About

Philip V. Bohlman is the Ludwig Rosenberger Distinguished Service Professor in Jewish History, Music, and the Humanities in the College at The University of Chicago, and an Associate Faculty member of the Divinity School. His teaching and research draw upon diverse methods and perspectives in music scholarship, emphasizing ethnography, history, and performance. He is particularly interested in exploring the interstices between music and religion, music, race, and colonial encounter, as well as music and nationalism. For four decades, the study of Jewish music in modernity has been a primary focus of his research, which has also informed his activities as a performer, notably as the Artistic Director of the New Budapest Orpheum Society, a Jewish cabaret ensemble-in-residence at the Humanities Division. His work in historical performance has been recognized with awards such as the Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society and the Donald Tovey Prize from Oxford University. Since 2008, he has conducted research in India, especially in Kolkata, Varanasi, and rural West Bengal, and he maintains ongoing research on the Eurovision Song Contest. Bohlman has authored and edited numerous books in English and German, with translations into many languages, and his publications include works on music, nationalism, ethnomusicology, and European modernity. He has received several prestigious awards, including the Derek Allen Prize for Musicology, the Jaap Kunst Prize, the Bruno Nettl Prize, and a Grammy nomination with the New Budapest Orpheum Society. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, and in 2019, he was awarded the degree of Doctor honoris causa by the Romanian National University of Music Bucharest.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Literature
• History
• Art
• Political Science
• Law
• Epistemology
• Ancient history
• Visual arts
• Linguistics
• Philosophy

Selected publications

• On Survival

  Ethnomusicology · 2024-02-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract An expansion of my 2022 Charles Seeger Lecture, “On Survival” unfolds as a set of reflections on the moment in the history of ethnomusicology that has followed intense periods of response to the COVID-19 pandemic and of racial self-reckoning worldwide. While examining common concerns and practices for ethnomusicology as a field, I do not propose a new theory or method, but rather I argue for the unity of the field rather than the separation of approaches into subdisciplines. The common ground of the present ethnomusicological moment, like that of the past to which ethnomusicologists now return, lies in a fundamental concern for ethical practice and moral purpose. Throughout the article, I draw upon case studies, many from my own ethnographic and historical work, especially from my research in and performances of music of the Shoah, to claim affinity between the fields of ethnomusicology and moral philosophy. These affinities emerge from common engagement with the moral dimensions of survival: trauma, mourning, border crossing, goodness, cohabitation with others in the Anthropocene, transcendence. The video clips are available here: https://files.press.uillinois.edu/journals/supplemental/ethno/seeger_lecture/

  PublisherDOI

• Name register

  2024

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Linguistics
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Twilight of the Gods: Saga of Experimental Music in the Late USSR - Kevin C. Karnes. Sounds Beyond: Arvo Pärt and the 1970s Soviet Underground. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. xii, 193 pp. Appendix. Notes. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. Figures. $35.00, paper. $34.99, ebook. - Peter J. Schmelz. Sonic Overload: Alfred Schnittke, Valentin Silvestrov, and Polystylism in the Late USSR. New York: Oxford Univewrsity Press, 2021. xvi, 408 pp. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. Figures. Tables. $99.00, hard bound.

  Slavic Review · 2024-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Twilight of the Gods: Saga of Experimental Music in the Late USSR - Kevin C. Karnes. Sounds Beyond: Arvo Pärt and the 1970s Soviet Underground. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. xii, 193 pp. Appendix. Notes. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. Figures. $99.00, hard bound. - Volume 83 Issue 2

  PublisherDOI

• European American music

  Oxford Music Online · 2024-03-23 · 1 citations

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Song about song, music about life Herder on music's transcendent moment*

  2024-02-29

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Philip Bohlman brings this volume to a close with Chapter 15, with an original discourse across disciplines and around the multifaceted figure of Johann Gottfried Herder, himself a historian, theologist, philologist, and folklorist. This chapter historically demonstrates how close to each other historical and anthropological disciplines found themselves in their search for an understanding of the Other at the outset of their foundations as modern academic disciplines, in what Bohlman calls “ethnomusicological thought.” Besides focusing and interpreting Herder’s lifelong work as a translator, Bohlman touches on a key concept for the discussion of cognate music theories.

