Bruno Nettl was born in Czechoslovakia in 1930, moved to the USA in 1939, studied at Indiana University and University of Michigan, and has taught since 1964 at the University of Illinois, where he is now Emeritus Professor of Music and Anthropology.

Active principally in the field of ethnomusicology, he has done field research with Native American peoples and in Iran, and secondarily in Israel and Southern India. He has served as President of the Society for Ethnomusicology and as editor of its journal, Ethnomusicology, and also of the Yearbook for Traditional Music.

Among his several books, the best known are Theory and Method in Ethnomusicology (1964), The Study of Ethnomusicology (1983), and the most recent, Blackfoot Musical Thought: Comparative Perspectives (1989), The Radif of Persian Music (rev. ed., 1992), and Heartland Excursions: Ethnomusicological Perspectives on Schools of Music (1994).

Bruno Nettl

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