The Charles Seeger Lecturer for the SEM 2018 Annual Meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico, is Kay Kaufman Shelemay – G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Prior to joining the Harvard faculty in 1992, Shelemay taught at Columbia University (1977-1982), New York University (1982-1990), and Wesleyan University (1990-1992). She completed all of her degrees at the University of Michigan: a Bachelor of Music in Vocal Performance, a Master’s in Music, and a PhD in Musicology for which she did her fieldwork in Ethiopia on the liturgical music of the Falasha.

Kay Shelemay’s time in Ethiopia coincided with the ongoing unrest associated with the Eritrean war of independence, the violence associated with the nation’s turn toward Communism, and the fall of the imperial government – due, in part, to the effects of a devastating, decade-long, nation-wide drought. Despite the circumstances, she managed to complete her research, ultimately producing two books. The first book was a traditional ethnography entitled Music, Ritual and Falasha History (African Studies Center, MSU, 1986), in which she documented the results of her research with performers and in archives, writing a comparative analysis that provided musical evidence for the ongoing debates about the religious roots of the Beta Israel and simultaneously rendering ethnomusicological findings relevant in an international debate with political, ethical, and moral dimensions. With her second book, A Song of Longing: An Ethiopian Journey (University of Illinois Press, 1991), Shelemay presented her own solution to one of the ethnographic conundrums facing scholars in the last decades of the twentieth century – how to tell the story of one’s (often life-changing) experiences elegantly and without detracting from the scholarly trajectory of one’s dissertation book. Read together, these books provide a rich and fulfilling a description of the whole range of ethnographic experience that is still relevant to students today.

Kay Shelemay then turned her attention to developing fieldwork opportunities in the urban contexts in which she found herself teaching, thus providing foundational experiences in ethnomusicological practice for generations of ethnomusicologists in New York and Boston, while developing research with the Syrian Jews of Brooklyn and Mexico City, with the early music movement in Boston, and with the Ethiopian Christian communities in Boston and Washington, DC. Each of these projects generated significant publication activity, including her Let Jasmine Rain Down: Song and Remembrance Among Syrian Jews (University of Chicago Press, 1998) and, edited with Steven Kaplan, Creating the Ethiopian Diaspora: Perspectives from across the Disciplines (Tsehai, 2015), and an in-progress manuscript documenting the roles and importance of musicians in African immigrant communities around the world.

Shelemay edited the field-codifying, seven-volume Garland Library of Readings in Ethnomusicology (1990) and the discipline-crossing Ethiopian Christian Chant: An Anthology (3 volumes) edited with Peter Jeffrey (A-R Editions, 1993-1997). An excellent pedagogue, Shelemay turned her years of teaching world music courses in many different contexts into a textbook for undergraduates. Entitled Soundscapes: Exploring Music in a Changing World, the book is now in its third edition (W.W. Norton, 2001, 2006, 2015). With its thematic rather than geographic orientation and with case studies drawn from cultures and contexts not traditionally covered in world music textbooks, Shelemay provided an innovative way for university teachers to bring the musics of the world, both near and far, to their students.

Throughout her career, Shelemay has taken on many leadership positions. She has chaired the Department of Music at Harvard several times and served as head of many university-wide committees. She has worked in advisory positions for institutions around the world including the Harvard Humanities Center, the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, and the Committee for the Future of the Humanities at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has served on myriad visiting committees and advisory councils for university departments and performing arts institutions and as a member of the editorial board for institutions such as Ethnomusicology Forum and the Publications Committee of the American Musicological Society, and the Editorial Board of University of Chicago Press Studies in Ethnomusicology. Last but not least, she has served the Society for Ethnomusicology unstintingly, filling the role of President of the Society from 1997 to 1999 and working on many different committees through her years as a member.

The recipient of numerous grants, fellowships, and residencies including support from NEH, ACLS, Rockefeller Foundation, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Guggenheim, Fulbright, and the Stanford Humanities Center, Shelemay has recently been selected to be a fellow of the American Philosophical Society (2013-) and the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences (2014-). She has been a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2000.

At the forefront of many of the most interesting trends and developments in ethnomusicology for over 40 years, Kay Shelemay continues to engage in foundational research, presenting her work in numerous contexts each year, regularly serving the field on tenure and departmental reviews, and teaching and mentoring students and faculty. The lecture that she will deliver at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology in Albuquerque is entitled “Ethnography as a Way of Life.”

- Sarah Weiss