  PublisherDOI

• Scope of Large Language Models for Mining Emerging Opinions in Online Health Discourse

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2024-03-05

  preprintOpen access

  In this paper, we develop an LLM-powered framework for the curation and evaluation of emerging opinion mining in online health communities. We formulate emerging opinion mining as a pairwise stance detection problem between (title, comment) pairs sourced from Reddit, where post titles contain emerging health-related claims on a topic that is not predefined. The claims are either explicitly or implicitly expressed by the user. We detail (i) a method of claim identification -- the task of identifying if a post title contains a claim and (ii) an opinion mining-driven evaluation framework for stance detection using LLMs. We facilitate our exploration by releasing a novel test dataset, Long COVID-Stance, or LC-stance, which can be used to evaluate LLMs on the tasks of claim identification and stance detection in online health communities. Long Covid is an emerging post-COVID disorder with uncertain and complex treatment guidelines, thus making it a suitable use case for our task. LC-Stance contains long COVID treatment related discourse sourced from a Reddit community. Our evaluation shows that GPT-4 significantly outperforms prior works on zero-shot stance detection. We then perform thorough LLM model diagnostics, identifying the role of claim type (i.e. implicit vs explicit claims) and comment length as sources of model error.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Dead C’s Clyma est mort

  2023-01-01

  book

  <JATS1:p>The Dead C’s Clyma est mort (1993) is the record of a live gig for one person. Tom Lax was running the Siltbreeze label in Philadelphia and had come to New Zealand to meet the artists he was releasing. He heard The Dead C at their noisy, improvised best, turning rock music on its head with a free-form style of blaring, loosely organised sound. Leading a second wave of music from Dunedin, New Zealand, The Dead C were an assault against the kind of jangly pop that had made the Dunedin Sound famous during the 1980s. This book uses The Dead C and in particular their album Clyma est mort (1993) to offer insights into the way the best of rock music plays vertigo with our senses, illustrating a sonic picture of freedom and energy. It places the album into the history of independent music in New Zealand, and into an international context of independent labels posting, faxing and phoning each other.</JATS1:p>

  PublisherDOI

• The Moment of National Song

  Palgrave studies in music and literature · 2023-12-28

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Text Encoders Lack Knowledge: Leveraging Generative LLMs for Domain-Specific Semantic Textual Similarity

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2023-09-12

  preprintOpen access

  Amidst the sharp rise in the evaluation of large language models (LLMs) on various tasks, we find that semantic textual similarity (STS) has been under-explored. In this study, we show that STS can be cast as a text generation problem while maintaining strong performance on multiple STS benchmarks. Additionally, we show generative LLMs significantly outperform existing encoder-based STS models when characterizing the semantic similarity between two texts with complex semantic relationships dependent on world knowledge. We validate this claim by evaluating both generative LLMs and existing encoder-based STS models on three newly collected STS challenge sets which require world knowledge in the domains of Health, Politics, and Sports. All newly collected data is sourced from social media content posted after May 2023 to ensure the performance of closed-source models like ChatGPT cannot be credited to memorization. Our results show that, on average, generative LLMs outperform the best encoder-only baselines by an average of 22.3% on STS tasks requiring world knowledge. Our results suggest generative language models with STS-specific prompting strategies achieve state-of-the-art performance in complex, domain-specific STS tasks.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Ethnicity

  2023-09-26

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Around 1970, discourses on ethnicity were in a state of upheaval. More recent ethnicity theories broadly distinguish three generations of ethnicity, which pass through different stages of migration. A relationship to their political and cultural environment is often shown through so-called “hyphenated identities,” such as “Irish-Americans” or “Iraqi-Kurds.” Hybrid references to musical traditions of different genres or origins are also possible, as is the strict maintenance of (only) one musical tradition. In the context of changing political constellations worldwide, the gap between the “self” and the “other” is widening. In countries with rising right-wing extremism, new migrants as well as resident ethnic groups are often the victims of racism and violence. Refugees and minorities are particularly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, not least because of the precarious conditions of flight and internment. It is now more important than ever to view the relationship between ethnicity and migration from a scholarly and time-critical perspective.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Mary Werkman

  University of Chicago

  16 shared

• Alessandro Bratus

  16 shared

• Paul Carr

  16 shared

• Bruno Nettl

  14 shared

• Vanessa Agnew

  12 shared

• Stephen Blum

  11 shared

• Nicholas Cook

  9 shared

• Johann Gottfried Herder

  9 shared

Awards & honors

• Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society
• Donald Tovey Prize from Oxford University
• Derek Allen Prize for Musicology from the British Academy
• 2013 Jaap Kunst Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology
• 2015 Bruno Nettl Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology