Bruno Nettl

Who is Bruno Nettl?

Bruno Nettl is an active ethnomusicologist and musicologist.

Bruno Nettl was born in Czechoslovakia in 1930, moved to United States in 1939, studied at Indiana University and the University of Michigan, and has taught since 1964 at the University of Illinois, where he is Professor Emeritus of Music and Anthropology, continuing to teach part-time. Active principally in the field of ethnomusicology, he has done field research with Native American peoples, in Iran, and in South India. He has served as president of the Society for Ethnomusicology and as editor of its journal, Ethnomusicology. Nettl holds honorary doctorates from the University of Illinois, Carleton College, Kenyon College, and the University of Chicago. He is a recipient of the Fumio Koizumi Prize for ethnomusicology, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Nettl was named the 2014 Charles Homer Haskins Prize Lecturer by the American Council of Learned Societies. In the course of his long career as a scholar and as a professor, he was the teacher of many of the most visible ethnomusicologists active today in the international scene like, among many others, Philip Bohlman, Chris Waterman, Marcello Sorce Keller, and Victoria Lindsay Levine. The Sousa Archives and Center for American Music holds the Bruno Nettl Papers, 1966-1988, 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.