Giancarlo Siciliano

My disciplinary  interests range from sociology and anthropology to semiotics and my involvement in ethnomusicology was sparkled by John Blacking’s How Musical Is Man?, Steve Reich’s “Music as Gradual Process” and Christopher Small’s Music–Society-Education – seminal texts which Robert Witmer helped me discover. Interest in this area declined for a while but was quickly rekindled upon completion of my Master’s degree in 1995 thanks to Ramon Pelinski who also made it possible for me to lecture on music and postmodernity at the C.S.I.C. in Barcelona and to attend an intensive series of ethnomusicology seminars in Granada in 1994. By that time I had met ethnomusicologist Peter Crowe whom I collaborated with as a member of the committee for the European Seminar in Ethnomusicology in 1996. That same year I moved to Paris where I pursued further studies in musicology, philosophy and social anthropology of jazz. I have also briefly lectured on Paul Berliner & jazz improvisation at the E.H.E.S.S. in Paris ; on pop music, desire, cultural studies, Elio e le Storie Tese and Deleuze & Guattari in Tarragona ; on Heiner Goebbels and Björk at the Amsterdam  School of Cultural Analysis. But it was not until 2004 that I got the opportunity to teach ethnomusicology and popular music studies at the University of Strasbourg.

Most of my recent work has been revolving around independent research and translation: in 2004, I translated articles by musicologists Steven Feld, Stephen Blum, Martin Stokes and John Rink. Alessandro Arbo’s “Breve storia del rumore, da Rousseau a Grisey”, which I translated in 2007, was published in Arbo's 2010 collection of essays entitled "Archéologie de l'écoute".