Scholar

(b Romania, 1930; d Copenhagen, 4 April 2015). Romanian-Danish ethnochoreologist. She worked as a researcher at the Institute of Ethnography and Folklore in Bucharest from 1953 to 1979. She contributed to the foundation and development of scientific research on traditional dance in Romania, where she conducted extensive fieldwork, filming dances and rituals in over 200 villages. Her main interests concerned the contextual study of dance, the analysis of dance structure, the processes of dance improvisation, and dance as an identity marker for the Roma minority group. She also investigated the way traditional symbols were manipulated in Romania for national and political power legitimation.

After 1980 she lived in Denmark, where she conducted research on topics such as continuity and change in the traditional culture of the Vlachs (a Romanian speaking ethnic minority of Serbia) living in Denmark, the Romanian healing ritual căluş, and on the theory and methods of field research in contemporary society. She was the Honorary Chairperson of the ICTM Study Group on Ethnochoreology and the leader of the Sub-Study Group on Fieldwork Theory and Methods, a Board member of Danish National Committee for ICTM, and Doctor Honoris Causa of Roehampton University, London. She had a great number of publications and a fruitful activity as a lecturer on an international level. In her last years, she worked with Margaret Beissinger and Speranța Rădulescu on the volume ...

[Jane Rogovin]

(b New York, NY, 17 March 1922; d London, England, 12 Sept 1990). American ethnomusicologist and curator. Although born and reared in the Bronx, Jenkins portrayed herself as having been brought up in rural Arkansas surrounded by Ozark folk music. As a teenager, she learnt an extensive repertoire of folksongs and became active in American folk music circles. Like many folksingers of the era, Jenkins espoused socialism. She studied anthropology and musicology in Missouri but her support of trade unions and civil rights attracted the scrutiny of the FBI.

Her move to London in 1950 placed Jenkins beyond the reach of McCarthyism. There she continued her studies and secured leave to remain in the UK by marrying Clive Jenkins, a prominent trade union leader. In 1960 she became the first Keeper of Musical Instruments of the Horniman Museum and commenced fieldwork. She traveled in the USSR, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and southern Europe to record and to build up a comparative collection of instruments for the Horniman. Jenkins organized exhibitions and published as curatorial duties permitted, but recording was her enduring legacy to ethnomusicology. She considered her banjo to be her most important piece of fieldwork equipment and she played to other musicians to encourage them to participate in recordings. Keen to capture music she perceived to be vanishing, she recorded more than 700 field tapes. Her frequent BBC broadcasts and commercially issued recordings introduced music from Asia and Africa to UK audiences and paved the way for the explosion of interest in ‘world music’. Jenkins’s original recordings and an archive of fieldwork photographs are held by the National Museums of Scotland....

Member of Lomax family

(b Austin, Jan 21, 1921; d Portland, Nov 27, 2009). American folk music performer, scholar and arts administrator, daughter of John Lomax. She was introduced to folk music and music scholarship at an early age and was educated at the University of Texas (1937–8), Bryn Mawr College (BA 1941) and the University of California (MA 1970). From 1941 to 1952 she was a member of the Almanac Singers and participated in the recording of such albums as Talking Union, Citizen CIO, American Folk Songs and Songs of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. She continued her work in folk music after being appointed assistant professor of anthropology in 1963 at California State College, Northridge, where she rose to the rank of professor in 1974. In 1977 she became director of the Folk Arts Program of the National Endowment of the Arts; she is credited with establishing folk arts programmes in virtually every state and territory of the USA by the time of her retirement in ...

Member of Lomax family

(b Austin, TX, Jan 15, 1915; d Sarasota, FL, July 19, 2002). American folksong scholar, son of John Lomax. He was educated at Harvard University (1932–3), the University of Texas (BA 1936) and Columbia University (where he did graduate work in anthropology in 1939). In 1937 he began working under his father in the Archive of American Folksong, Library of Congress. He worked for the Office of War Information and US Army Special Services during World War II, and served Decca Records Inc. as Director of Folk Music (1946–9). He produced numerous educational radio and television programmes on folk music for use in the USA and Great Britain (such as the ‘American Patchwork’ series produced for PBS, 1990) and recorded and studied folksong in Great Britain, Haiti, Italy, Spain, the USA and elsewhere. He served on the boards of several American folk festivals and lectured at various American universities (Chicago, Columbia, Indiana, New York). In ...

