Features

Science and humanities scholars cross disciplines to find new approaches

A Calder-like constellation of geometric shapes swirls around a spiral axis on a flat panel display as composer Lisa Bielawa RI ’08 plays a melody on a piano. Representing pitches, chords, and keys, the figures leap and whirl as her fingers strike the keyboard, modeling the structure of her music in its moment-to-moment mutation.

Titled “Music on the Spiral Array. Real Time.” (MuSA.RT), the system is the springboard for work that Elaine Chew RI ’08 and Alexandre François RI ’08 are doing in their science research cluster, “Analytical Listening Through Interactive Visualization.”

“We’re developing tools to model what humans do when they play or listen to music,” says Chew, who is married to François. “We want people to understand more deeply what a musician does when performing and help musicians make decisions with more knowledge.”

Chew and François are on the faculty of the University of Southern California (USC) Andrew and Erna Viterbi School of Engineering. François is a research assistant professor of computer science, and Chew is an associate professor of industrial and systems engineering and electrical engineering. Chew is the Edward, Frances, and Shirley B. Daniels Fellow at Radcliffe.

Their collaboration in life and work began six years ago at USC. Chew had created a spiral array model of tonality and hoped to make it respond to live performance. François, using a method he had invented to rapidly develop dynamic multimedia software, quickly translated Chew’s model into an interactive system. Their joint creation, MuSA.RT, is the first system to model and visualize the structure of live music.

At Radcliffe, Chew and François are continuing their pioneering research and also exploring ways to share it with scholars in both the sciences and the humanities. “Modeling music—both its composition and performance—offers rich application potential,” says Chew. “There are so many questions one can begin to answer.”

Down the hall at 36 Concord Avenue, a humanities cluster is nurturing collaborative research that may bring a new dimension to established disciplines or even spawn a field. Titled “Ethiopian Christian Creativity in Transnational Perspective,” this cluster unites historian Steven Kaplan RI ’08, a professor of African studies and comparative religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; ethnomusicologist Kay Kaufman Shelemay RI ’08, the G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music and a professor of African and African American studies at Harvard University; and musician Mulatu Astatke RI ’08.

Shelemay and Kaplan have been studying Ethiopian culture and religion for three decades. “We bonded in 1978 over Ethiopian monasticism,” says Kaplan. “We’ve been close friends and colleagues ever since.”

Religion, culture, and history intertwine in Ethiopia, which was a Christian empire from the fourth century until 1974, when a military regime deposed the last emperor, Haile Selassie. Since then, some two million Ethiopians have fled their homeland. Of the five hundred thousand Ethiopian immigrants living in the United States, two hundred thousand are in Washington, DC.

Shelemay and Kaplan are examining how the Ethiopian culture—including music and the practice of Orthodox Christianity—has survived and changed among Ethiopians in the United States.

“This subject is timely and enticing to us not just because we know and love Ethiopia,” says Shelemay, “but because Ethiopian people, history, and contributions are almost universally neglected. They simply don’t fit into any discourse. Perhaps they will show us how to create a new discourse.”

While one cluster studies an evolving community and culture, its neighbors are modeling the decisions of a musician in real time. Both teams are venturing beyond established academic boundaries as they explore live human phenomena. 

At Radcliffe, François is rethinking his programming technique, Software Architecture for Immersipresence (SAI). “I plan to use SAI as the foundation of a more integrative, human-centered approach to software system creation,” he says. While adapting software design to accommodate dynamic human behavior, François hopes to make programming more useful and less daunting to those in other fields, such as music scholars.

In work and in life, François and Chew bring together different worlds.

“We’re hybrids,” says François, a computer scientist drawn to neuroscience. “I want to model and test what we humans do when we see something interesting or listen to music that moves or challenges us. That requires new ways of thinking about computer programming. This is the direction I want to go.”

Chew is the first honoree of the Viterbi Early Career Chair and the founder and head of USC’s Music Computation and Cognition Laboratory. She is also an award-winning classical pianist.

While earning her PhD in operations research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at the invitation of Pulitzer Prize–winning composer John Harbison, Chew performed in a world premiere preview of his Cello Concerto (1994) with cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

“Basically, I am a musician,” says Chew. “Everything I’m doing stems from this fact. I have a lifetime of work cut out for me exploring music in mathematical and scientific terms.”

Chew and François are accustomed to crossing boundaries. “I was born in Buffalo to parents of Chinese descent who raised me in Singapore,” says Chew. “Alex was raised in Paris by parents with roots in Italy and Spain. We’ve been engaged in cross-cultural translation all our lives, which helps us cope with the problems of working in a new discipline that doesn’t fit into an established academic structure.”

