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University of Washington

Campbell named chair of Smithsonian Folkways board

Professor Patricia Campbell.

Professor Patricia Shehan Campbell was recently elected chairperson of the board of Smithsonian Folkways, the nonprofit record label and archive of Smithsonian Institution, the national museum of the United States.  The Folkways initiative is to heighten communication among and about people and cultures, accomplished principally through the medium of music, accompanied by informative notes and educational features.

Campbell teaches courses in music education, writes on children's music and world music pedagogy,  and is the current head of the Ethnomusicology program at the School of Music.

"The resources of Smithsonian Folkways offer documentary recordings (both audio and video) of many of the world's musical expressions, and allow those engaged in education at any level the opportunity to understand and celebrate the many splendors of our cultural heritage--and those of others in the world," Campbell says.  "I'm honored to be a part of the archive activities, and hope for even further connections of the Folkways 'global sounds' to teachers and their students."

Campbell's second edition of Songs in Their Heads was released by Oxford University Press in November 2010, with this accolade from Daniel Sheehy, Director of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage:  "The clarity, maturity, and authority of Patricia Campbell's insightful treatment of children's musical life as a culture of its own offers a rock-solid, radical, and reasoned approach to music education in a multicultural world'.

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