Theodore Konkouris
Theodore L. Konkouris is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology and a musician. Theodore holds undergraduate degrees in Pharmacy, Art History, and Music. He read ethnomusicology at SOAS and received his PhD from Queen’s University Belfast where he taught anthropology and ethnomusicology since 2011. His research interests include Mande Hunters' Music; African Music; Avant-Garde; Free Improvisation; Popular Culture; Hunting; Sorcery and Witchcraft; Existential Anthropology; Fieldwork & Ethnography.
Theodore has been researching Mande hunters and their music since 2003. He has done so in libraries, national archives, and intensive fieldwork of 18 months among hunters in Mali. In 2009 Theodore became an apprentice of Solo Konate, one of the most prominent hunters’ musicians, a skilful hunter, knowledgeable healer, and gifted diviner, with whom he learned how to play and experience hunters’ music and performance. Theodore travelled and participated in hunters’ ceremonies and public events, followed his teacher to recording sessions and documented recording practices and live performances, and learned the behavioural code and worldview of the hunters.
Theodore explored aspects of the contemporary commercial hunters’ music scene in Bamako, based on an ethnographic account of the contexts, social organization, aesthetics and symbolism of the hunters’ musical tradition in Mali. Through inquiry and discourse he explored themes of apprenticeship, hunters’ performance, hunters’ musical repertoires, hunters’ music production and local industry, hunters’ radio programmes, and dissemination of their music, and finally, the growing contemporary popularity of hunters’ music from a phenomenological perspective. He discussed the impact of the record industry and cassette recordings of hunters’ music on the tradition itself, and on contemporary forms of Malian music. Theodore showed why this tradition is popular among hunters and non-hunters, and considered what it is that hunters are voicing that speaks so fully to contemporary needs and memories of Malian society.
Theodore is the author of ‘Recalling the Past in Song: Memory and Recovery in Mande Hunters’ Ceremonies’ in The Politics of Memory and Recovery in Times of Crisis, edited by Fiona Larkan and Fiona Murphy (Ashgate, 2018), ‘“I am sorry that we made you bleed”: Locality and Apprenticeship among the Mande Hunters’ in Reily, Suzel A and Katherine Brucher eds. The Routledge Companion to the Study of Local Musicking (Routledge, 2018) and ‘A Night at Radio Donko’ Ethnomusicology Forum (Special Issue — Radio and Ethnomusicology vol.27, no.3).
Supervisors: Prof. Fiona Magowan, Prof Lisette Josephides, and Dr. Marina Roseman
Phone: 7766099879
Theodore has been researching Mande hunters and their music since 2003. He has done so in libraries, national archives, and intensive fieldwork of 18 months among hunters in Mali. In 2009 Theodore became an apprentice of Solo Konate, one of the most prominent hunters’ musicians, a skilful hunter, knowledgeable healer, and gifted diviner, with whom he learned how to play and experience hunters’ music and performance. Theodore travelled and participated in hunters’ ceremonies and public events, followed his teacher to recording sessions and documented recording practices and live performances, and learned the behavioural code and worldview of the hunters.
Theodore explored aspects of the contemporary commercial hunters’ music scene in Bamako, based on an ethnographic account of the contexts, social organization, aesthetics and symbolism of the hunters’ musical tradition in Mali. Through inquiry and discourse he explored themes of apprenticeship, hunters’ performance, hunters’ musical repertoires, hunters’ music production and local industry, hunters’ radio programmes, and dissemination of their music, and finally, the growing contemporary popularity of hunters’ music from a phenomenological perspective. He discussed the impact of the record industry and cassette recordings of hunters’ music on the tradition itself, and on contemporary forms of Malian music. Theodore showed why this tradition is popular among hunters and non-hunters, and considered what it is that hunters are voicing that speaks so fully to contemporary needs and memories of Malian society.
Theodore is the author of ‘Recalling the Past in Song: Memory and Recovery in Mande Hunters’ Ceremonies’ in The Politics of Memory and Recovery in Times of Crisis, edited by Fiona Larkan and Fiona Murphy (Ashgate, 2018), ‘“I am sorry that we made you bleed”: Locality and Apprenticeship among the Mande Hunters’ in Reily, Suzel A and Katherine Brucher eds. The Routledge Companion to the Study of Local Musicking (Routledge, 2018) and ‘A Night at Radio Donko’ Ethnomusicology Forum (Special Issue — Radio and Ethnomusicology vol.27, no.3).
Supervisors: Prof. Fiona Magowan, Prof Lisette Josephides, and Dr. Marina Roseman
Phone: 7766099879
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