Miriam Gerberg papers

Miriam Gerberg is an ethnomusicologist, composer, performer and educator with specialties in Middle Eastern and Japanese musics, and applied ethnomusicology. Her graduate study was at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. She has studied Arabic classical music with Simon Shaheen, George Sawa, Jamal Sinno, and AJ Racy, and Japanese koto with Michiyo Yagi, Masayo Ishigure and Ikuko Yuge. She was Director of Outreach in UCLA’s Department of Ethnomusicology from 1998- 2002 and has been teaching world musics at Hamline University since 2005. She also founded the Minnesota Global Arts Institute which produces world music concert series, workshops and residencies. Miriam regularly performs world musics, recently with her Middle East group Ensemble Mezze and traditional Japanese koto with Green T Productions.

She has written commissions for chamber orchestra, opera, music theater, theater, choirs and for dance which have been performed across the U.S., in Israel, Palestine, Holland, Australia, Japan and Sumatra. As a music theater composer she has worked on productions and had original works produced at theaters, colleges and opera companies in Minnesota, Connecticut, Washington State and New York. Her concert compositions have included commissions written for, among others: Taiseer Elias of El F’waar, Israel, Michiyo Yagi of Tokyo, Ben Pasaribu of Medan, Sumatra, the Minnesota Opera, the Minnesota Orchestra, and the Schubert Club.