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James Kippen teaches a range of ethnomusicology courses at the University of Toronto. He studied Social Anthropology and Ethnomusicology under John Blacking and John Baily at Queen's University, Belfast. His doctoral research in Lucknow, India, dealt with tabla drumming in its sociocultural context, particularly as interpreted by his teacher, the hereditary master Afaq Hussain Khan; the study was later published as The Tabla of Lucknow: A Cultural Analysis of a Musical Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 1988). He held two post-doctoral fellowships for computer-assisted musical analysis, and taught Anthropology and Ethnomusicology courses at Queen’s before joining the University of Toronto in January 1990. Since then he has been awarded three major research grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada to pursue investigations into cultural concepts of time in Indian music and society, and the changing theory and practice of rhythm and metre in Hindustani music. He continues to study and practise both tabla and pakhavaj drums. He also studies and performs Balinese gendèr wayang music with the ensemble Seka Rat Nadi.
James Kippen has published in a variety of scholarly journals such as Anthropological Quarterly, Music Perception, Computers and the Humanities, Minds and Machines, World of Music, Journal of the Indian Musicological Society, Asian Music etc., and has contributed a key article on North Indian metric theory and drumming to the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. His most recent book, Gurudev’s Drumming Legacy: Music, Theory and Nationalism in the Mrdang aur Tabla Vadanpaddhati of Gurudev Patwardhan (Ashgate, 2006), translates, transcribes and analyses an early reformist text on Indian drumming, and places the work in rich historical and sociocultural contexts. He is currently co-editing a book called Music and the Art of Seduction.
In 2008, James Kippen was Mohindar Brar Sambhi Visiting Professor in Indian Music at the Department of Ethnomusicology, University of California at Los Angeles.
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