Professor Margaret Kartomi
AM FAHA Dr. Phil (Humboldt University)
Research and Ethnomusicology Coordinator
Email :
margaret.kartomi@arts.monash.edu.au
Phone : (03) 9905 3238
Fax : (03) 9905 3241
Location
: Room 121, Performing Arts Centre, Building 68, Clayton Campus
Biography
Margaret Kartomi is a specialist on the ethnomusicology of Indonesia and Southeast Asia and the world authority on the music of Sumatra. She is the author of over 100 articles and four books and has produced eight commercially released CDs. Her publications cover many areas including the music of Java, Sumatra, Maluku, Flores, Chinese-Indonesia, Jewish - Asia and Australia - and Australian Indigenous children’s music; also youth orchestras, music education and public policy. A graduate of the University of Adelaide, Margaret undertook doctoral studies at the Humboldt University in Berlin before taking up a lectureship at Monash in 1968, being promoted to reader in 1976 and professor in 1989. From the early 1970s she pioneered the teaching and research of Asian music in Australia. During her time as Head of School (1989-2001), she developed a new philosophy of education, directed the expansion of the University’s music programme to include performance and composition as well as ethnomusicology and musicology, and instituted several double degrees. Her next book, The Musical Arts of Sumatra, the Land of Many Rivers, will be published by the University of Illinois Press in 2009. Margaret is in demand as a supervisor of higher degrees and has successfully directed more than two dozen theses.
Margaret has received many honours. She was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1982; was made an Order of Australia in 1991 and was awarded an Australian Government Centenary Medal in 1993. In 2005 Margaret was elected a Corresponding Member of the American Musicological Society.
Research Interests
Musicological and ethnomusicological theory; organology; historiography; ethnomusicology of Indonesia and Southeast Asia; Aboriginal Australian children’s music; Baghdadi-Jewish music; youth orchestras; music education; public policy; music performance; music across the arts; music aesthetics
Recent Publications (Full List of Publications)
Journal Articles
2008 'A response to two problems in music education: the Young Australian Concert Artists Program of the Australian Youth Orchestra’, Music Education Research 10/1, 141–58
2007 ‘Youth orchestras in the global scene’, in Growing up Making Music: Youth Orchestras from Australia and the World [Australasian Music Research 9, special issue] ed. Margaret Kartomi with Kay Dreyfus and David Pear, 1-26
2007 ‘The Australian Youth Orchestra Inc: its identity as a national icon and expansion of its performance and educational programs’, [Australasian Music Research 9, special issue] ed. Margaret Kartomi with Kay Dreyfus and David Pear, 27–53.
2006 ‘Aceh’s body percussion: from ritual devotionals to global niveau’, Musiké: International Journal of Ethnomusicological Studies vol. 1 [Music and Ritual, ed. Keith Howard], 85-108
2005 ‘On metaphor and analogy in the concepts and classification of musical instruments in Aceh’, Yearbook for Traditional Music 37, 25–57
2004 ‘Some implications of local concepts of space in the dance, music, and visual arts of Aceh’, Yearbook for Traditional Music 36, 1-49
2004 ‘Musical outcomes of Jewish migration into Asia via the Northern and Southern routes c. 1780-c.1950’, Ethnomusicology Forum 13/1, 3¬–20 (with Andrew D. McCredie)
2004 ‘Tracing Jewish-Babylonian trade routes and identity through music, with reference to seven versions of a song of praise melody’, Ethnomusicology Forum 13/1, 75-100
2004 ‘“If a man can kill a buffalo with one blow he can play a rapa’i Pasè’: how the frame drum expresses facets of Acehnese identity’, in Min-su chui [Journal of Chinese Ritual, Theatre and Folklore] 144, 7-38
2004 ‘Some implications of local concepts of space in the dance, music, and visual arts of Aceh’, Yearbook for Traditional Music 36, 1-49
Special Issue Journals
2007 Growing up Making Music: Youth Orchestras from Australia and the World [Australasian Music Research 9] special issue, ed. Margaret Kartomi and Kay Dreyfus, with David Pear
2004 Silk, Spice and Shirah: Musical Outcomes of Jewish Migration into Asia, c. 1780-c.1950, Special Issue of Ethnomusicology Forum 13/1 [guest editors Margaret Kartomi and Kay Dreyfus]
Recording
Out of Babylon: The Music of Baghdadi-Jewish Migrations into Asia and Beyond, Celestial Harmonies CD 13274-2, with 60-page booklet of musicological commentary and analysis (with Bronia Kornhauser), 2007
Work in Progress
Book
The Musical Arts of Sumatra, the Land of Many Rivers (contracted by the University of Illinois Press to be published in 2009)
Book Chapters
‘About the history of the musical arts in Southeast Asia’, commissioned for the Cambridge History of World Music ed. Philip Bohlman (forthcoming)
‘“Art with a Muslim theme” and “Art with a Muslim flavor” among Women of west Aceh’, commissioned for Music, Gender and Islam (Oxford University Press) eds. David Harnish and Ann Rasmussen (forthcoming)
Article
‘Effects of the armed conflict, the tsunami, and the Helsinki Peace Accord on the musical arts in Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam’
Reference
Commissioned to write for the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Culture online edition ed. Suad Joseph, for Brill, LeidenPrizes, Grants, Honours
Recipient of many Australia Research Council Grants since 1973
Order of Australia (AM)
Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities
Centenary Medallist, Commonwealth of Australia
Corresponding Member, American Musicological Society
German Critics’ Prize for best ethnographic record of the year, 1988 and 2007