Researching Simha Arom

In the 1960s, Simha Arom was sent by the Government of Israel to establish a brass band in the Central African Republic. He became fascinated by the traditional music of this country, especially the vocal polyphonies of the Aka Pygmies. He entered the CNRS in 1968 and in 1984 he received its Silver Medal. He did field work every year from 1971 to 1991, accompanied by ethnolinguists and students, to record this music to study it and preserve it. Simha Arom was awarded a First Prize for French Horn at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique of Paris before becoming an ethnomusicologist. Using interactive experiments, he has worked on uncovering implicit musical systems and the way in which cultures build cognitive categories as attested in their music. His work is based on the postulate that, in order for it to be valid, data collected in the field must be corroborated by cognitive data specific to the holders of the culture studied.His research topics include the temporal organization of music, musical scales, polyphonic techniques, music in the social system and the elaboration of conceptual tools for the categorization, analysis and modeling of traditional music. From a mostly descriptive discipline, he has tried to build a science in the full sense of the word, with all of its attributes: experimentation, verification, validation, modeling, conceptualization and reconstitution by means of synthesis.He has been a Visiting Professor at many universities – particularly Montreal, UCLA, Vancouver, M.I.T., Cambridge (U.K.), Tel-Aviv, Bar-Ilan, Haifa, Basel, Zurich, Siena, and Venice, and his work has inspired contemporary composers2 such as Luciano Berio (Coro), György Ligeti, Steve Reich, Fabien Lévy and Fabian Panisello.Simha Arom is Research Director Emeritus at the CNRS, a founding member of the Société française d'ethnomusicologie, the Société française d'analyse musicale, the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM) and the European Seminar in Ethnomusicology; he is also a member of the Société française de musicologie and the Board of directors of The Universe of Music project (UNESCO).His sound archives were deposited in 2011 at the sound library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Simha Arom was the subject of the 2014 documentary SIMHA by Jerome Blumberg.