Music Studies Colloquia

This School of Music event is free & open to the public. 

What Makes a Song Alive?

Abstract: Biologist and proto-ethnomusicologist Dr. Vladimír Úlehla (1888-1947), used his expertise in the biological sciences to study of folk songs from Strážnice, his childhood village at the western hem of the Carpathian Mountains at the Moravian Slovakian border. His posthumous magnum opus Živá Píseň (Living Song, 1949) chronicled the musical traditions of Strážnice through four decades of ethnography, song transcription (including those sung by Julia's consanguineal relations), and structural analysis. For V. Úlehla, songs were living organisms, grown from their particular ecological environment. Julia and Aram will give an ethnocultural overview of this repertoire, and discuss what it means to find life in song, particularly across cultural rupture and displacement.

Julia Úlehla and Aram Bajakian
Bio: Julia Úlehla is a vocalist, composer, and scholar whose research engages with ancestry, traditional culture, and extra-rational ways of knowing. After performing for several years as a lyric mezzo-soprano in the San Francisco Bay Area, Julia was a member of the Grotowski Workcenter in Italy, and now regularly performs throughout North America and Europe in a variety of performance milieus. She received a BA in Music from Stanford University, an MMus in Vocal Performance from the Eastman School of Music, a PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of British Columbia, and a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada, which she held in the Cultural Studies department at Queens University. Her scholarship has appeared in the journals Music and Science (forthcoming), Canadian Theatre Review (forthcoming), Performance Matters (2023), and Ethnomusicology Translations (2018), and as a co-authored chapter in Research and Reconciliation: Unsettling Ways of Knowing through Indigenous Relationships (2019). As a composer and vocalist, she has recorded on Pi Recordings (2025), Songlines Recordings (2017), and Sanasar Records (2014).

The music of guitarist and composer Aram Bajakian music has been called “a masterpiece” (fRoots), “shape-shifting” (FreeJazzCollective), and “sometimes delicate, sometimes punishing” (Chicago Reader). As a guitarist, “the virtuosic jack of all trades” (Village Voice) has toured extensively with Lou Reed, Madeleine Peyroux, John Zorn and Diana Krall. From 2018-2021, Bajakian served as the New Music Curator at Western Front in Vancouver, one of Canada’s leading artist-run centers for contemporary art and new music. Bajakian received his Bachelor of Music degree (Summa Cum Laude) from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he studied with Dr. Yusef Lateef. He holds a Master of Arts Degree in Music Education from Teachers College, Columbia University and Master of Music degree in Music Composition from the University of British Columbia. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia where his advisor is Dr. Nathan Hesselink. His research focuses on contemporary and historic Armenian communities.