Kwasi Ampene

Associate Professor of Musicology
Director of the West African Highlife Ensemble
Director of the CU Summer Program in Ghana

Email: kwasi.ampene@colorado.edu
Website: http://spot.colorado.edu/~ampene/
Office Location: Room N134, Imig Music Building
Office Phone: 303-492-6439
Mailing Address: 301 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309-0301

Kwasi Ampene joined the CU music faculty in fall of 2000. His areas of expertise include African and African-American music. His research interests include music composition in oral cultures with emphasis on the Akan of Ghana, metaphor and the theory of embodied cognition, intersection between phonology, oral composition and performance, music and social change, popular music, and the music of Thelonious Monk.

Ashgate Publishing in the UK published his book titled Female Song Tradition and the Akan of Ghana in August 2005. He has given numerous presentations on various aspects of African music and cultures at major universities, national and international conferences. In the fall of 2005, he was invited by the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, China to present two lectures at the Symposium, Africa Meets Asia: Dialogue Between Africa and China in Music. He was invited to present research at the Second International Symposium on the Music of Africa at Princeton University in 2005.

He received his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in 1999, having written a dissertation entitled “The Creative Process in Nnwonkoro: A Female Song Tradition of the Akan of Ghana.”