Robert E. Brown

Robert Edward Brown (18 April 1927 – 29 November 2005) was an American ethnomusicologist who is credited with coining the term "world music". He was also well known for his recordings of music from Indonesia. Many of these recordings, among the first widely distributed and commercially available in the United States, inspired a generation of musicians to study and perform Indonesian gamelan music.

Biography Brown was born in Utica, New York and grew up in Clinton, New York. He founded the world music/ethnomusicology 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 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.

In 1977, NASA launched the space probe Voyager with a gold-plated copper record featuring sounds and images of life and culture on Earth. Working with Carl Sagan, Brown chose a recording of the gamelan composition Puspawarna from Java: Court Gamelan to represent Southeast Asia. He also 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.

Brown began teaching at San Diego State University 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 Balinese performing arts located in Bali.

In 2006, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign announced that Brown had bequeathed his extensive collection of instruments, recordings, books, paintings and artifacts and to the school's world music center. The Robert E. Brown Center for World Music, 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 Records. 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 wayang performance Java: Court Gamelan (1971). Grammy-nominated Java: Court Gamelan, Volume II (1977) Java: Court Gamelan, Volume III (1979)