulting in codification, commercialization, and exclusion. This project grapples with the effects of “heritagization” on the production and maintenance of community as an evolving set of concepts and affectively charged practices.

Since 2020, neurologist Dr. Rhonna Shatz and I have offered a community-based program called “Dementia and the Arts” that pairs music and medical students at the University of Cincinnati with persons with neurodegenerative disease in the community, as well as their care partners. Meeting weekly in groups of four over the course of a semester, the students and community members build relationships through mindfulness and musical activities. This service-learning course has generated new data that informs a deeper understanding of the connections between the experience of musical awe and functional connectivity in the brain.
MUSICAL AWE
MUSIC MAKING COMMUNITY
This volume, co-edited by myself and Tony Perman and compiled in honor of Tom Turino’s contributions to ethnomusicology, explores the unique and tangible ways in which musical practice actively contributes to the making (and sometimes the unmaking) of community. The book foregrounds music’s potential to transform community for the better by centering the value of difference in productive feedback dynamics of music and community, and by asserting the need for mutual moral indebtedness in community formation.
PERFORMANCES
"Commercial Jagar" Performance with Pritam Bhartwan
Jagar is a ritual practiced in Uttarakhand, India, to awaken gods and seek their favor or justice. It involves invoking deities through music and storytelling, often drawing from epic narratives like the Mahabharata and Ramayana.
"Himalayan Beats" Concert featuring Pritam Bhartwan and the CCM Himalayan Lab, October 2011
"Naked World Ensemble" with Om Srivastava (tabla), Ali Morshedlou (tar) and Nazanin Morshedlou (Persian dance)
Naked World Ensemble is a Silk Road group that combines the instrumentation and improvisational dances and musics of China, India and Iran.
The MbiraCats Ensemble Performing "Karigamombe"
The Zimbabwean Mbira Ensemble (affectionately known as the MbiraCats) is one of several "World Music Labs" offered at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory, which includes Tabla, Raga, and Himalayan Drumming Labs. This performance that was recorded during the COVID19 lockdown.

"Shumba" on Mbira dzaVadzimu featuring Tute Chigamba, Jennifer Kyker, Tony Perman and Stefan Fiol

“Battle of Panipat” - Composed and Performed by Jim Feist (tabla) with Stefan Fiol (sitar) and Johnny Ruzsa (bansuri) in 2015
