Media Contact: Leanne Ingle, lingle@timberland.lib.wa.us; 360-704-4508, or toll-free, 1-877-284-6237.

Ethnomusicologist Sean Williams presents Islam and Music in the Islamic World from noon to 1 p.m., Tuesday, March 18 at the Chehalis Timberland Library, 76 NE Park Street, Chehalis. This Inquiring Mind series presentation is free of charge and appropriate for a high school to adult audience.

Williams (left) presents the musical diversity of Islam and examines the basic relationship between Islam and music, focusing on the rules regarding both the performing and the visual arts. The audience will hear examples of Islamic music from Spain, Egypt, Afghanistan, India, Indonesia and other areas.

One of the most important aspects of Islamic music is the distinction between the sacred and the secular. With vocal music on one end and instrumental music on the other end of a continuum between respectability and disrepute, musicians all over the Islamic world have to carefully consider the risks and responsibilities of being performers in a problematic arena. Williams examines what it means to be an artist in the Islamic world, and how the tensions of fundamentalism, patronage, gender limitations, and the economy of pleasure all tend to focus musical production into specific constraints.

Dr. Williams earned her Ph.D. at the University of Washington. As a professor of music, Asian studies and Celtic studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, she focuses on musically-related issues of language, gender, politics, and expressive culture. She has lived and worked in Indonesia, Japan, Ireland, the Middle East, and Germany. She plays many Indonesian instruments in addition to the banjo, fiddle, mandolin, and guitar.

For more information, people may call the Chehalis Timberland Library at 748-3301.

Timberland Regional Library serves Grays Harbor, Lewis, Mason, Pacific, and Thurston counties at 27 community libraries and 6 school-based cooperative library centers. Lewis County residents can telephone reference librarians for information on any subject at Timberland’s Central Reference Service, 1-800-562-6022, toll-free. Or they can "Ask a Librarian" online at http://www.timberland.lib.wa.us/asklib.htm. Anyone needing special accommodations to participate in a library’s program may contact the library 4 days in advance.