Judith O. Becker is Professor of Musicology/Ethnomusicology at the
University of Michigan and was named Glenn McGeoch Collegiate Professor
of Musicology in 2000. She is currently the Director of the Center for
Southeast Asian Studies at UM.
Becker is especially known for her
scholarship on the musics of Southeast Asia, particularly the gamelan
music of Central Java. More broadly, she is known for her efforts to
theorize music as behavior and for her willingness to search widely for
the intellectual and methodological tools to yield new insights.
She
is the author of two books, Traditional Music in Modern Java: Gamelan
in a Changing Society (University Press of Hawaii, 1980) and Gamelan
Stories: Tantrism, Islam and Aesthetics in Central Java (Arizona State
University Press, 1993; revised edition, in press). Although she is
arguably best known for her interpretive work, Becker oversaw a massive
translation project, Karawitan: Source Readings in Javanese Gamelan and
Vocal Music, edited by Judith Becker and Alan Feinstein (University of
Michigan, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 1984, 1987, 1988), that
brought a large number of primary written works on Javanese gamelan into
English.
In the mid-1990s, Becker embarked on an ambitious
comparative project to examine the relationship between trance and music
in several very different musical traditions, from the Sufis of north
India, to Balinese trancers, to Sri Lanka, to American Pentecostals.
Delving deeply into neuroscience, Becker is now focused on the
relationships between culture and biology, and she works within the
framework of biological phenomenology in her forthcoming book, Deep
Listeners: Music, Emotion and Trancing. This year’s Seeger lecture will
address some of the very deepest relationships between music, culture,
and the human body
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