Member of Lomax family

(b Goodman, MS, Sept 23, 1867; d Greenville, MS, Jan 26, 1948). American folksong collector. While studying for his MA at Harvard (1906–7) he was encouraged by his professors George L. Kittredge and Barrett Wendell to collect the folksongs of cowboys in Texas, where he had grown up. This work resulted in Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1910), one of the first important collections of American folksong. He collected and published only sporadically between 1910 and 1932, after which he undertook a nationwide lecture and collecting tour that produced American Ballads and Folk Songs (with Alan Lomax, 1934), hailed as the largest single collection of indigenous American song to that time.

Lomax became curator of the Archive of American Folksong at the Library of Congress in 1933 and played a major role in its development. With support from the library and other government agencies, he and his son Alan made field recording trips throughout the 1930s, mostly in the South and Southwest, pioneering the use of instantaneous disc recording equipment for that purpose and eventually depositing in the archive recordings of more than 4000 folksongs. Among their discoveries was the black folk-blues artist Leadbelly, whom they found in prison in Louisiana in ...

[Maud Mann, Maud Foulds, Tandra Devi, Swami Omananda Puri, Maud Coote]

(b Cluain Meala (Eng. Clonmel), Tipperary, 4 July 1882; d Douglas, Isle of Man, 6 June 1967). Irish violinist, ethnomusicologist, authority on Indian music, writer, music therapist, and polymath. In 1884 the MacCarthys emigrated to Australia: in 1892 mother and daughter returned to Britain where Maud made her solo violin debut, playing to critical acclaim in Britain, Ireland, and the United States. Over-playing caused painful neuritis and led to a change in direction: she became deeply interested in Indian music. In 1907 she sailed alone to India, beginning her sojourn in Adyar, Chennai where she studied Karnatic classical singing. During journeys of 8,500 km north from Thanjāvūr to Vārānasī and Lahore she learned a variety of music and became proficient in Hindi and Urdu. Meticulous field notes document her pioneering ethnomusicological work.

Late in 1909 MacCarthy returned to London where, for two decades, driven by a commitment to bridging the colonial divide, she presented erudite lecture-recitals of Indian music across Britain and in Paris, singing in several languages and accompanying herself on ...

(b Louisville, KY, Oct 20, 1877; d Louisville, KY, Feb 24, 1919). American composer and folksong collector. She had no formal training as a composer. At the suggestion of May Stone of the Hindman Settlement School in Knott County (Kentucky), she spent the summer of 1914 in Knott and Letcher counties transcribing folksongs and tracing their origins to English and Scottish ballads. By her own description the people of the area called her “the strange woman huntin’ song-ballets.” She published Folk-songs of the Kentucky Mountains (1917, repr. 1922, 1926, 1937), in which 13 of the 20 songs are traced to precursors in Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98). At a time when many American composers turned to folk music as the source of a distinctive voice, McGill’s activities contributed to the search for an American national music. Among her own compositions are the songs “Duna, when I was a little lad” (...

(b Prague, March 14, 1930; d Urbana, IL, Jan 14, 2020). Ethnomusicologist of Czech birth. He was educated at Indiana University (AB 1950; MA 1951; PhD 1953) and the University of Michigan (MALS 1960). His distinguished teaching career was anchored at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (appointed associate professor of music, 1964; professor of music and anthropology, 1967–92; emeritus professor, 1992), but included numerous guest professorships, including Kiel (Fulbright professor, 1956–8), Washington (1985, 1988, 1990), Louisville (Bingham Professor, 1983), Colorado College (1992, 1998), Harvard (1990), and Chicago (1996). Among numerous honors are four honorary doctorates (Chicago 1993; Illinois 1996; Carleton College 2000; Kenyon College 2002), the Fumio Koizumi Prize (Tokyo 1993), and a Festschrift (1991).

