Linda Burman-Hall

Linda Burman-Hall, performer and cultural musicologist, is active in research on performance practices, improvisation, and in the history of music. As a scholar-performer and Professor of Music at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), she relates regional styles and fashions in music to cultural context, and describes, analyzes, and performs historically- and culturally-informed realizations of musical materials.

In the field of ethnomusicology, Prof. Burman-Hall has studied and performed Indonesian gamelan music for 30 years, and has performed traditional and gamelan fusion works in Europe and America. In extended annual field trips in Indonesia, she has documented performance practices of Bali, Java, and Madura, and has also taught as a visiting faculty member at STSI (Sekolah Tinggi Seni Indonesia, the Advanced School for the Arts), in Denpasar, Bali.

In the 1990s, she directed an interdisciplinary team of nine Indonesian and American scholars studying new Balinese music. In addition to coordinating the Gamelan program at UCSC, she directs the campus Balinese Gamelan Angklung (“Swarasanti”) and Semar Pegulingan.

Her publications in the area of ethnomusicology include studies of American and Indonesian traditional musics. She is currently completing research on the Balinese recordings of the Fahnestock Expedition. A major project, an edition and translation from the Dutch of J. S. and A. Brandts Buys van Zijp’s 328-page monograph, De Toonkunst Bij de Madoereezen (“The Music of the Madurese,” 1928), is also nearing completion.

Dr. Burman-Hall received M.F.A. and Ph.D. degrees for her work in musicology and theory at Princeton University. “Kawitan” is the first film she has co-produced with Eli Hollander. A second collaborative film, Kahyangan: Death and the Journey of the Soul in Bali, is planned for release later this year.

For further information, visit Linda Burman-Hall’s UCSC website, http://arts.ucsc.edu/faculty/Burman-Hall/.