Harry Liebersohn

When I think of my friendship with Bruno, my mind wanders instantly to the lunch places where we would meet from time to time – as often as I could get away from teaching duties and the general mishegas of university duties. For a long time we wandered from place to place, one time Mexican, another time Chinese, or Indian, until for a long stretch we found a home at Sitara in downtown Urbana, right across from Busey Bank. It was well named for musical conversations, but that wasn’t the main attraction. Sitara had a lunchtime thali that was tasty and cheap – and Bruno and I had a hearty appreciation of both of those virtues. The acoustics were good, the seats (almost all booths with genuine naugahyde or some such faux-leather cover) were comfortable. Bobby the head waiter would greet us, the flat screen in the background played an endless Bollywood loop. I would always order the thali. Bruno would sometimes vary things a bit by ordering aloo gobi. He favored it because of the potatoes which were (as he liked to point out) part of his Central European heritage. “Heritage” mattered, but Bruno never became self-serious about it.  

 What else, besides the food, did we talk about? His family, of course: Nettl clan, I got to know and cherish all of you so well through his stories! And there was the wider family, past and present, including the Australian cousin whom he hoped to visit once again; and his parents, especially as he remembered life with them in the Princeton years, where they started out in a cold-water flat and Bruno’s mother supported the family by giving piano lessons. And we talked about everything else you could think of: Bruno’s health (often the first topic of conversation – but then, after telling me his latest worry, he would cheer up). Politics (we worried together in 2008 about whether Obama would beat McCain, who seemed impossibly erratic). Jews, Jewishness, Judaism. The Midwest versus the East Coast: Bruno was a fiercely patriotic Midwestener, I was indelibly stamped by my East Coast upbringing.  And of course, music. With the master teacher’s matter-of-fact generosity, Bruno walked his historian friend (me) through the history of musicology, ethnomusicology, his own writings, his beloved students, his friends in the profession, the past and present of the UIUC School of Music. We had to work to bridge our disciplinary cultures; what an immensely entertaining, enriching labor. Our dialogue gave me a feel for Bruno’s gift for mediation between cultures. He scorned to hide behind scholarly jargon, he explained gladly, he gave me a keen feel for the significance of everything from improvisation to the concert we’d heard the night before at the Krannert Center.

Bruno may not have been a historian, but he had an unmistakable eye for periodization, one of the historian’s most important tasks, turning chronologies into meaningful units of time. So, for example, his notion of the seminal 1880s – the moment of publications by figures like Guido Adler and Alexander Ellis that announced a global conception of musicology – was entirely original. It challenged convention notions of European intellectual history: the late nineteenth century belonged to the zenith of European imperialism (to borrow a phrase from William Langer), and most scholars assume that intellectual life must have been correspondingly permeated by imperial attitudes. To a considerable degree it was, and Bruno was fully aware of that; but he pointed to the existence of a profoundly important counter-culture of sympathetic engagement with non-European cultures which led through figures like Stumpf and Boas to the best achievements of the twentieth-century cultural sciences, including ethnomusicology. For years I’ve tested Bruno’s conception of the seminal 1880s and found it true and fruitful.

A few years ago, I interviewed Bruno for the journal Itinerario (41/2, 2017). I asked him whether it was the experience of multi-cultural Prague that had turned him into an ethnomusicologist. His answer was an emphatic no. Being a child was so difficult in Prague; you never knew which language to address adults in. Once his family landed in the U. S., he told me, he put on a baseball cap and never looked back. I don’t know if that answer is quite definitive; we shall never know, perhaps he could not know, what mixture of childhood experience and adult reflection on his family odyssey entered into his horizonless humanism. What matters in the end is not how he got there, but the way of life he lived and shared, endlessly cosmopolitan and happily local, with so many friends, colleagues, students, and other admirers around the world.