Robert E. Brown
Encyclopedia
World music
World music is a term with widely varying definitions, often encompassing music which is primarily identified as another genre. This is evidenced by world music definitions such as "all of the music in the world" or "somebody else's local music"...
" . He was also well known for his recordings of music
Music
Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...
from Indonesia
Indonesia
Indonesia , officially the Republic of Indonesia , is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Indonesia is an archipelago comprising approximately 13,000 islands. It has 33 provinces with over 238 million people, and is the world's fourth most populous country. Indonesia is a republic, with an...
. Many of these recordings, among the first widely distributed and commercially available in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, inspired a generation of musicians to study and perform Indonesian gamelan
Gamelan
A gamelan is a musical ensemble from Indonesia, typically from the islands of Bali or Java, featuring a variety of instruments such as metallophones, xylophones, drums and gongs; bamboo flutes, bowed and plucked strings. Vocalists may also be included....
music.
Brown grew up in Clinton, New York
Clinton, Oneida County, New York
Clinton is a village in Oneida County, New York, United States. The population was 1,952 at the 2000 census. It was named for George Clinton, a royal governor of the colony of New York....
. He had a very extensive background in music while still young. He played timpani
Timpani
Timpani, or kettledrums, are musical instruments in the percussion family. A type of drum, they consist of a skin called a head stretched over a large bowl traditionally made of copper. They are played by striking the head with a specialized drum stick called a timpani stick or timpani mallet...
and bass drum
Bass drum
Bass drums are percussion instruments that can vary in size and are used in several musical genres. Three major types of bass drums can be distinguished. The type usually seen or heard in orchestral, ensemble or concert band music is the orchestral, or concert bass drum . It is the largest drum of...
in a band, double bass
Double bass
The double bass, also called the string bass, upright bass, standup bass or contrabass, is the largest and lowest-pitched bowed string instrument in the modern symphony orchestra, with strings usually tuned to E1, A1, D2 and G2...
and cello
Cello
The cello is a bowed string instrument with four strings tuned in perfect fifths. It is a member of the violin family of musical instruments, which also includes the violin, viola, and double bass. Old forms of the instrument in the Baroque era are baryton and viol .A person who plays a cello is...
in the school orchestra
Orchestra
An orchestra is a sizable instrumental ensemble that contains sections of string, brass, woodwind, and percussion instruments. The term orchestra derives from the Greek ορχήστρα, the name for the area in front of an ancient Greek stage reserved for the Greek chorus...
and accompanied the school chorus on piano. A sponsor enabled him to study music theory
Music theory
Music theory is the study of how music works. It examines the language and notation of music. It seeks to identify patterns and structures in composers' techniques across or within genres, styles, or historical periods...
at the Utica Conservatory with Johannes Magendanz and study piano
Piano
The piano is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. It is one of the most popular instruments in the world. Widely used in classical and jazz music for solo performances, ensemble use, chamber music and accompaniment, the piano is also very popular as an aid to composing and rehearsal...
with Clara Magendanz. He performed the first movement of the Schumann
Robert Schumann
Robert Schumann, sometimes known as Robert Alexander Schumann, was a German composer, aesthete and influential music critic. He is regarded as one of the greatest and most representative composers of the Romantic era....
piano concerto
Piano Concerto (Schumann)
The Piano Concerto in A minor, Op.54, is a famous Romantic concerto by Robert Schumann, completed in 1845.Schumann had begun several piano concerti before this one: In 1828, he had begun one in E-flat major; from 1829-31 he worked on one in F major, and in 1839, he wrote one movement of a concerto...
with the high school orchestra during his sophomore year.
The same year, he held the job of organist
Organ (music)
The organ , is a keyboard instrument of one or more divisions, each played with its own keyboard operated either with the hands or with the feet. The organ is a relatively old musical instrument in the Western musical tradition, dating from the time of Ctesibius of Alexandria who is credited with...
at Hamilton College. He also performed popular music with his own band, Bobby Brown and His Swingsters. During his undergraduate years at Ithaca College
Ithaca College
Ithaca College is a private college located on the South Hill of Ithaca, New York. The school was founded by William Egbert in 1892 as a conservatory of music. The college has a strong liberal arts core, but also offers several pre-professional programs and some graduate programs. The college is...
and his graduate studies at Cornell University
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...
he continued to work as an organist.
Bob Brown started his doctoral studies at UCLA as a piano major in 1953. After Mantle Hood
Mantle Hood
Mantle Hood was an American ethnomusicologist. Among other areas, he specialized in studying gamelan music from Indonesia. Hood pioneered, in the 1950s and 1960s, a new approach to the study of music, and the creation at UCLA of the first American university program devoted to ethnomusicology...
began teaching at UCLA the following year, Brown switched to ethnomusicology and became Hood's first teaching assistant. Brown received his doctorate in ethnomusicology from UCLA. His dissertation was titled The Mrdanga: A Study of Drumming in South India
Carnatic music
Carnatic music is a system of music commonly associated with the southern part of the Indian subcontinent, with its area roughly confined to four modern states of India: Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu...
