Our ethnomusicologist co-operators

Jan van Belle (b. 1942) has studied saxophone and clarinet at the Conservatory of Music in Utrecht, and has a master’s degree in Musicology. He is currently preparing a PhD thesis on music of Ismaili’s in Central Asia. He has done extensive field research in Morocco, Ghana, Bulgaria, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Northern China. Furthermore he has published several papers and produced various radio programs (2024, 2036, 2089, 2105).

Rob Boonzajer Flaes made a number of films on anthropological and musical topics. To mention a few: ‘Bleh’, ‘Polka’, ‘Crying Slowly’, ‘Dor—Low is Better’, and ‘Thinking is Useless’. He has published widely on visual anthropology and popular music. He did the fieldwork for Frozen Brass #1 and #2 and made most recordings (2020, 2026).

Edda Brandes is a German ethnomusicologist living in Berlin and Bamako, Mali. With colleagues from the National Museum of Mali she has executed the documentation of traditional music in more than thirteen different ethnic groups during twelve fieldtrips in Mali between 1991 and 1996 (2082).

Bartolomé Duysens is an anthropologist and founder of the Fundación Interchange. He is currently involved in a research project on Venezuelan popular culture (2063, 2081, 2092, 165, 187, 199, 203, 9604, 9608, Merusa Records).

Fred Gales is a researcher at the Center for Visual Anthropology. Since many years he is active in recording and releasing ethnic music. He has done extensive research in the origin and development of music and in music-archeology. He researched the historical and source materials for Frozen Brass. Currently he is working on projects in Burma and Thailand (2020, 2026, 2040, 2045, 2075).

Ernst Heins retired in 2001 as senior fellow of the Ethnomusicology Center ‘Jaap Kunst’ at the University of Amsterdam and is one of the leading Dutch ethnomusicologists. He has done extensive field research into the music of West- and Central Java, resulting in a number of publications on these subjects (2014, 2053). He currently works on a re-release of the 1931 shellack recordings of Menak Jingga).

Rick Heizman is a highly regarded jazz/classical/original guitarist from San Francisco, California, USA. Rick's fascination with Burma began with his first visit there in 1981. He has been back to Burma many times, exploring, meeting musicians, collecting instruments, recording, and learning. He has done significant work in bringing this music to the rest of the world (2083).

Jovan Howe graduated at the University of Washington. In 1971/72 he had a Fullbright Fellowship (1 year in Finland, 5 months in Russia, with research trips to the Ukraine, Georgia and Abkhazia). From 1985 to 1993, he lived and worked in Finland and Russia, except for parts of 1986, 1987 and 1988, when he lectured and taught in the United States. Since 1993 he has lived in The Netherlands. He died in 2002 (2039, 174, 7011).

Jan Jansen studied History and Anthropology at the University of Utrecht. Since 1991 he is working at the Centre of Non-Western Studies of the University of Leiden. He has done extensive research in West Africa on the Sunjata epic and the jeliw from Kela in Mali (2015, 2059, 2104).

Stephen Jones has spent extended periods in China since 1986, working closely with the Music Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Arts in Beijing. He has travelled widely in China, carrying out much fieldwork on living traditions of folk music. He is co-founder of the European Foundation of Chinese Music Research (CHIME). Since 1993 he has held research fellowships at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University. He has helped bring several outstanding groups of Chinese musicians to perform in Europe and the USA. He is author of two major books, Folk music of China: living instrumental traditions (Oxford UP, 1995; paperback with CD 1998), and Plucking the Winds: village musicians in old and new China (Leiden: CHIME foundation, 2003), as well as many articles, and has contributed to The Rough Guide to World Music, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and The Garland Encylopaedia of World Music, besides co-ordinating and writting notes for several CDs. He is also a professional violinist in London period-instrument orchestras. (2109)

Taira Kerimova is musicologist, candidate on art criticism and assistant professor at the department of history of music of the Azerbaijan State Conservatoire in Baku. She has done extensive research into the origin and development of music and the folklore of Azerbaijani women (2028, 2034).

Rolf Killius is a London-based sound recordist, music researcher and radio broadcaster, who has particular interest in traditional Indian music. He has spent more than two years in India, where he lived within the music communities, studying and recording traditional music and culture as part of a project undertaken in conjunction with the British Library / National Sound Archive in London. Currently the National Sound Archive in UK, the ARCE (Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology) in India and Rolf prepare another comprehensive project to record, document and research folk, devotional and ritual musics of selected areas in India (2074).

