Djembe music/dance performance at a wedding celebration (Bamako 2019; ????Photographer: R. Polak)
Career
2023 (spring term) Benedict Visiting Professor of Music, Carleton College
2022 to date Researcher, RITMO, University of Oslo
2017 – 2022 Researcher, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics
2011 – 2016 Researcher, University of Music and Dance Cologne
2006 – 2007 Postdoc, University of Bayreuth
1993 – 2010 Djembe player/teacher, Freelance
2002 Doctor of Philosophy (Social Anthropology), University of Bayreuth
1996 Magister Artium (Social Anthropology, African Studies, African History), University of Bayreuth
Schematics of a cross-cultural laboratory experiment testing the perception and liking of timing variations in different musical styles, countries, and expertise groups. From Jakubowski, Polak, Rocamora, Jure & Jacoby (2022) Fig. 1.
Polak, Rainer, & Doumbia, Noumouké (2022). Learning to dance in rural Mali. In A. v. B. Wharton & D. Urbanavi?ien? (Eds.), Dance and Economy, Dance Transmission: Proceedings of the 31st Symposium of the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM) Study Group on Ethnochoreology (pp. 282–290). Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre.
Polak, Rainer (2022). Non-isochronous metre in music from Mali. In M. Doffman, E. Payne, & T. Young (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Time in Music (pp. 252–274). Oxford University Press.
Rainer Polak is a music and dance researcher specializing in djembe drumming and dance from Mali. At the RITMO Centre (University of Oslo), he leads the project DjembeDance. He also serves as the Benedict Distinguished Visiting Professor of Music at Carleton College (Department of Music) during the spring 2023 term. Previously, Polak was a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (2017–2022) and the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz K?ln (2011–2016).
Performance as a research method: Polak plays accompaniment in the context of apprenticing to master djembe drummer Jeli Madi Kuyate, at a name-giving celebration in Bamako (1994).
In the 1990s, Polak studied social anthropology, African languages, and African history at the University of Bayreuth (Germany), where he earned an MA degree in 1996 and a PhD in 2002. Since then, he has also taken sociological, ethnomusicological, performance-theoretical, music-theoretical, empirical-musicological, and cognitive-scientific perspectives; recently, he has been developing an approach to empirical choreomusicology (integrated music/dance studies).
Polak is associate editor of the journal Music Perception since 2018 and serves as reviewer for various journals and research funding agencies. In addition to his career as a researcher, he has also taught djembe drumming up to the university level and repeatedly organized concert and workshop tours to Europe for music/dance performers from Mali.
In sum, rather than a particular discipline or profession, the constant in Polak's biography is a sustained, participatory, and collaborative engagement with performers, performance practices, and communities of practice in Mali.
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