Andrew Raffo Dewar
- Title: Professor
- Department: New College and Music
- College: Arts & Sciences
Bio
Andrew Raffo Dewar, Ph.D. is a composer, soprano saxophonist, electronic musician, ethnomusicologist, and arts organizer. He is Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts in New College and the School of Music.
Recent publications include ethnographic research on 1970s intermedia art in Argentina during a military dictatorship, 1960s electronic music collective the Sonic Arts Union, philosophical issues of ontology in performance and music technologies, original music for his performing ensembles based in San Francisco, New York City, and Hamburg, Germany, music for film and theatre, compositions incorporating ethnographic interviews, biofeedback, data sonification, and collaborative cross-disciplinary installations utilizing 3D spatial audio.
He has performed internationally over the past 25 years, with over 200 performances and installations on five continents during his 14 years at the University of Alabama. Recordings of Dewar as a composer and performer are available on two dozen albums published by record labels throughout the United States and Europe.
His scholarly writing has been published in the Journal of the Society for American Music, Musiktexte, Leonardo Music Journal, Jazz Perspectives, Jazz Research Journal, the New Grove Dictionary of American Music (2nd Edition), Jazz & Culture, and elsewhere. He has also published chapters in the edited volumes Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Representation and Subjectivity (Duke University Press, 2016) and Experimentalisms in Practice: Music Perspectives from Latin America (Oxford University Press, 2018).
He was awarded the 2019 Robert M. Stevenson Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology, a 2020 University of Alabama President’s Research Award, a Fulbright Specialist award to Bogota, Colombia in July 2021, and served as Fulbright Canada Research Chair at York University in Toronto during winter/spring 2022.
Dewar holds an interdisciplinary BA in Music, Anthropology, and Asian Studies from the University of Minnesota, and an MA and Ph.D. in music composition and ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University.