David Park McAllester

David Park McAllester (6 August 1916 – 30 April 2006) was an American ethnomusicologist and Professor of Anthropology and Music at Wesleyan University, where he taught from 1947–1986. He contributed to the development of the field of ethnomusicology through his studies of Native American musics and traditions, and he helped to establish the ethnomusicology department and the World Music Program at Wesleyan University. His recordings of Navajo and Comanche music led to the establishment of the World Music Archives at the university. in Everett, Massachusetts. McAllester held a fascination with Native Americans and Native American culture from a young age, and he also claimed to have "remote Narragansett heritage."

While in Manhattan, New York City, he joined the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), and remained a member for his entire life. After the war, he returned to Columbia University. He briefly taught introductory anthropology at Brooklyn College before accepting a teaching position at Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 1947, while still working on his degree. He was awarded a Ph.D. in 1950.

The idea of founding an academic ethnomusicological society had first come about when its creation was informally agreed upon by David McAllester, Willard Rhodes, and Alan Merriam in November 1953 at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Philadelphia. As a result, in 1955, along with the support of Charles Seeger, Alan Merriam, Willard Rhodes, and honorary president Frances Densmore, the Society for Ethnomusicology was cofounded by McAllester.

McAllester partially retired in 1979 and retired fully in 1986 to a home in the Berkshires. He died on 30 April 2006 in Monterey, Massachusetts.

Scholarship McAllester specialized in the study of Native American music. Much of his field research centered around the music, ceremony, and religion of Southwest Native American peoples. McAllester's literature on Southwest Native American cultures includes research on the peyote religion across various Native nations, research on music in Navajo ceremony, and a collection of translated Navajo house songs and photographs of Navajo dwellings, among other works.

McAllester, with his fieldwork with the Navajo, gave great importance to immersing himself into the Navajo culture, not just taking sound samples and analyzing them without much cultural data. For example, in Navaho, McAllester found out that "there was no general word for 'musical instrument' or even for 'music,'" something that could not be possible just from sound recordings but could be discerned via a hands-on culturally immersive fieldwork approach.

Notable anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn, on the foreword to McAllester's work, Enemy Way Music, writes: "Dr. McAllester has treated music for what it is: an aspect of culture which can be fully understood only if its manifold and often subtle overflows into other aspects of culture are grasped." According to McAllester, one such near-universal is that music always seems to have a definite resemblance of a start and end, a technique or form across all cultures.