Cynthia Tse Kimberlin

Who is Cynthia Tse Kimberlin?

Cynthia Tse Kimberlin is an American ethnomusicologist. She is the Executive Director and Publisher of the Music Research Institute and MRI Press, based in Point Richmond, California. Her primary area of expertise is the music of Africa, in particular Ethiopia and Eritrea.

Kimberlin was born on the Navajo Nation, in Ganado, Apache County, Arizona and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California. She earned a B.A. degree in musicology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1962, directly after which she joined the Peace Corps, which had been founded a year earlier. Traveling to Ethiopia, she was sent to the northern province of Eritrea, where she served as a Peace Corps volunteer from 1962 to 1964. During this time she took it upon herself to conduct ethnomusicological fieldwork, although she had not yet received training in the field. She recorded many types of Eritrean and Ethiopian music, using a borrowed Philips reel-to-reel tape recorder with 3-inch reels. Many of these recordings are now of historical significance, as younger Tigray-Tigrinya people are largely unfamiliar with these songs.