ETHNOMUSICOLOGIST | GUITARIST | PRODUCER

Kabelo Chirwa began his higher education in music at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky. At Bellarmine he received a bachelor of the arts degree in Music with an emphasis in Jazz Studies. Immediately after his time in Louisville, Chirwa attended University of Louisiana at Lafayette where he received a master’s degree in Music Theory and Composition. His thesis composition Encumbered Existence: A Three Movement Work for Jazz Orchestra is—in part—a musical depiction of his life experiences and hopes, but is simultaneously used to examine the Black American struggle.

Kabelo Chirwa is a graduate assistant and PhD candidate in the musicology program at University of Cincinnati, College-Conservatory of Music. He is an Albert C. Yates fellow at University of Cincinnati and received a Future of Music Faculty Fellowship from Cleveland Institute of Music. His primary area of research is hip-hop in West Africa and the United States. Specifically, his work interrogates how the transmission of music and culture within Africa and the diaspora can inform one’s understanding of global and local popular music traditions. Chirwa has presented on these ideas of transmission within Africa and the diaspora in Tanzania and at the African Studies Association Conference. He is also interested in digital music culture. Chirwa’s interest in digital technologies both considers a broad understanding of digital musicking (the formation and articulation of cybercultures) and centers hip-hop as a music that was created and popularized in the digital age.