Steven Feld is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Music at the University of New Mexico. A long time Santa Fe resident, he has been active in New Mexico music since the mid 1970s when he was a founder of the New Mexico Jazz Workshop. He previously taught at Columbia University, New York University, University of California at Santa Cruz, University of Texas at Austin, and University of Pennsylvania. He is also a visiting professor at the Greig Academy of Music at the University of Bergen in Norway.
Feld's research principally concerns the anthropology of sound and voice, incorporating studies in linguistics and poetics, music and aesthetics, acoustics and ecology. Since the mid-1970s he has studied the sound world of the Bosavi rainforest in Papua New Guinea. His current project is a CD series, ultimately with accompanying book and DVD, on the history and culture of bells.
He is also active in human rights work that tracks the impacts of mining and logging in Papua New Guinea and West Papua, and that exposes worldwide problems of musical censorship and the situation of refugee, exile, and indigenous musicians. In 2003 he founded VoxLox, a documentary sound art label, in order to produce CDs that advocate for human rights and acoustic ecology.
Feld received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation "genius prize" fellowship in 1991, and in 1994 was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. For 2003-2004 he received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Also in 2003 he received the Fumio Koizumi Prize for lifetime achievement in the field of Ethnomusicology.
HIS BOOKS INCLUDE:
Sound and Sentiment (1982/1990, U. Pennsylvania Press; J.I. Staley Prize,1991)
Music Grooves (with Charles Keil, 1994, U. Chicago Press; Chicago Folklore Prize, 1995)
Senses of Place (edited with Keith Basso, 1996, SAR Press)
Bosavi-English-Tok Pisin Dictionary (with Bambi Schieffelin, 1998, ANU Press)
Jean Rouch: Ciné-Ethnography (editor/translator, 2003, U. Minnesota Press)
HIS CDS INCLUDE:
Voices of the Rainforest (1991, Rykodisc)
Rainforest Soundwalks (2001, EarthEar)
Bosavi: Rainforest Music from Papua New Guinea (2001, Smithsonian Folkways)
Bells and Winter Festivals of Greek Macedonia (2002, Smithsonian Folkways)
Romani Soundscapes, in Dick Blau (photographs), Charles & Angeliki Keil (texts),
Bright Balkan Morning: Romani Lives and the Power of Music in Greek Macedonia
(2002, Wesleyan UP);
Primo Maggio Anarchico: Anarchist May Day in Carrara, Italy (2002 Umanita Nuova/FAI).
Other websites with links to his recordings and publications are:
http://www.bosavipeoplesfund.org
http://www.uwm.edu/People/dickblau/BrightBalkanMorning/