Bruno Nettl was an American ethnomusicologist and academic of Czech birth.
27 Facts About Bruno Nettl
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Bruno Nettl was born on March 14,1930 in Prague, then in Czechoslovakia, to a musical family.
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Bruno Nettl's father was Paul Nettl, a well-known musicologist who researched Mozart as well as the connections between Czech, German and Jewish musical traditions.
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Bruno Nettl played violin in his youth, at one point in an orchestra under Kurt Weill.
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Bruno Nettl studied piano and took part in Dalcroze eurhythmics classes taught by his mother.
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Bruno Nettl's father taught at Princeton's Westminster Choir College, and the family became American citizens in 1945.
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Bruno Nettl later received a second Masters in library science from University of Michigan.
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Bruno Nettl's career centered around the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he founded an ethnomusicology department and taught from 1964 to 2011.
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Bruno Nettl was gradually appointed higher positions at UIUC: Associate Professor of Music in 1964, Professor of Music and Anthropology in 1967, and Professor Emeritus of Music and Anthropology in 1992.
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Bruno Nettl rose UIUC's ethnomusicology department to national eminence, with 6 full-time professors.
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Bruno Nettl was a recipient of the Fumio Koizumi Prize for ethnomusicology, and was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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The Sousa Archives and Center for American Music holds the Bruno Nettl Papers, which consists of administrative and personal correspondence while Nettl was a professor and head of the Musicology Division for the University of Illinois School of Music.
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Bruno Nettl received the first Taichi Traditional Music Award in 2012 from the China Conservatory of Music, and was named the 2014 Charles Homer Haskins Prize Lecturer by the American Council of Learned Societies.
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Active principally in the field of ethnomusicology, Bruno Nettl's scholarship covered many diverse musical traditions throughout the world.
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Bruno Nettl's research ranged from the music of Iran to music of South India and the music of Central Europe to the traditions of North America, particularly the music of the Native Americans.
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Bruno Nettl himself cited Blackfeet, Iranian, and Southern Indian music as his fields of expertise, having done fieldwork with all three cultures.
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Bruno Nettl authored the article on music for The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
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Bruno Nettl did field research in Montana on the Blackfeet people's music for his 1953 PhD dissertation; It was republished in 1954.
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Over three decades later Bruno Nettl published Blackfoot Musical Thought: Comparative Perspectives.
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Bruno Nettl lived in the capital Tehran during the late 1960s and early 1970s, working alongside performers of Persian traditional music.
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For half a year, Bruno Nettl did fieldwork in what is Chennai, southern India.
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Bruno Nettl authored other surveys, such as the Theory and Method in Ethnomusicology and edited Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music, alongside his student Philip V Bohlman.
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Bruno Nettl met his wife, the artist Wanda Maria White, while he was a student at Indiana University and the couple married in 1952.
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Bruno Nettl's daughters continued living in Champaign in their adulthood.
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Outside of music, Bruno Nettl enjoyed spending time with family, attending concerts, playing casual poker, baking and solving The New York Times crossword.
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Bruno Nettl frequently wrote comedic verses for close friends and family; they were collected and published in the anthology Perverse at Eighty, which included drawings by his daughter Gloria.
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Bruno Nettl continued to publish prolifically until his death on January 15,2020 in Urbana, Illinois, US.