Nettl’s scholarship was seminal for the growth of ethnomusicology during the second half of the 20th century. He wrote or edited numerous works surveying and broadening theoretical and methodological principles, notably ...

(b Prague, March 14, 1930; d Urbana, IL, Jan 14, 2020). American ethnomusicologist of Czech birth. He was educated at Indiana University (AB 1950; MA 1951; PhD 1953) and the University of Michigan (MA 1960). His distinguished teaching career was anchored at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (appointed associate professor of music, 1964; professor of music and anthropology, 1967–92; emeritus professor, 1992), but included numerous guest professorships, including Kiel (Fulbright professor 1956–8), Washington (1985, 1988, 1990), Louisville (Bingham Professor 1983), Colorado College (1992, 1998), Harvard (1990), and Chicago (1996). Among numerous honours are two honorary doctorates (Chicago 1993; Illinois 1996), the Fumio Koizumi Prize (Tokyo 1993), and a Festschrift (1991).

Nettl’s scholarship was seminal for the growth of ethnomusicology during the second half of the 20th century. He wrote or edited numerous works surveying and broadening theoretical and methodological principles, notably ...

(b Minneapolis, MN, June 12, 1892; d Albuquerque, NM, Jan 6, 1989). American composer, educator, ethnomusicologist, and attorney. He studied English at Yale University (BA 1915) and at Harvard, and practiced law until 1941, when he moved from New York to Albuquerque as professor and head of the music department at the University of New Mexico. He was soon appointed dean of the College of Fine Arts, serving until his retirement in 1957. He studied composition throughout his life, training with horatio Parker , Nadia Boulanger, Roy Harris, paul Hindemith , and at Mills College with Darius Milhaud (1947–50). A prolific composer, he wrote two operas (including Little Jo, 1947–9), a musical comedy ( Joy Comes to Deadhorse), four symphonies, other orchestral and chamber music, numerous songs and choral works, and dozens of electronic works. He collected thousands of field recordings of traditional music, which comprise the John Donald Robb Archive of Southwestern Music at the University of New Mexico, and published ...

(b Camden, SC, June 30, 1927; d March 12, 1995). American ethnomusicologist, composer, and gamelan performer. She obtained her BA degree in composition and performance from Cornell University and her MA degree in composition from UCLA, where she was among Mantle Hood’s first students to research Indonesian music. In 1953 she collaborated with Lester Horton on the realization of the ballet Yerma based on Federico García Lorca’s subject. She taught at Cornell University and from the 1970s until her death at Loyola Marymount University, where served as Associate Professor of Music and Chair of the Department of Music. She conducted field research in Bali, where she studied with the famous Balinese master of music Cokorde Agung Mas and also in India, Trinidad, and Ghana. Her ethnomusicological knowledge, particularly the Balinese gamelan, influenced her own compositions, including Bayang Bayangan (Shadows) for Western Septet, Balinese Octet, Dancers and Visuals (...

(b Shkodër, Albania, 14 June 1920; d Tirana, 12 March 2008). Albanian ethnomusicologist, musician, composer, and writer. He began his musical studies as a boy in Shkodër. In the years between 1940 and 1944 he studied the flute and composition at the Conservatory of Florence, Italy. Back in Albania in the early years of the Hoxha regime, Sokoli was imprisoned, as were other scholars who had studied abroad, and he spent five years in incarceration.

In 1952 he moved to Tirana, where he taught the flute and folklore in the high school. Although he was not qualified to teach at the higher academic level, he played a key role in musical research in Albania. He collaborated on ethnomusicological expeditions carried out in 1957 with East German scholars and in 1958 with Romanian scholars.

He was the author of numerous pioneering books and articles on Albanian musical folklore, employing both descriptive and analytical approaches, as well as surveying important figures of the musical, and wider cultural, Albanian tradition. His writings and ideas shaped the discipline and educated two generations of Albanians ethnomusicologists, including scholars in Kosovo. His many publications include the books ...