The 2016 Charles Seeger Lecture, “My Music,” will be delivered by Ellen Koskoff, Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music, where she is Director of Ethnomusicology Programs. Koskoff is Editor of Ethnomusicology and General Editor of the Eastman/Rochester Series in Ethnomusicology. She received a Ph.D. in musicology/ethnomusicology from the University of Pittsburgh, initiating the study that would eventually emerge as Music in Lubavitcher Life (2000). Her M.A. in vocal and piano pedagogy from Columbia University was preceded by a bachelor’s degree in the same from Boston University. In addition to numerous articles and book chapters, Koskoff is the author of Music in the United States: An Introduction (2005), and the editor of The United States and Canada, volume 3 of the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music (2001).

Ellen Koskoff is well known to the SEM membership; her influence has been widely felt throughout the Society and is remarkable for its breadth. Over the arc of her career she has served the Society in many ways, preceding and following her tenure as SEM President from 1999 to 2001. The imprint of her influence has reverberated in her role on the SEM Board as Secretary and as the chair of the Niagara Chapter, the 1986 Local Arrangements Committee, the 1997 Program Committee, the Mentoring Committee, the Publications Advisory Committee, and several other committees.

In her landmark edited volume, Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective (1988), Koskoff invites a coterie of scholars to consider gender difference in music performance beyond the western music canon. Referred to with respect as “the Koskoff,” Women and Music is one of the most significant works on gender and music in ethnomusicology and a foundational text in the field. While today’s students encounter the volume’s essays in graduate seminars on the history of ethnomusicology, the ripple effect of her intervention should not be underestimated. Writing in the mid-1980s, confronting established modes of ethnomusicological investigation, and negotiating institutional biases that privileged historical musicology and other subfields in music, Koskoff carved out an intellectual space for the study of gender and music in the academy, an area of musicological investigation writ large that continues to grow.

It is to our good fortune that representative essays, new work, and previously published book chapters culminate in A Feminist Ethnomusicology (2014), an intellectual memoir with a foreword by Suzanne Cusick. Here, the author problematizes fieldwork, feminism, and ethnomusicology, deftly considering their intersections. One of Koskoff’s strengths is her ability to consider several paths of inquiry simultaneously, a practice that her most recent book addresses in its focus on music and gender, but also, on music and its discourses in Lubavitcher communities, generational instantiations of feminism, and the tensions between and blind spots tolerated by ethnomusicology, historical musicology, and anthropology.

Through her writings, fierce determination to engage the world through ethnographic fieldwork, and, lastly, through her way of being, Ellen Koskoff has helped to foster a more receptive social field for the study of gender, feminism, and music. Through her activism within and beyond SEM, she has garnered greater respect for women and individuals who identify as feminists, while accruing the admiration of those who would seek to understand the distinction. In an address in which she will reflect on her engagement of the music and music communities she loves, Koskoff is sure to delight as much as she instructs. You will not want to miss it!

-Eileen M. Hayes