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

Ethnomusicologist Sean Williams presents Islam and Music in the Islamic World from 2 to 3 p.m., Saturday, April 12 at the Olympia Timberland Library, 313 8th Avenue SE. The presentation is free of charge and intended for a high school to adult audience.

Williams discusses the musical diversity of Islam and the basic relationship between Islam and music, focusing on cultural 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.

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. 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, performers all over the Islamic world have to carefully consider their risks and responsibilities.

As a professor of music, Asian studies and Celtic studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Williams 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 the banjo, fiddle, mandolin, guitar and many Indonesian instruments.

This is a Washington Commission for the Humanities Inquiring Mind presentation. For more information, people may call the Olympia Timberland Library at 352-0595.