Philip V. Bohlman
Society for ethnomusicology
A Life in Ethnomusicology
Bruno Nettl epitomized what it means to live a life in ethnomusicology. For the readers of this newsletter and the members of the Society for Ethnomusicology, for our students and colleagues, for those throughout the world with whom we shared our understanding of what music in its infinite varieties could be, for all of these, too, Bruno Nettl’s life in ethnomusicology was a model and an inspiration worthy of our grandest aspirations. Bruno taught us what we have come to know about living a life in ethnomusicology because he himself did so with such grace and wisdom.
Ethomusicologists throughout the world have been celebrating Bruno’s life in ethnomusicology in a remarkable number of ways since his passing on January 15, 2020. It is particularly fitting that we also celebrate his life fulsomely in the pages of the SEM Newsletter, the common venue of communication for the Society for Ethnomusicology, the community of scholars he valued above all others and to which he dedicated his life. Bruno’s life embodied the beginnings of the SEM, and during the course of over six decades of SEM history his voice was the chronicler of our Society to which we most often turned. The pages of the SEM Newsletter are filled with reports by and about Bruno, articles short and long, and encomia honoring his life in ethnomusicology. It is only fitting that the SEM Newsletter honors Bruno upon this final moment of passage in his life.
Bruno Nettl spent the earliest years of his life in Prague, Czechoslovakia, where he was born on March 14, 1930, the son of the historical musicologist Paul Nettl and the distinguished pianist Gertrud Hutter Nettl. He relished the date of his birth in many ways, remembering the occasions when he celebrated their common birthday with Alfred Einstein in Princeton during the early 1940s, and whimsically speculating about the significance of Pi-Day (3.14) for the infinite possibilities of his own life. He loved to celebrate his birthday with family and friends, sometimes on several occasions, in Champaign and then Chicago, coupled with special events, among them the presentation of his second Festschrift in 2015 (This Thing Called Music). It was on his birthday in 1980, too, that he quietly gathered a circle of students to mourn the death of Alan P. Merriam in Poland earlier that day.
In 1939, Bruno and his family were forced to flee Prague because of their Jewish heritage. The refugee family first found support in Princeton, New Jersey, where Paul Nettl found a teaching position at Westminster Choir College, and then after World War II in Bloomington, Indiana, where Bruno would enter Indiana University, receiving all of his undergraduate and graduate degrees there, the Ph.D. in 1953. Characteristically, Bruno also relished the many remarkable moments of his refugee years, among them the individual donations from Westminster students that became his father’s salary. Above all other stories, he never tired of recounting his first meeting with Wanda Maria White during registration at Indiana, whom he would marry in 1952 and share the rest of his life in ethnomusicology with her. There were also stories of great sadness from the refugee years that he did not tell, at least until the very end of his life, when he reflected on the incarceration of his three living grandparents in the concentration camp at Theresienstadt/Terezín, which only one grandmother survived.
All who enjoyed the privilege of knowing Bruno personally also quickly came to know the ways in which his life was inseparable from his family. Bruno’s wife of sixty-seven years, Wanda, accompanied him when he traveled to guest professorships and fieldwork, and made marzipan and Nußtorte for his students. Wanda has long been present in the dedications to her that open Bruno’s books, in her shared eponymous role in the Bruno and Wanda Nettl Lecture series at the University of Illinois, in the artwork that graces many of his books, and in Bruno’s loving tribute to her in the final months of his life, when he stewarded the publication of Wanda Nettl, Artist, a sumptuous collection of photographs of her artworks. Bruno is survived by Wanda, by his daughters, Rebecca Nettl-Fiol and Gloria Roubal, and by an extended family of in-laws and grandchildren, among them our colleague in ethnomusicology, Stefan Fiol.
The heady early days of ethnomusicology and the formation of the Society for Ethnomusicology notwithstanding, the career path for a young ethnomusicologist in the 1950s was not easy. With a new Ph.D. in hand, Bruno would need to launch his career at Wayne State University in Detroit, where he served as Music Librarian until 1964, when he finally was appointed as an ethnomusicologist for the first time to a professorship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which would be the home of his far-reaching influence on the field of ethnomusicology for the rest of his life. Generations of students encountered the field in the classrooms at UIUC, and it would be his Ph.D. students and their Ph.D. students who would play a critical role in expanding ethnomusicology’s presence in colleges, universities, and cultural institutions throughout the world. Enhancing that influence was the distinctive magnanimity and capaciousness of his teaching, recognized frequently by the observation that it is impossible to identify any single Bruno Nettl School of Ethnomusicology.
