September 21, 2009

Alumni Highlight: Stefan Fiol

Stefan Fiol (BA, Music, 1998) concentrated on piano performance under Anne Miller during his time at Lewis & Clark, but was set on a career path in ethnomusicology after taking musicology courses from Aaron Beck and Gil Seeley, anthropology courses from Diane Nelson, and the gamelan ensemble with Pak Widiyanto.

Stefan Fiol (BA, Music, 1998) concentrated on piano performance under Anne Miller during his time at Lewis & Clark, but was set on a career path in ethnomusicology after taking musicology courses from Aaron Beck and Gil Seeley, anthropology courses from Diane Nelson, and the gamelan ensemble with Pak Widiyanto.  He went on to complete his PhD in musicology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2008).  His current research explores the growth of mass-mediated music in the central Himalayas, and the ways that this music both sustains and undermines attempts to delineate a cultural and political movement within the recently formed regional state of Uttarakhand.  Dr. Fiol’s two years of fieldwork in India were supported by research fellowships from Fulbright-Hays, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the American Institute of Indian Studies. He has also conducted fieldwork on the music and dance of Zimbabwe, Paraguay, and Chile (the latter as part of a study abroad program while at L&C), and he is an avid performer and teacher of the sitar, Himalayan percussion instruments, and the Shona mbira of Zimbabwe. Dr. Fiol is currently a visiting scholar in the South Asia program at Cornell University, and he is beginning a second year on the musicology faculty at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY. Previously, he was a visiting faculty member at the University of Notre Dame (2005-6) and he also taught courses at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2002-4).