Join an in-depth conversation about the history of blues music and the expansive diaspora with Dr. Paul Apodaca and Sean Heim. Learn about blues roots and legacies, the passing down of oral and musical traditions, and the future of blues music informed by each of the artists and educators experiences.

Paul Apodaca (Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles) is an Associate Professor of Sociology and American Studies. Dr. Apodaca specializes in Folkore, Mythology, American Indian studies and California, Southwestern and Mexican culture. He is the former Editor of the Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology. His research has helped to preserve and continue American Indian music in California. A founding consultant for the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of the American Indian, Dr. Apodaca was part of a team winning the Academy Award in 1985 for the feature documentary Broken Rainbow. Dr. Apodaca was curator of the Folk Art, American Indian, California and Orange County history collections of the Bowers Museum for 17 years.

Sean Heim received his first serious musical training in secondary school and soon after began studies in music composition with Harold Oliver at Rowan University (BM cum laude). He then worked with Louis W. Ballard at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, studied with Chinary Ung at Arizona State University (MM), and holds a Ph.D. from The University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, where he worked with Philip Bracanin. He currently resides in Southern California and is Associate Professor of Music and Director of Music Composition/Theory at Chapman University.

The primary focus of Heim’s work as a composer has been to develop an imaginative personal language that strongly reflects the compositional techniques and aesthetic of his own western tradition as well as the distillation and infusion of theoretical principles and musical elements found in numerous cultures. His most recent work seeks to delve even deeper to express the base commonalities that lie beneath the surface emanations of culture. Heim’s music also reflects a deep interest in physics and the natural world, and it is out of these collective curiosities that he has created unique fusions that continually evolve by means of increased conceptual and technical abstraction.