Monica Fonorow
As part of Penn Libraries’ Strategic Communications team, Monica supports the Libraries' staff to ensure they have the tools and content to communicate efficiently and effectively with Penn students, scholars, researchers, faculty, staff and the public at large.
Monica comes to the Libraries from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, where she led all external communications activities. Previously she has held communications and marketing roles at the Science History Institute and the Academy of Vocal Arts. She holds a BA from Rutgers University, where she majored in philosophy and minored in French, and is a candidate for an MS in arts administration at Drexel University.
This exhibition features a set of four reed-flute instruments brought from Egypt during the nineteenth century—Neys—along with contemporary research on new organology and music history. The multimodal exhibit also includes a musical performance, a media display, and a downloadable syllabus.
The instruments are part of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology’s African collections, currently supervised by Dwaune Latimer. Although they were donated during the end of the nineteenth century, they were not widely known until 1937, when Francis William Galpin wrote in The Music of the Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians that the oldest instrument of this kind was among the collections owned by the University of Pennsylvania. Since then, the international impact of Galpin’s book and the prominent stature of these instruments have stimulated musicological discussions about the prehistoric origins of the Ney and the instrument’s ongoing transformation during the present.
The exhibit is curated by Juan Castrillón, candidate in Ethnomusicology in the Department of Music at the University of Pennsylvania, and offers an organological contribution informed by his ethnomusicological research and his performance expertise on the instrument.
The exhibit is co-sponsored by The Otto E. Albrecht Music Library, African Collections of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Middle East Center, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, the Center for Experimental Ethnography, and the Department of Music.
