The Society for Ethnomusicology will hold its 64th Annual Meeting on November 7-10, 2019, at Indiana University Bloomington. The meeting, hosted by Indiana University in conjunction with the IU Bicentennial (1820-2020), includes a program of events made up of scholarly presentations, musical performances by local and international musicians, film screenings, and two pre-conference symposia.

This event also brings to campus legendary musician George Clinton, who is known for his work as the mastermind behind the Parliament-Funkadelic funk music collective and was recognized with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019. Clinton will deliver the 2019 Charles Seeger Lecture on November 9 in Alumni Hall at the historic Indiana Memorial Union.

For more information about the meeting and registration, please visit the conference website at: https://www.ethnomusicology.org/page/Conf_2019

Featuring Roger Pfingston, Tom Hastings, Richard Fish (reading works by Ernie Pyle)
Music by Gabriel Harley
$5 suggested donation
And as always, an open mic

Born and raised in Evansville, Indiana, ROGER PFINGSTON is a retired teacher of English and photography. He is also the recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and two PEN Syndicated Fiction Awards as well as the author of Something Iridescent, a collection of poetry and fiction. Five chapbooks have appeared since 2003: Nesting, Earthbound, Singing to the Garden, A Day Marked for Telling, and What’s Given, the latter recently published by Kattywompus Press. His poems have appeared in a wide range of publications, including I-70 Review, U.S. 1 Worksheets, Poet Lore, American Journal of Poetry, Innisfree Poetry Journal, and Ted Kooser’s column, American Life in Poetry. About Pfingston’s new chapbook, What’s Given, Sammy Greenspan, editor of Kattywompus Press, writes, “Follow the gaze of poet Roger Pfingston, as he takes in the passage of seemingly ordinary days in apparently unremarkable places, and watch the world quiet down, deepen, and ripple out.”

TOM HASTINGS taught language arts and Jungian psychology at Harmony High School here in Bloomington for 36 years before retiring in 2014. He received a BA in Mythogenics from Antioch in 1973 and has taken graduate classes at the California Institute of Asian Studies, the C. G. Jung Institute in Switzerland, and classes toward a Masters in Counseling at Indiana University. He’s been a Royal Scottish Arts Council Poet in the Schools in Edinburgh, Scotland and for the Indiana Arts Commission in Zionsville and Bloomington. He created the Indianapolis Broadsheet, cofounded the Indiana Writers Center and was poetry editor of its publication, Inprint. His poems have appeared in numerous small press publications and he is the author of a dozen chapbooks. His new and collected poems, Crop Circle Secrets, were published by Muse Rules Press in 2004. He fronted the poetry performance band, Coup Coup Daddy, for over a decade and he was the foreign correspondent for on-line Zoo & Logical Times. Since 2015, he’s been teaching theatrical magic classes for the Ivy Tech Center for Lifelong Learning as well as demonstrating and performing at Rich Hill’s Magic and Fun Emporium in Nashville, Indiana.

RICHARD FISH is an actor, writer, and musician who has worked in audio theatre since 1970, becoming a producer, director, teacher, engineer, Foley artist, journalist, and publisher along the way. Richard has worked with the leading figures in audio theatre from coast to coast, including the legendary American grand master of the art, Norman Corwin. A founder of the National Audio Theatre Festivals organization, and WFHB Community Radio in his hometown of Bloomington, Indiana, Richard has won awards for radio advertising, broadcast journalism, and acting, including a Mark Time Award for “carrying on the traditions of The Firesign Theatre.” He is heard weekly over WFHB as host of “The Firehouse Theatre,” presenting old and new audio theatre; as writer and presenter of “Better Beware,” a weekly news feature on scams and swindles; and in “The Firehouse Follies,” a live variety show offered four times a year. All these broadcasts are streamed and archived on the station’s website, www.wfhb.org. Richard will be reading from the works of Hoosier war correspondent Ernie Pyle.

In July, singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist GABRIEL HARLEY released his fifth full-length album, Beat of a Broken Heart, a collection of personal, acoustic-guitar-driven songs inspired by love, friendship, and life in the wake of his own open-heart surgery in 2013 and the obstacles and complications that lingered for months and even years after. Recorded at Gabriel’s own Perfect Mix Studios, Beat of a Broken Heart’s sound is deeply rooted in the music he grew up on–namely singer-songwriters of the 1970s like Cat Stevens, Jim Croce, and James Taylor.

Many musicians have day jobs to make ends meet. However, few artists maintain the lifestyle kept by Gregory Alan Isakov. The Colorado-based indie-folk artist is a full-time farmer who sells vegetable seeds and grows various market crops on his three-acre farm, while also tending to a thriving musical career.

“I switch gears a lot,” he says. “I wake up really early in the growing season, and then in the winters, I’m up all night. I’m constantly moving back and forth.”

Isakov had an easier time balancing his two passions while making his fourth full-length studio album, Evening Machines. In between farm duties, the multi-instrumentalist wrote and recorded in a studio housed in a barn on his property. Like the farm, this studio has a communal atmosphere, filled with instruments and gear stored there by musician friends—gear Isakov always leaves on, just in case inspiration strikes.

$1 from each ticket sold for this show will support Project Worthmore, which provides opportunities for refugees through six programs—Community Navigation, English Language, Worthmore Clinic, Family Partnership, Delaney Community Farm, and the Yuh Meh Food Share—that assist refugees in becoming self-sufficient and improving their quality of life.