Bernard Kleikamp has been a key person in the folkrevival of The Netherlands since the mid-1970s. He is an ethnomusicologist/businessman, who studied drama, language and literature of The Netherlands, and ethnomusicology at the University of Amsterdam. He has run the Leiden Folkfestival for 16 years, was one of the founders of Dutch folkmagazine ‘Janviool’, and was director of the festivals ‘Brass Worldwide’ and ‘Festmed’. His continuing interest in musical traditions has resulted in a life-long quest to the origins and roots of music, of which almost every footstep has been documented by an LP or CD. He is president/owner of Pan Records since the mid-1980s and also ran Paradox Concerts (a concert agency) from 1978 until 2003. In between he also graduated as a music publisher (2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2012, 2013, 2023, 2031, 2047, 2090, 188, 200).
Born 1951, Music School, Church Choir, BA in Literature, married, 3 sons.
Hobbies: Bach, Italian cuisine, running, single malt whiskies, zemstvo’s, shawms, history.
“As long as I can remember I have been involved in music. It started at the boy's choir of the Catholic Church and at music school, or even before that when my mother and grandmother taught me the folk songs of my native Westfrisian area, and my interest never stopped.”

Peter Kloos (1936 - 2000) was professor at the Free University of Amsterdam and one of the leading Dutch anthropologists. He has done extensive field research into the language and culture of Indians from Surinam, resulting in a number of publications. His latest research was on Sri Lanka (4005).

Felix van Lamsweerde was curator of the department of ethnomusicology of the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam from 1962 till his retirement in December 1999. He has done extensive field research into the music of India, resulting in a number of publications (4001/02).

Ad and Lucia Linkels, a married couple, are two Dutch ethnic sound recordists, photographers, authors, and teachers of music and dance. During extensive fieldwork trips through most Polynesian countries they studied, collected, and recorded hundreds of songs and dances. Apart from publications on popular music in schools, several of their books on Polynesian cultures have been published in the Dutch and English language. Ad Linkels died suddenly in 2002. (2011, 2022, 2033, 2043, 2044, 2055, 2066, 2077, 2079, 2084, 2088, 2094, 2095, 2096, 2097, 2098, 2099, 2101, 150, 162, 183, 195, 207, 7007, 7009 9601, 9602, 9603).

Elisabeth den Otter is a music anthropologist. Before becoming curator of the department of Ethnomusicology of the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam in 1988, she did research in Peru (2072). During her curatorship she developed interests in puppetry worldwide (which resulted in a large exhibition in 1996), and in the music, dance and puppetry of Africa (4010).

Joseph J. Palackal grew up in the music tradition of Christians living in India. At the age of nine he  made his debut in in the church at Pallippuram, Cherthala. Much later, during fieldwork for his master’s degree in Ethnomusicology at Hunter College, New York, he began to approach the Syriac music from an academic perspective with the help of the Research Institute of Studies in History (RISHI), Mannanam. (2085)

Rainer Polak is an anthropologist, ethnomusicologist and jembe drummer. His M.A. thesis ”Das Spiel der Jenbe Trommel” is published by Lieth Verlag, Affalterbach (1998). He is the editor of a CD-series with percussive and modal music from Mali, India, and elsewhere for Bandaloop Records, Munich. At present he is carrying out further research for a Ph.D. thesis on drum performance, festival culture, and society in Mali. (2060, 2108).

Helen Rees is currently an assistant professor of ethnomusicology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UVLA). She obtained a B.A. in Chinese from Oxford University in 1987 and then spent two years studying Chinese musical instruments and musicology at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. She completed a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology at the University of Pittsburg in 1994. Since 1989 she has carried out research on ritual and folk music of the Han and Naxi ethnic groups in Yunnan Province, southwest China. Her book ‘Echoes of History: Naxi Music in modern China’ was published by Oxford University Press (2058, 7012/13, 7014/15).

Randy Raine-Reusch is a composer and international concert-artist who has travelled the Pacific Rim extensively studying with master musicians in Thailand, Indonesia, Australia, Korea and Japan. As a multi-instrumentalist Randy draws from his collection of 600 world instruments to perform with a wide range of artists. He spent five years in Sarawak, Borneo, recording, preserving and developing traditional indigenous peoples’ music. Currently he is the director of the newly Arizona Music Instrument Museum (2067, 2068).