Throughout the year, Chew and François gave their first series of joint presentations, and in April, they convened a symposium on new work in interactive music systems. “We are seeing what works or not as we communicate with scholars in other disciplines,” says François.

“At the same time,” says Chew, “we’re trying to figure out how to exist in the academic world in a way that satisfies who we actually are.”

Like Chew and François, Shelemay and Kaplan find that the study of dynamic human activity requires a creative, cross-disciplinary approach. “We’re trying to figure out how to most effectively talk about what is a part of life all around us,” says Shelemay.

She and Kaplan are recording oral histories of Ethiopians in Washington, DC, and interviewing Astatke together. “Mulatu lives what we are studying,” says Kaplan, who is researching a book on Ethiopian Christianity in its American diaspora.

Like Shelemay, Kaplan uses ethnographic tools. “Most historians study the Ethiopian church through its manuscripts,” says Kaplan. “I’m interested in how Ethiopians live as Christians in Ethiopia and now in diaspora.”

Instead of archives, Kaplan mines the Internet for the bylaws of the Ethiopean churches. He discovered that while churches in Ethiopia are hierarchical in structure, Ethiopian churches in the United States are member-run congregations. “It’s a marvelous paradox that the church—a brilliant expression of Ethiopian identity—has adopted a classic American form of religious structure,” says Kaplan.

Kaplan and Shelemay find evidence of cultural continuity in The Ethiopian Yellow Pages. They point out ads for homeland burial services, including casket transport, and listings of freelance wedding singers. They regard these performers as heirs of the azmaris, itinerant minstrels whose repertoire included political satire. “Many were killed by the Italians during their occupation,” says Shelemay.

While at Radcliffe, Shelemay is writing a book about Ethiopian music and musicians in the United States. She is exploring how performers who inventively adapt Ethiopian musical traditions can influence the growth of a community in diaspora.

Among Shelemay’s sources is Astatke, the originator of Ethiojazz, an infectious hybrid of traditional Ethiopian music, Latin jazz, funk, and soul. Renowned among Ethiopians as well as fans of jazz fusion and world music, his recordings gained an even wider audience as the soundtrack of Jim Jarmusch’s 2005 film, Broken Flowers.

After attending Lindisfarne College and the Trinity College of Music in England, Astatke studied at the Schillinger House of Music in Boston, now the Berklee College of Music, and performed in both Boston and New York City. In the late 1960s, he returned to Addis Ababa, taking with him Western instruments such as the Hammond organ and vibraphone as well as an ambition to blend twelve-tone Western music with traditional Ethiopian five-tone scales. He became a major figure in his country’s burgeoning music scene and performed with Duke Ellington on his 1973 visit to Addis Ababa.

“When merging these two scales, it’s not always easy to keep the flavor of the five tones,” says Astatke. “Here at Radcliffe, I’m writing music that brings out the identity of my country. This has been one of the best years of my life.”

Astatke is reinventing other elements of the Ethiopian musical tradition. He added extra strings and an electronic pickup to the krar, a lyre-like instrument used by St. Yared, the fourth-century founder of sacred music in Ethiopia. Astatke’s new work, The Yared Opera, mingles recordings of Ethiopian Christian chants with the live accompaniment of violins, synthesizers, and drums. “The musicians will respond to the conducting stick,” says Astatke, referring to the maqwammiya—the staff that guides the rhythm of liturgical performances—which he is recasting as an orchestra leader’s baton.

Astatke debuted a section of the opera at Sanders Theatre in April, after Shelemay and Kaplan hosted the first major cross-disciplinary conference on cultural creativity in the Ethiopian diaspora. The two will jointly edit its papers into a book of essays. Among the new pieces Astatke played at the April event was one he wrote called “The Radcliffe.”

“We’re exploring the nature of musical creativity as it is practiced by real people under challenging conditions of migration and resettlement,” says Shelemay.

Both clusters are incubating collaborative work that may breed a new field or transform established disciplines.

“Like Elaine and Alex,” says Shelemay, “we’re asking where our study belongs and what field we are actually in.” 

“Such questions are ideal for the Radcliffe Institute, which is a hothouse of interdisciplinary study,” says Kaplan. “The name Addis Ababa means ‘new flower.’ We’ve planted the seeds. Now we’re waiting to see what grows out of our year together.” 


Susan Saccoccia is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, Boston Magazine, and the Boston Globe, among other publications.

Photo of Lisa Bielawa RI ’08 using the MuSA.RT system by Elaine Chew RI ’08; photo of the musicians of the St. Mary's Ethiopian Orthodox Church in Washington, DC, by Marilyn Heldman; photos of fellows by Tony Rinaldo