His commitment to the possibility of diverse ethnomusicologies notwithstanding, it is also possible to identify two guiding principles that proved to be central to his writing and teaching. The first of these is his belief that there is something that we call music. Defining it and conceptualizing music differs from culture to culture, but “this thing called music” is crucial to the human experience. The other guiding principle that unifies his thinking is his embrace of plurals, witnessed in his insistence on speaking about musics, origins, cultures, histories of music, and “issues and concepts,” altogether incapable of being reined in even by “thirty-three discussions.” That there is a contradiction between understanding unifying universals and proliferating differences was something that he embraced, indeed, that provided the ontological core for much of his writing in recent years. Music could be itself, and it was much, much more, and it was critical to ethnomusicology’s fundamental purpose to understand how and why.
As we reflect on Bruno’s life in ethnomusicology, we recognize that he led that life according to these guiding principles. Ethnomusicology was also itself, and it too must be much, much more. Turning to that life with his guiding principles in mind, we witness how a single life multiplies to become many lives. For just a moment I should myself like to reflect on the many identities we might ascribe to the lives Bruno led in our midst.
Searcher for meaning. Bruno searched for meaning in places that many thought could not be limited by singular concepts and meanings. There is no better example of his search for meaning than the entry on “Music” he wrote for the 2001 revised edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Both bemused and horrified that Grove had never included an entry on music, Bruno singlehandedly replaced zero coverage with thirteen two-column pages, one of the great ontological tours de force in all of music scholarship.
Teacher and nurturer. Where many scholars think primarily through writing, Bruno, his students would argue, thought fundamentally through teaching. The pedagogical moment was always one of intellectual intimacy and nurturing, inspiring students to discover their own lives in ethnomusicology. Bruno was a teacher—and a student—wherever he was, whether advising dissertations or learning the Persian radif from Nour Ali Borumand in Tehran. There is no more profound testament to this life in music than the title of his 1983 Charles Seeger Lecture and subsequent Ethnomusicology article, “In Honor of Our Principal Teachers.”
Storyteller and intellectual historian. Bruno had many intellectual passions, but if there was one pursuit in his later writings that rose to the level of obsession it was the history of ethnomusicology. He simply could not tell that story in enough different ways. There were dictionary and encyclopedia entries (including, ethnomusicologists will be happy to learn, several important essays that will appear posthumously), and there were the humorous poems, gastromusicological treatises, and sundry amusing musings that he simply circulated among friends and former students. I dare say that it is the marker of a great storyteller that Bruno actually invented a genre of ethnomusicological discourse with such texts, for example, with a poem sent to me for my sixty-seventh birthday in August 2019, a bilingual doggerel in sonnet form on the history of ethnomusicology: “Die Geschichte der Ethnomusikologie / A matter of great interest to me / Begann mit Amiot, Baker, Fewkes und Stumpf.”
Traveler along ethnomusicological roads. Bruno held the conviction that ethnomusicology made every kind of life journey possible. He believed that it was his great fortune to have been able conduct research with Indigenous peoples and folk musicians, the music cultures of Iran and India, popular music and Western art music, music of the privileged and music of those facing the challenge of survival. He wished such fortune on every ethnomusicologist, and he strove always to pave the roads that allowed others to travel in ways they would chart themselves.
Optimist. Those who knew Bruno well as family, friends, and students might be surprised that I end this modest list of his ethnomusicological lives to close by claiming him to be an optimist. There were many areas of the contemporary world that he did regard with pessimism—his own health, for example, and the health of civic and political life in the United States—yet everything was different when it came to ethnomusicology. As witnessed in his search for meaning or his travels along ethnomusicological roads, the future of the field was ensured because of the collective ideas and energy of those turning to the field with optimism and resolve to confront the future that lay ahead.
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In the letter that Bruno and Wanda sent to friends and colleagues at the end of 2019, an annual tradition during the holiday season that always captured and conveyed his abundant wit, Bruno reached the final paragraphs of what would become his last written communication to most of us. Only three months from his ninetieth birthday, he began to close the letter cheerfully proclaiming that he had cause to be optimistic once again. He expressed his gratitude for the previous year and the many ways his life continued in such a way that he would still be contributing to ethnomusicology. With the twinkle in his eye of a searcher, teacher, storyteller, traveler, and optimist, he seized the moment to announce that he had “another book in me,” this one assessing the many ways in which he and other ethnomusicologists had changed their minds over the course of their lives. The concept for such a book had been percolating for several years, and, surprising to no one, a few preliminary essays had begun to appear in print. And so it was, this book-in-the-making would take him back to his earliest years in the field and chart again the path toward his final years, the summation of a complete life in ethnomusicology by one who enjoyed that life to its fullest.