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
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
This guest post for World Day for Audiovisual Heritage was written by Stuart Wheeler, MA ‘21, who has spent the past several months working with the World Music Archives as well as Special Collections & Archives to help process collections from contemporary American composers including John Cage and Ned Sublette. One of his projects was … Read more
