On this page the BFE pays homage to colleagues, friends and illustrious figures in the field of ethnomusicology who have passed away but who will remain in our memory. It is our wish to honour the memory of these departed friends.

A Tribute to Jeremy Montagu, 1927–2020

The death of Jeremy Montagu, the distinguished musician, lecturer and scholar, has a special significance for musicologists in general and members of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology in particular. We feel a collective sense of loss, a library has gone down in flames, as our African friends might put it. In his website (www.jeremymontagu.co.uk) he describes himself as having had three careers, as a horn player, as a conductor and as professional percussion player. He also became a world expert on musical instruments. He trained at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, from the late 1940s to the early 1950s, during which time he led his own ensemble, the Montagu String Orchestra, performing baroque and early classical works. He soon had a busy career as a professional musician and played with many of the major London orchestras and also worked as percussionist with Musica Reservata, an early music group, where he reinvented early percussion through the reconstruction of relevant period instruments. His year as temporary assistant curator of musical instruments at the Horniman Museum in 1961-62 led to a keen interest in instruments from other parts of the world and the start of a career in lecturing and teaching about organology and built up what became a vast collection of instruments from all parts of the world. His family home in Dulwich was in itself a veritable museum of instruments. I seem to recall a row of trombones attached to the wall on one side of the hallway as you entered the house. As an expression of this new interest in the musical instruments of the world he became a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1962 and joined its Ethnomusicology Committee towards the end of its first manifestation.

Not to be discouraged, in 1965 Jeremy became Secretary of the newly configured RAI Ethnomusicology Panel, which he ran for nine years. The Panel was more of a discussion group than a formal committee, with meetings held several times per university term. Each meeting was essentially a talk, or a paper in preparation for publication, given by a particular individual, often with audiotape musical examples, followed by discussion. These were not necessarily based on original fieldwork by the speaker but addressed broader topics, like children’s games, narrative songs, and work songs. For one year the Panel’s interest focused on detailed chapter by chapter discussions of Merriam’s Anthropology of Music (published in 1964). “To analyse deeply such a book was a valuable experience; it clarified both our estimation of the book and our own aims and practices,” as Jeremy wrote in a report to the RAI. The Panel seems to have been diminished by the departure of Nazir Jairazbhoy, one of its key members, then teaching at SOAS, for a professorship in Canada in 1969 and as Jeremy put it in a letter to me, the Panel “did not come to any formal end but just died off”. The last meeting was in 1974, when John Blacking gave a talk on Music, Dance, and the Making of Man.

By this time a new interest in ethnomusicology was gradually developing amongst musicologists in the UK following the publication of Merriam’s Anthropology of Music and Nettl’s Theory and Method in Ethnomusicology, and this was manifest in the work of the International Folk Music Council’s recently established UK National Committee, with prominent members such as Maud Karpeles, Bert Lloyd, John Blacking, Helen Myers, Peter Cooke, Stanley Glasser, Jeremy and his wife Gwen, and others. One of the features of the IFMC UK Committee’s activities became its annual three-day conference, organised with great efficiency by Gwen and Jeremy. The first of these was held at the University of Keele in 1975, followed by conferences at Goldsmiths, Cambridge, Oxford, Sussex, Dartington, Edinburgh, Durham, York, Limerick, and many other institutions, which brought together the gradually expanding coterie of ethnomusicologists in the UK (see BFE Conferences Archive for details).

ICTM(UK) began publishing the British Journal of Ethnomusicology in 1992 and in 2004 changed the journal’s name to Ethnomusicology Forum. At about the same time the ICTM(UK)’s name was changed to the British Forum for Ethnomusicology. From its inception Jeremy was a leading enthusiast for BFE and a staunch supporter of its activities.

In 1981 Jeremy was appointed to a Lectureship and Curatorship of Musical Instruments at the Bate Collection in the Faculty of Music in the University of Oxford, a post he held until 1995. He was also appointed an Honorary Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, an honour he richly deserved. This must mark the apex of his career as a scholar and teacher.

