María Ester Grebe

María Ester Grebe Vicuña (July 11, 1928 – November 1, 2012) was a Chilean anthropologist and ethnomusicologist focusing on the Indigenous peoples of Chile.

Biography María Ester Grebe was born in 1928 in Arica, Chile. She studied musicology at the University of Chile, graduating with a bachelor's in 1965. She primarily researched the indigenous peoples of Chile, traveling up and down the country to attend festivals and ceremonies, and interviewing a wide variety of subjects. On two occasions, in 1964 and 1977, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to pursue her musicological research.

She published several books, notably 1998's Culturas indígenas de Chile: un estudio preliminar ("Indigenous Cultures of Chile: A Preliminary Study") and 1967's The Chilean Verso: A Study in Musical Archaism.

In 2012, Ethnomedia released a two-volume collection of recordings produced by Grebe in Indigenous communities in northern Chile, titled Aymara 1976-1977 and Aymara 1976-1983. She died a few months later, at age 84, in Santiago.