Sean Williams (ethnomusicologist)

Sean Williams (b. 1959, Berkeley, California) is an ethnomusicologist who teaches at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.

Her primary areas of teaching include Irish studies and Asian studies; she leads the Sundanese music ensembles Gamelan Degung Girijaya (Enduring Mountain Gamelan) and Angklung Buncis Sukahejo. She received a BA in classical guitar performance from UC Berkeley in 1981, and an MA (1985) and Ph.D. (1990) in ethnomusicology from the University of Washington (Seattle).

Publications

Sean has written numerous articles about music in Indonesia, Ireland, and Japan, and written or edited several books:

• 1998 The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music (Southeast Asia) (Garland/Routledge - with Terry E. Miller)
• 2001 The Sound of the Ancestral Ship: Highland Music of West Java (Oxford University Press)
• 2005 The Ethnomusicologists' Cookbook (Routledge)
• 2008 The Garland Handbook of Southeast Asian Music (Routledge - with Terry E. Miller)
• 2010 Focus: Irish Traditional Music (Routledge)
• 2011 Bright Star of the West: Joe Heaney, Irish Song-Man (Oxford - with Lillis Ó Laoire)

She is a current council member of the Society for Ethnomusicology (and former board member), current president of the Special Interest Group on Irish Music [1], on the board of the Society for Asian Music, and belongs to several other music-and-culture-related societies.

Sean Williams is also a musician; she plays numerous Indonesian instruments along with the classical guitar, Irish fiddle, and banjo. She sings in Irish, English, Indonesian, and Sundanese. In the summers she teaches at the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop in Port Orchard, Washington.

References

• Personal webpage