Behind the Paintings: Invisible Worlds of Artistry. A musical night with Anna Lomax and David Marker

 

May 04, 2022, 06:00 PM - 07:00 PM

This presentation, led by anthropologist Anna Lomax Wood and David Marker, will illustrate the musical heritage of the people that are the subjects of many of the paintings featured in Staging Injustice: Italian Art 1880-1917. Farmers, emigrants, rice weeders, sulphur miners, and factory workers all had distinct and complex musical cultures that ethnomusicology has studied and preserved through important campaigns of field recordings, such as the one completed by Alan Lomax and Diego Carpitella in 1954, and the work of ethnomusicologists to study and preserve this intangible cultural heritage continues to this day.

The event will showcase select recordings from Alan Lomax’s archive, contemporary recordings by David Marker, and a concert featuring original traditional instruments.

Reserve your tickets HERE!

Anna Lomax Wood is an anthropologist and public folklorist. She is the President of the Association for Cultural Equity (ACE), established in 1985 by her father, legendary musicologist Alan Lomax. In 1996, when Alan Lomax was disabled by a stroke, Wood took responsibility for overseeing his archive, housed at Hunter College, and implementing his unfinished projects, most notably the production, which she undertook in 1997 with Jeffry Greenberg, of the Alan Lomax Collection on Rounder Records. It is a suite of more than 100 CD’s in ten series, of music recorded by Alan Lomax in the deep South, the Bahamas, the Caribbean, the British Isles, Ireland, Spain and Italy. Upon her father’s death in 2002, ACE worked with the Library of Congress to preserve, restore, digitize, and transfer Alan Lomax’s original recordings, photographs, and videos to the Library’s American Folklife Center, In 2005, Wood and Mr. Greenberg produced an 8-CD box set issued on Rounder: Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax. In 2009, she produced the 10-CD, Alan Lomax in Haiti, issued by Harte Records.

David Marker is an ethnomusicology PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center who specializes in pastoral and peasant music of rural southern Italy.  For the past fifteen years he has been vigorously documenting oral culture music traditions in southern Italy as well as learning and playing the zampogna, chitarra battente, organetto and other traditional Italian instruments.  In 2010 he published a self-made documentary film, Zampogna: The Soul of Southern Italy, which chronicles bagpiping traditions in southern Italy (available on YouTube).  Much of the impetus for his ethnographic documentation work is inspired by the careers of Alan and Anna Lomax and he is honored to have worked with Anna on several projects involving Italian music. He has family in both Sicily and Campania where he enjoys visiting friends and relatives during his field recording trips.

 

Public Programming at CIMA is made possible with the generous support of Christie’s.