In 2014 the Director of the RAI, Professor David Shankland announced the RAI’s decision to revive the RAI Ethnomusicology Committee and invited me to take the Chair. One of the first people I asked to join the newly constituted Ethnomusicology-Ethnochoreology Committee was Jeremy, who was the only surviving member of the earlier committee. He accepted the invitation and kindly donated to the RAI his papers from that committee and the Ethnomusicology Panel of which he had been Secretary for ten years. Despite the difficulties of travel from Oxford to Fitzroy Street by public transport he attended a number of committee meetings and contributed valuable suggestions as to the goals and objectives of the Committee.

The lively work of this world expert on musical instruments continued to the end of his life. His informative and entertaining autobiography Random Memories (2017) is highly recommended to all BFE members, who will explore the huge library of data embedded in this great scholar’s remarkable mind as well as more personal accounts of his extraordinary life.

John Baily

Goldsmiths, University of London

Bruno Nettl 1930 - 2020

Bruno Nettl passed away on 15 January 2020 at the age of 89. Born in Prague in 1930, his father, Paul, was an academic musicologist and his mother, Gertrude, a pianist. His academic career took him to Bloomington, Indiana, where he studied with George Herzog and received his PhD. This was followed by teaching jobs in Wayne State University and the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. His work encompassed the music of Native America, Iran, Southern India and Central Europe, as well as reflections on the social life of western art music in the Midwestern ‘homelands’.

It is impossible to overstate his significance for the field of ethnomusicology. He was active in the Society for Ethnomusicology at its very outset in 1953; he was its President (1969-71), and twice editor of its flagship journal, Ethnomusicology (1962-66 and 1999-2002). He supervised and mentored the key figures of the subsequent generation, and penned ethnomusicology’s most enduring monographs and reflections on the field, among them Folk Music in the United States; Blackfoot Musical Thought; Daramad of Chahargah: A Study in the Performance Practice of Persian Music; The Study of Ethnomusicology; Thirty-Three Discussions; Nettl’s Elephant: On the History of Ethnomusicology; Heartland Excursions: Ethnomusicological Reflections on Schools of Music; Becoming an Ethnomusicologist: A Miscellany of Influences; and field-defining edited collections, including Eight Urban Musical Cultures: Tradition and Change and In The Course of Performance: Studies in the World of Musical Improvisation. His contribution to the field was recognized by honorary doctorates from the University of Chicago, The University of Illinois, Carleton College and Kenyon College, as well as Fellowship of American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was the recipient of not one but two major festschrifts: Ethnomusicology and Modern Music History, and, most recently, This Thing Called Music.

His writing spoke with a unique and unmistakable voice. He posed disarmingly clear questions but located them in capacious disciplinary panoramas, and an unrivalled knowledge of ethnomusicology’s own history. And he insisted we forgot neither people nor music, no matter where theory might take us. Nettl was, arguably, the last of the comparative musicologists. His was a slightly discrepant voice when I was learning about ethnomusicology, a moment at which, in this country at least, the tone was being set in anthropology, rather than music departments. But the sharpness and urgency of his questions remain, and his has proved to be the enduring voice. His support of colleagues and students was unstinting, radiating outwards in every direction. He had the time, and the energy, for absolutely anybody interested in ethnomusicology. This, too, will endure: a unique model of scholarly care. He will be badly missed by ethnomusicologists in the UK and beyond. A great many of us here will have known him as a mentor and a friend. The Forum’s condolences are due to his family, friends and former students, and to his wife, Wanda.

