Center for World Music logo with dancers and drummers in colorful costume

Concert: "The Ecstatic Music of the Indian Himalayas" with Pritam Bhartwan and Stefan Fiol

Part of the Gateways to World Music Series

The Robert E. Brown Center for World Music invites campus and community members to discover the ecstatic music of the Indian Himalayas through a performance lecture by renowned singer, drummer, healer, and recording artist Pritam Bhartwan and Stefan Fiol, an ethnomusicologist at the University of Cincinnati who has spent the last decade studying these musical traditions. Their performance will combine ornate vocals with dense, interlocking patterns performed on a variety of indigenous percussion and wind instruments. Together they will demonstrate the full range of expressive culture from this Himalayan region, including possession ceremonies, heroic ballads, festival dance-songs, and music for seasonal and life-cycle rituals.

This lectureship is supported by the Lorado Taft on Art Fund / College of Fine and Applied Arts and is presented by the Robert E. Brown Center for World Music.

About the Performers

Pritam Bhartwan is among the most widely acclaimed artists in the central Himalayas of North India. Beginning at the age of seven, Pritam began learning the drumming and singing traditions of Garhwal (the western portion of Uttarakhand) by traveling with his father and uncles to possession rituals, epic ballad performances, and local ceremonies and festivals. He soon acquired a reputation as one of the most electrifying performers in the region and went on to record more than 50 commerical albums, in addition to appearing regularly on All India Radio and Doordarshan, India’s state television program. Pritam has received a number of awards from the government of India, including the Sur Samrat, Jagar Samrat, and Uttarakhand Vibhuti. He has also become one of the leading ambassadors of folk music from the Garhwal Himalayas, taking his music and dynamic teaching style to Oman, United Arab Emirates, Germany, New Zealand, Canada, and various parts of the United States.

Stefan Fiol is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati. He specializes in the music of the Uttarakhand Himalayas of northern India. Stefan received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2008 after conducting several years of ethnomusicological research in the Indian Himalayas. His research has been funded by fellowships from Fulbright Hays, the Wenner Gren Foundation, and the American Institute of Indian Studies. In 2017, Stefan published a book with University of Illinois Press entitled Recasting Folk: Indian Music, Media and Social Mobility; other publications have appeared in Ethnomusicology, Asian Music, Yearbook for Traditional Music, Ethnomusicology Forum, Journal of Asian Studies, and Journal of South Asian Popular Culture.

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Contact

For further information, visit the Robert E. Brown Center for World Music (external link) or email .

To request disability-related accommodations for this event, please contact Brian Cudiamat at or (217) 244-5586.