Simha Arom - Biography

Biography

In the 1960's, Simha Arom was sent by the Israeli Government to found a brass band in the Central African Republic. He was fascinated by the traditional music he heard there, especially the vocal polyphony of the Aka Pygmies. He joined the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in 1968, and received its Silver Medal in 1984. He returned to do field work in Africa every year from 1971 to 1991, accompanied by ethnolinguists and students, in order to record, preserve and study this music. Simha Arom won the First Prize for French Horn at the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique of Paris. When he became an ethnomusicologist later on, he worked on uncovering implicit musical systems and studied the ways in which a culture builds its cognitive categories as observed in its music – using interactive experiments. His work is based on the principle that validation of data collected during field work must involve corroboration with cognitive data specific to the holders of the culture being studied. His research covers the temporal organization of music, musical scales, polyphonic techniques, music in social systems and the development of conceptual tools for the categorization, analysis and modeling of traditional music. Starting with a discipline that was mainly descriptive, he tried to make it into a real science, with all of its attributes: experimentation, verification, validation, modeling, conceptualization and reconstitution through synthetic processes. He has been an invited professor at many universities – particularly Montreal, UCLA, Vancouver, M.I.T., Cambridge (U.K.), Tel-Aviv, Bar-Ilan, Haifa, Basel, Zurich, Sienna, and Venice. His work has inspired contemporary composers such as Luciano Berio, György Ligeti, Steve Reich, Fabien Levy and Fabian Panisello.