Summer 2003
The multicultural meanings of music
Photo by Jayme Halbritter
MIRJANA LAUSEVIC
Assistant professor, music
Education
M.A., Ph.D. Wesleyan University, ethnomusicology
B.A. Sarajevo University, musicology, ethnomusicology
Has taught at…
Dartmouth College
New York University
Wesleyan University
University of Sarajevo
Guest lecturer at…
Dartmouth College (on Balkan music in the U.S.)
Tufts University (concert with her ensemble Zabe i Babe, which performs traditional and popular music of Bosnia)
Bennington College (Balkan music and workshop on Bosnian singing)
and several other colleges and universities.
Has performed with…
Rehobot Oromo International Choir (Ethopian choir)
Wesleyan Klezmer Ensemble
Pandemonium Steel Band (with Queen Latifah)
Crossing disciplines...
to join an interdisciplinary CLA project, Borderlands: Ethnicity, Identity, and Violence in the Shatter-Zone of Empires Since 1848.
When Mirjana (“Minja”) Lausevic arrived at the University of Minnesota fall 1999, she brought in her imagination a storied Minnesota landscape populated by a cast of familiar characters.
“What I knew about Minnesota was from [Garrison Keillor’s] Prairie Home Companion,” she laughs. “I expected to see lots of Norwegian bachelors.”
To be sure, she did find some Norwegian Lutherans—but she also found people of Laotian, Hmong, Tanzanian, Sudanese, Oromo, and South Asian heritage. And she has unearthed traditional Middle Eastern dance and ancient Tibetan folk music and Japanese drumming and an exuberant choir from Oromia, all part of a Twin Cities musical landscape that Lausevic finds all the more diverse the more she digs.
Lausevic is an ethnomusicologist, a specialist interested not only in music but in the people who make the music—and she draws her insights not only from the study of music itself but also from the social sciences and humanities. She wants to know how people of various cultures give meaning to and are shaped by their unique musical sounds.
Ethnomusicology was not a field that Lausevic set out to study, although she grew up in the right place for it. Born in Sarajevo—the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina—Lausevic trained as a classical pianist, with an eye to performing. But she also was an eyewitness to music’s ability to both ease and inflame ethnic and political tensions.
“Music was politics in Bosnia,” she says. “It was used to forge national identity, to consolidate, to encourage fighting or threaten the other side. It was how people identified along political lines.
“Think about a stadium of people singing the national anthem. It makes people feel united. It makes you feel like you’re thinking what everyone else is thinking. If you touched on a concrete issue with the people in that stadium, everyone would disagree. But music doesn’t question that.”
Captivated by what she saw as the awesome power of music, Lausevic began doing research on that phenomenon. In 1991, she came to Wesleyan University in Connecticut to earn a master’s and then a doctoral degree in ethnomusicology. When she arrived at the U as an assistant professor, Lausevic brought with her a desire to “peel away the layers and find what’s inside” the very eclectic music of her new environment. It didn’t take her long to get going.
That fall, Lausevic and her students began developing a Web site called “The World In Two Cities,” dedicated to exploring and documenting musical expression in Minneapolis and St. Paul. What they have found in the ongoing project is an extraordinarily rich musical scene: “From the Barrios of South Minneapolis, Frogtown, the East African West Bank, and the Little Mogadishu of Loring Park … the Twin Cities is resonating with many different sounds,” says the introduction on the site’s home page.
“This is what I hoped for,” Lausevic says of the site, which continues to grow and has garnered some national attention. “I see this as part of a larger agenda—to enable people to recognize there is something very valuable here and to allow their voices to be heard. It’s an effort to understand how music survives, to try to bridge gaps. I want to introduce musicians to new venues, and find out how musicians themselves fit in. It’s also been a great opportunity for students to get exposed to the big picture.”
A big-picture teacher she is, often sending her students into the community and inviting to her classroom musicians who bring with them unfamiliar traditions and styles. In one particularly memorable session, a family of Sacred Harp singers—the Lee family—from Hoboken, Georgia, joined Lausevic in her classroom to teach their art form.
A rural Southern tradition with origins in 17th-century England, Sacred Harp is written with shaped, geometric notes and sung without accompaniment. Some students were so moved by this intense, spiritually rich music that they later visited the Lees in Georgia.
“In Western culture, we’re used to sheet music,” Lausevic says. “But there is so much you can’t read from a sheet. We can’t reduce music to notes.
“I teach that meaning lies not just in emotional response to music, but in understanding music in larger contexts—how meaning is created, how we relate to it. It’s really about listening as key to understanding.
“We are encouraged very little to think about how music is used. I teach the application of music to daily lives. We try to imagine scenarios like, ‘What kind of music would I put on if Grandma or a friend were over?’ That helps us think about values and how we present ourselves.
“As an ethnomusicologist, I want to equip people to understand, to keep their minds open,” Lausevic continues. “In this way, you become both a better musician and a better person. I really feel ethnomusicology is a lifestyle. Your work never stops.”
At least it doesn’t stop for Lausevic, who, with her musician husband, Tim Eriksen, just completed work on a major motion picture to be released in December 2003. For “Cold Mountain,” which stars Nicole Kidman and Jude Law, Lausevic and Eriksen were brought in to organize a Sacred Harp singing for a recording session and then teach the actors how to sing this music.
“It was so moving,” she says. “The entire crew, everyone, was so moved and found a much deeper role for the music.”
Meanwhile, Lausevic continues to expand her horizons, with “millions of projects in my head and only so much money and time,” she laughs. “I leave it to chance to figure out what should be done.”
Visit "A World of Two Cities" website.
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