(1965). He studied and played the mridangam.
Brown began teaching at Wesleyan University
Wesleyan University
Wesleyan University is a private liberal arts college founded in 1831 and located in Middletown, Connecticut. According to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Wesleyan is the only Baccalaureate College in the nation that emphasizes undergraduate instruction in the arts and...
in 1961. He founded the world music/ethnomusicology
Ethnomusicology
Ethnomusicology is defined as "the study of social and cultural aspects of music and dance in local and global contexts."Coined by the musician Jaap Kunst from the Greek words ἔθνος ethnos and μουσική mousike , it is often considered the anthropology or ethnography of music...
program at Wesleyan. It was here that Brown first used the term "world music" to describe the ethnomusicology program.
Bob Brown followed the philosophy advocated by Mantle Hood, who could be considered the father of gamelan
Gamelan
A gamelan is a musical ensemble from Indonesia, typically from the islands of Bali or Java, featuring a variety of instruments such as metallophones, xylophones, drums and gongs; bamboo flutes, bowed and plucked strings. Vocalists may also be included....
music education in the USA: that students become bi-musical. Bob Brown's own "World Music" programs from the 1960s onwards were built on the ideal of bi-musicality, which was an innovative approach to music education at the time. It proposed that students, after acquiring competence in the music of their native culture, study with master musicians from another culture, and thereby acquire competence in the musical performance and theory of that culture too. The result would be a person with musical competence in two cultures: bi-musicality.
Brown was one of the organizers of the American Society for Eastern Arts (ASEA). In 1973, Brown founded the Center for World Music. He remained president of the organization until his death. Thinking about how much musical experience was available to him in high school motivated him to start the "Music in the Schools program" for the Center for World Music.
Brown began teaching at San Diego State University
San Diego State University
San Diego State University , founded in 1897 as San Diego Normal School, is the largest and oldest higher education facility in the greater San Diego area , and is part of the California State University system...
in 1979. He served as the Chair of the School of Music for three years from 1979 to 1982. He retired in 1992. Brown also was the owner of Girikusuma or Flower Mountain, a center for traditional Bali
Bali
Bali is an Indonesian island located in the westernmost end of the Lesser Sunda Islands, lying between Java to the west and Lombok to the east...
nese performing arts located in Bali
Bali
Bali is an Indonesian island located in the westernmost end of the Lesser Sunda Islands, lying between Java to the west and Lombok to the east...
.
In 2006, The University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana announced that Brown had bequeathed his extensive collection of instruments, recordings, books, paintings and artifacts and to the school's world music center. The Center, which opened in April 2008, was named in his honor.
Recordings
Brown produced five of the early recordings from Indonesia in the "Explorer Series" released on Nonesuch RecordsNonesuch Records
Nonesuch Records is an American record label, owned by Warner Music Group and distributed by Warner Bros. Records.-Company history:Nonesuch was founded in 1964 by Jac Holzman to produce "fine records at the same price as a trade paperback", which would be half the price of a normal LP...
. Two of the recordings were from Bali, and three were from Java:
- Bali: Gamelan Semar Pegulingan
- Bali: Music from the Shadow Play, music from a wayangWayangWayang is a Javanese word for theatre . When the term is used to refer to kinds of puppet theatre, sometimes the puppet itself is referred to as wayang...
performance - Java: Court Gamelan (1971). This Grammy-nominated recording has been potentially heard throughout the galaxy. In 1977, NASANASAThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...
launched the space probe VoyagerVoyager programThe Voyager program is a U.S program that launched two unmanned space missions, scientific probes Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. They were launched in 1977 to take advantage of a favorable planetary alignment of the late 1970s...
with a gold-plated copper recordVoyager Golden RecordThe Voyager Golden Records are phonograph records which were included aboard both Voyager spacecraft, which were launched in 1977. They contain sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, and are intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form, or for...
featuring sounds and images of life and culture on Earth. Working with Carl SaganCarl SaganCarl Edward Sagan was an American astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist, author, science popularizer and science communicator in astronomy and natural sciences. He published more than 600 scientific papers and articles and was author, co-author or editor of more than 20 books...
, Brown chose a track from the recording, Ketawang: Puspawarna, to represent Southeast AsiaSoutheast AsiaSoutheast Asia, South-East Asia, South East Asia or Southeastern Asia is a subregion of Asia, consisting of the countries that are geographically south of China, east of India, west of New Guinea and north of Australia. The region lies on the intersection of geological plates, with heavy seismic...
.
Also, he recommended the recording "Jaat Kahan Ho" in Raga Bhairavi by Surashri Kesarbai Kerkar for inclusion on the Voyager disc, since he believed it to be the finest recorded example of Indian classical music.
- Java: Court Gamelan, Volume II (1977)
- Java: Court Gamelan, Volume III (1979)