We have already spoken of Shima Arom in this section, about a documentary that filmmaker Jerome Blumberg has made ​​on his life and that will be financed through the French crowd-funding platform Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.

Ethnomusicologist, born in Düsseldorf in 1930, emeritus director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and an Honorary member of the International Musicology Society, Arom, who has devoted much of his life to the study of traditional musical expressions of Central Africa, today, at the age of eighty-four years, is still engaged in a dense research, focused in particular on the polyphony of Georgia.

Here we are still talking of Arom because it came out, for editions LIM, The reasons for the music. Scriptures of musicology of Africa, curated by Maurizio Agamennone and Serena Facci. The book, to which are attached unedited audio and video, collects essays that the French scholar wrote from the late seventies to the first decade of the twenty-first century. The essays are a total of ten and, as the editors point out, not only were included for the first time in the same collection – a fact in itself extraordinary and crucial to reconstruct theories, ethnographic practice, insights and innovations with which Arom enriched the tradition of ethnomusicological research on African music – but for the first time been translated in Italian, allowing us, thus, to reduce the distance with a great contemporary scholar, whose work covers paramount importance. The volume is introduced by “Conversations with a teacher”, a large letter in which the curators have transcribed a series of discussions with Arom over the past few years and that, in the development of a dialogic reflection, leads the topics addressed in the volume in a more contemporary dimension.

Autore: Daniele Cestellini

Daniele Cestellini ha scritto 752 articoli.

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