Jahangir Selimkhanov was born in Baku, Azerbaijan in 1959 in a family of musicians. He graduated in 1982 at the Azerbaijan State Conservatory (now: Baku Music Academy) summa cum laude, with qualifications: musicologist, music critic, teacher of music theory/history. He has participated in and assisted numerous cultural projects in Azerbaijan and abroad. Since 1992 he assists in the production of the Anthology of Azerbaijan Music (2012, 2017, 2021, 2031, 2034).

Ratula Sen (born in Calcutta, India) is an art historian in South Asian art and graduated at the University of Amsterdam. She is also a vocalist and performs North Indian classical music. Her training in vocal music has been in the traditional ‘guru-shishya parampara’ style under ustad (maestro) Yunus Husain Khan of Agra ‘gharana’ (style) and Naina Devi of Delhi. Ratula is adviser on classical music from North India for the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam. At the moment she resides both in the USA and in India. (4006/07, 4011, 4012).

Vyacheslav Shurov (1936, Moscow) is a collector, investigator, and propagandist of folk music. He is professor at the Moscow Conservatory and scientific director of the laboratory of folk music. He is doctor in art-history and author of monographs and many articles on musical folklore, and of several compilations of folk songs (Russian, Mordvin, Abkhaz, and Gypsy songs). He is a producer of records with collections of folk songs and melodies. His specialization is the musical folk art of South Russia and Siberia. In his research, he pays a lot of attention to the aesthetical aspects of folk music performance and to folk polyphony.
Starting in 1990, he has begun a co-operation with PAN Records to release a series of CDs with recordings of authentic musical folklore from Russia and the former USSR (2001, 2002, 2008, 2009, 2018, 2019, 2032, 2035, 2041, 2042, 2069/71, 7003, 7008).

Rein Spoorman is an anthropologist and ethnomusicologist and has been active as a musician and organiser for many years. He has done extensive research in the origin and development of music, the relation of traditional and popular music and the musical identity of ethnic minorities, resulting in a number of publications on these subjects. He worked at PAN Records from 1991 until 2004 and is producer of the 4000-series. He is still involved with PAN Records as an independent producer (155, 168, 173, 175, 193, 2010, 2037, 2051, 2093).

Wouter Swets is one of the leading Dutch ethnomusicologists, specialized in the music of the Balkans and the Near-East, Turkish traditional art music, and music of the Turkic peoples. He has done extensive field research resulting in a number of publications on melodic modes and meter (2007, 2017, 2027, 2073, 133).

Tian Liantao was Associate Professor of Music at the Central Institute of Minority Nationalities in Beijing from 1960 until 1984. From 1984 till today he is Professor and Research Fellow on the Institute of Music Research on the Central Conservatory of Music in Bejing. Since 1990 he is Deputy President of the Chinese Minority Music Society and since 1993 advisor to the Village of Chinese Culture Project in Nara, Japan (2046).

Alan R. Thrasher has been interested in East Asian musics since the mid-1970s. He has done extensive field research into the music of both Han and Chinese minority musics, resulting in a number of publications on these subjects. His publications have appeared in journals such as Asian Music and Ethnomusicology, with other important contributions appearing in The New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments and The Grove/Norton Handbook of Ethnomusicology. He is Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver (2030).

Joop Veuger studied singing and school-music at the Conservatory of Amsterdam and has been active as a singer and organiser for many years. He has done extensive field research into the traditional music of East Africa, and especially Uganda. He has published mainly on the education and development of music and had a part-time job with PAN Records until he retired in 2000 (2016, 2029, 2057, 2062).

Trevor Wiggins is Director of Music for Dartington College of Arts in the UK and has previously published a number of articles and books about the music of West Africa (2052, 2065).

Zhang Xingrong (1941, Baoshan County, Yunnan Province, China) is a Professor at the Yunnan Art Institute in Kunming. He studied erhu and composition from 1960 to 1965, and from 1965 to 1980 he was assistant teacher of erhu and the performance of Chinese music. From 1980 to 1982 he took a refresher course in the Composition Department of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. After 1982 he taught courses on the analysis and writing of Chinese instrumental music and on the performance of Chinese music in the Arts Department of the Yunnan Arts Institute. In 1987 he was appointed Associate Professor in the Music Department and in 1992 he was appointed Professor. After 1982 he has done extensive musical research and fieldwork among the minority nationalities of China. With Pan Records he has agreed to release a number of CDs of ethnic groups living in Yunnan Province (2038, 2058, 7012/13, 7014/15).