Friday, October 24, 2025 — 3-4 p.m.Frank Center for Public Affairs, Room 100 Join us for a screening of a chapter of the film-in-progress Searching for the Folk Philosopher, followed by a discussion with Wesleyan graduate student Ameen Mokdad MA’26, the film’s composer and Impact Producer. In the film, the Iraqi director Mounir Salah searches … Read more
Tuesday, October 14, 2025 12 noon-1 pmSmith Reading Room, 1st floor Olin Library Charismatic Zimbabwean master musician Samaita Vitalis Botsa creates gorgeous waves of sound with his mbira, connecting the living with the ancestors. “I’m just the car, it’s the spirits doing the driving, making the music,” he says. Visiting from his village in Zimbabwe … Read more
Thursday, October 9, 2025 12 noon-1 pm Smith Reading Room, 1st floor Olin Library Mohammad Geldi Geldi Nejad MA’23, known as “Oghlan Bakhshi,” a master of the dutar, a two-stringed lute, and an epic bard, will perform some Turkmen songs and instrumental pieces with special guest performers Zyyada Jumayeva and Abdolghaffar Geldinejad. Sponsored by the World Music … Read more
Friday, May 23, 2025 at 1:00pmOlin Library, 252 Church Street, Room 014 (Jakobson Room), Middletown, Connecticut Free and open to the public.This event is part of Wesleyan’s Reunion + Commencement Weekend. What can archival collections tell us about the complex relationship between Russian émigré musicians and their new American audience? This talk delves into the World … Read more
Saturday, April 26th, 20259:45-10:45amFrank Center PAC 100 Join director, writer, and producer Sam Quigley ‘74 MA’77 for a screening of his newly digitized 1989 documentary Copper, Tin, & Fire: Gongsmithing in Java, followed by a Q and A. The documentary shows the generations-old process of forging knobbed bronze gongs in the workshop of master gamelan … Read more
Fingerstyle banjo solos from the turn of the 20th century Ethan Schwartz (banjo); Emma Mistele (piano) Tuesday, April 22, 2025 — noon-1pmGribbel Reading Room 202A, 2nd floor Olin Library Graduate students in music Ethan Schwartz (banjo) and Emma Mistele (piano) present a noontime concert of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century works for five-string banjo by … Read more
Join us for the premiere of a new documentary, The Path, by Aibek Baiymbetov, an MA student in Ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University, followed by a Q&A with the director. Thursday, March 27, 2025 — 4:30-6:00 pm — Olin 327B The performance of the Kyrgyz epic Manas represents as a vivid example of a living oral tradition … Read more
A mini-concert finale to Finding the Spirit of Inanga: A Gallery of African Musical Instruments at Olin Library Friday, February 28th, 2025 12:00pmSmith Reading Room, Olin Memorial LibraryFree and open to the public RSVP here: https://forms.office.com/r/Kq4qEa3ey2 (RSVPs encouraged but not required.) Join us as we celebrate the past year of Finding the Spirit of Inanga: … Read more
Monday, February 3, 2025 at noon Gribbel Room 202A, 2nd floor Olin Library, 252 Church Street, Middletown Free and open to the public Artists Kata Kovács and Tom O’Doherty present a talk at the closing of their sound installation Minute/Year (2016–present), which was installed in Olin Library throughout 2024. The U.S. premiere of the work … Read more
A staircase performance by MUSC 300 11/11/11 AM Olin Library | Music Staircase ‘Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears’, instructed Pauline Oliveros, in her Sonic Meditationsfrom 1970. As well as pushing at disciplinary, social, and institutional boundaries, the experimental initiatives of the 1960s and ’70s sought to cultivate greater sensory … Read more