Martin Stokes

King's College London

Joan was born in 1918 in London.  Her musical skills were immediately evident: by age 12 she had gained a scholarship to the Royal College of Music and went onto become a student there, winning the prestigious Hopkinson Gold Medal, which she shared with the well-known pianist Cyril Smith. At the Royal College she took an early interest in what at the time were little known European composers such as Bartok, who may have stimulated her interest in folk music and ethnomusicology. Joan graduated just as the war started and began teaching music at Putney High School and Roehampton Training College and gave piano concerts. In 1948 Joan began 30 years of freelancing at the BBC.  Initially she played piano for the Home Service, made BBC records, including one with Spike Milligan, and produced music manuals for children.  By 1955 Joan had become a self-taught expert on a number of early and remote musical instruments and began presenting programmes on historical musicology covering bagpipes, harps and, in 1957, a programme on Chinese instruments, the shawm and sheng, with the strapline ‘a programme of uninhibited music from many lands, played on unusual instruments’.  This strapline epitomes Joan’s approach to her work and life – uninhibited and unusual.  

Underscoring Joan’s broadcasting was her meticulous academic work.  Her approach was forensic, combining comparative anthropological and archeological investigation into the context of music making, with a hands-on feel of the instruments which, if necessary, she would have reproduced by crafts-persons.  In 1961 she restrung the Brian Boru harp.  In addition to writing a number of books, she wrote for the Galpin Society, World Archeaology, the British Museum and Dance Research amongst many other academic journals and is internationally renowned as one of the first ethnomusicologists.  Her most well known work is her iconic book on the Irish harp, republished several times between 1965 and 1988 and continues to be cited.  At age 80 Joan was still publishing papers and was on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Dance Research. 

Just as Joan was a forerunner in the study of ethnomusicology, in her 70s she was breaking new ground in the study of historical dance. A report on the National Early Music Association’s 1991 International conference, entitled the Marriage of Music and Dance, provides a clear demonstration of Joan’s erudition, energy, enjoyment of life and her capacity to carry people with her.  Quote: ‘Joan Rimmer’s paper on the estampie, the early French dance, swept her audience along in a joyous succession of foot-tapping rhythms drawing on the rhythmic metre of a number of 12^th to 14^th century poems and songs, which suggest that estampies must have been exhilarating dances to perform.  This …should lay to rest for ever those tedious inventions so beloved of many exponents of early dance.’  A pathbreaker and a convention breaker.

Joan married twice.  First to James McGillivray an oboist in the Royal Philharmonic and to Frank Llewellyn Harrison, an authority on early church music, whom she married in 1966.  It is clear from an examination of both men’s careers that Joan swept them along in a joyous interest in the music making and dancing of rural people.  In the 1950s Joan and McGillivray had an extraordinary collection of early wind instruments long before interest had developed into comparative musicology.  Shortly after the war, when travel was by no means easy, McGillivray accompanied Joan to the Asturias to record music making at shepherds’ festivals, which Joan subsequently made into a BBC programme.   Joan accompanied her second husband, Frank Llewellyn Harrison, a musicologist at Oxford specialising in medieval and renaissance sacred music, on teaching sabbaticals in America, including at Yale, Princeton and Stanford, where Harrison met and established a 20 year friendship with Frank Zappa.  Once in America Joan spurred Harrison’s interest in ethnomusicology.  In later life Joan described driving Frank through the mountains of Mexico and Central and South America, making early tape-to-tape recordings of the music making of indigenous people - especially during festivals and in various stages of inebriation and trance.  Together Joan and Frank wrote on Spanish elements in Mayan music in the Chiapas, Mexico.  This was typical of her interest in tracing the diffusion of musical elements, and small changes in musical instruments, across time and space.  After retiring from Oxford, Frank took up professorships in Amsterdam and Utrecht in the 1970s, and Joan carried on her research, this time in comparative studies of folk music and dance in northern Europe.  In 1976 they returned to England and bought a small house in Canterbury, where Joan continued her research and writing well into her 80s.

Dr Penny Vera-Sanso
Senior Lecturer Development Studies
Birkbeck, University of London