Jane Desmond

professor of anthropology, uiuc

Dear Rebecca,

You will be flooded with condolences today I know, but since we rarely see one another in person, I wanted to send a note on behalf of my partner Virginia Dominguez and myself to express our condolences on your loss of Bruno. Everyone in the anthro department loved him, not surprisingly, and when I moved here in 2007, I was thrilled to know he was on the campus.

As an undergraduate at Brown, I designed my own major in dance and music, and luckily it included a lot of ethnomusicology courses.  Of course, I read some of your father's early work!  I've never forgotten that, and was so delighted to finally meet him in person so many years later at UIUC.  And, my encounter with his field then was in a sense life-changing.  I"ve never forgotten my sense of my own stunning ignorance when I listened to gamelan music for the first time or studied Indian classical music---how could I be so unaware of the creativity of more than half the world? Beyond that personal experience, I was always delighted to encounter him out and about in town, with such a happy sense of engagement wherever he was.  There are so many who knew him so much better, but I wanted you to know how deeply his work has touched so many of us on campus who didn't get to know him well too.