Faculty of Law Professor Bruce Ziff has accepted a three-year appointment as the Associate Director of folkwaysAlive!, a unit within the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta, starting on July 1, 2015. He will remain with the Faculty of Law while undertaking these new responsibilities.
"What a wonderful opportunity for Bruce and for the University!," Faculty of Law Dean Paul Paton commented. "We're privileged to have a number of Faculty whose time and talents are dedicated in special ways across the university, and I'm glad we can support Bruce as he pursues this passion. He's already brought the clawhammer banjo into Property Law in ways I couldn't have imagined. The potential for new and interesting pathways for collaboration in teaching and research is a surprising and exciting feature of this new relationship."
FolkwaysAlive! was created in 2003. Among other things, it houses the complete Folkways Records catalogue. Folkways was operated by Moses Asch as an independent record label in New York City from the 1940s until the 1980s. The Folkways collection is remarkable for its depth and breadth. Among other things, it contains valuable and rare recordings of music from the United States and all over the world. As Ziff notes, "Folkways was producing 'world music' records long before that term had been coined".
In the late 1980s, Folkways was taken over by the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC, and continues to release recordings under the label "Smithsonian Folkways". At around the same time, Moses Asch's son, Michael, a professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta for many years, arranged for the original Folkways collection -- over 2,100 LPs -- to be donated to the University. From that benefaction folkwaysAlive! developed. Importantly, folkwaysAlive! has an ongoing affiliation with the Smithsonian.
One mission of folkwaysAlive! at the University of Alberta is to facilitate research in relation to the original Folkways albums. But it also seeks to explore new musical expressions in the spirit of Moses Asch's vision for Folkways. That can include the collection of field recordings of all kinds, master classes, outreach programs, scholarly presentations, concerts, and so on; all things 'sonic' fall within the purview of folkwaysAlive!. During his term, Ziff will assist with program development.
Ziff teaches property law in the Faculty of Law, and a recipient of the University's McCalla Teaching Fellowship for 2015-16. He is also a professional musician (clawhammer banjo and bodhran), performing in February 2015 at the folkwaysAlive!-sponsored "Winter Roots Festival".
In recent years, Ziff has taken to writing songs about leading property cases, on occasion performing these at talks or in class. But this cross-appointment to the Faculty of Arts offers potential for collaboration in other ways: Ziff is currently exploring synergies with law Professor Cam Hutchison, an expert in copyright law, who developed the law school's course on musicians and the law. As Ziff observes, "there are urgent issues around such topics as copyright and indigenous cultures, making an exploration of the relationship between law and music timely".