Wachsmann, Klaus P(hilipp)

(b Berlin, 8 March 1907; d Tisbury, Wilts, 17 July 1984). British ethnomusicologist of German birth. After reading law for four years at his father’s urging, he studied musicology at the University of Berlin with Blume and Schering and comparative musicology with Hornbostel and Sachs (1930–32). Despite a Lutheran upbringing, he was prohibited as a person of Jewish background from attending German universities after 1933. He moved to Switzerland in 1934 and took the doctorate under Fellerer at the University of Fribourg in 1935 with a ground-breaking dissertation on pre-Gregorian chant. Forced to leave Germany permanently in 1936, he fled to London and enrolled at the London School of Oriental and African Studies for work in linguistics, notably on the Bantu languages. He moved with his wife to Uganda in 1937 and spent several years supervising missionary education. He was then appointed curator of the Uganda Museum, Kampala (1948), a post which enabled him to return to ethnomusicology and travel throughout Uganda collecting musical instruments and making recordings. Wachsmann turned the Uganda Museum into the first ‘living’ museum in Africa: he employed professional musicians as museum attendants who performed daily (a practice which continued after he left Uganda), hired musicians as research assistants and established the practice of aiding scholars who visited the museum. After 20 years in Uganda, he returned to London and was scientific officer in charge of ethnological collections at the Wellcome Foundation, London (1958–63). Unable to find an academic post in England, he was invited by Ki Mantle Hood in 1963 to teach at the department of music and Institute of Ethnomusicology, UCLA. While he was at UCLA he was a guest lecturer in African universities (University of Ghana, 1965; Makerere University, Kampala, 1966). In 1968 he was appointed professor in the school of music and department of linguistics of Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. He became professor emeritus in 1975, but continued to teach as a visiting professor and lecturer at the University of Texas, Dallas (1976–7), the University of Edinburgh (1978), Queen’s University Belfast (1978) and Cologne University (1978–9). His professional appointments included president of the Society for Ethnomusicology (1967–9) and president of the international Folk Music Council (1973). He received many honours, including the bronze medal and an honorary life membership from the Royal African Society (1958), serving as Huxley Memorial Lecturer and medal recipient at the nomination of the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Grosses Verdienstkreuz der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (1984).

Wachsmann was a pioneer in the study of African music and a leader in the development of organological methodology. Isolated from the Western scholarly world while in Africa, he became an idiosyncratic thinker who was later dubbed ‘humanist’ for his readings and citations of works from many fields (see his Festschrift, 1977). Focussing primarily on Ugandan examples, his theories and methodologies, particularly those in Tribal Crafts of Uganda (1953) and ‘Ethnomusicology in Africa’ (1970), came to be known for their applicability to the study of any music. He directed the compilation of A Select Bibliography of Music in Africa (1965) and was editor of Essays on Music and History in Africa (1971), a collection of articles dealing with the problem of writing the music history of oral cultures. His lecture ‘The Changeability of Musical Experience’ (delivered to the Society for Ethnomusicology, 1981; published 1982) was one of the first reflexive explorations of ethnomusicology. Of equal importance are his field recordings: having earned the respect of the Ugandan musicians he had known, Wachsmann’s 1600 recordings (compiled 1949–52), are outstanding examples of Ugandan music and comprise one of the most important collections of African music available. The recordings are housed in the National Sound Archive in London, with copies at the Uganda Museum and at UCLA.

WRITINGS

Untersuchungen zum vorgregorianischen Gesang (diss., U. of Fribourg, 1935; Regensburg, 1935)

‘An Approach to African Music’, Uganda Journal, vi (1939), 148

with M. Trowell: Tribal Crafts of Uganda (London, 1953)

‘Musicology in Uganda’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, lxxxiii (1953), 50–57

‘The Transplantation of Folk Music from One Social Environment to Another’, JIFMC, vi (1954), 41–5

Folk Musicians in Uganda, Uganda Museum Occasional Paper, ii (Kampala, 1956)

‘Harpsongs from Uganda’, JIFMC, viii (1956), 23–5

‘A Study of Norms in the Tribal Music of Uganda’, EthM Newsletter, no.11 (1957), 9–16

‘A Century of Change in the Folk Music of an African Tribe’, JIFMC, x (1958), 52–6

‘Recent Trends in Ethnomusicology’, PRMA, lxxxv (1958–9), 65–80

‘The Sociology of Recording in Africa South of the Sahara’, AfrM, ii/2 (1959), 77–9

‘Problems of Musical Stratigraphy in Africa’, Ethnomusicologie III [and IV] [recte V]: Wégimont V 1958 and 1960, 19 only

ed.: An International Catalogue of Published Records of Folk Music (London, 1960)

trans., with A. Baines: ‘Erich M. von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs, Classification of Musical Instruments’, GSJ, xiv (1961), 3–29

‘Criteria for Acculturation’, IMSCR VIII New York 1961, 139–49

‘The Primitive Musical Instruments’, Musical Instruments through the Ages, ed. A. Baines (Harmondsworth, 1961/R, 2/1966/R), 23–54

‘A Rare Nuba Trumpet Collected by the Seligmans’, Man, lxiii (1963), 85–6

‘Human Migration and African Harps’, JIFMC, xvi (1964), 84–8

‘Some Speculations Concerning a Drum Chime in Buganda’, Man, lxv (1965), 1–8

‘The Earliest Sources of Folk Music from Africa’, IFMC Conference: Budapest 1964 [SMH, vii (1965)], 181–6

‘Experiments in Ugandan Music’, East Africa Journal, iii/1 (1966–7), 19–26

‘Negritude in Music’, Composer, no.19 (1966), 12–16

‘The Trends of Musicology in Africa’, Institute of Ethnomusicology, University of California at Los Angeles: Selected Reports, i (1966), no.1, pp.61–5

‘Extracts from a Memorandum on Music Education in Uganda’, ‘The State of African Musicology’, African Studies at Makerere 1936–1966 (Kampala, 1967), 82–4, 85–93

‘Pen-Equidistance and Accurate Pitch: a Problem from the Source of the Nile’, Festschrift für Walter Wiora, ed. L. Finscher and C.-H. Mahling (Kassel, 1967), 583–92

‘Ethnomusicology in African Studies: the Next Twenty Years’, Expanding Horizons in African Studies: Evanston, IL, 1968, ed. G. Carter and A. Paden (Evanston, IL, 1969), 131–42

‘Music’, Journal of the Folklore Institute, vi/2–3 (1969), 164–91

‘A Drum from Seventeenth-Century Africa’, GSJ, xxiii (1970), 97–103

‘Ethnomusicology in Africa’, The African Experience, ed. J.N. Paden and E.W. Soja, i (Evanston, IL, 1970), 128–51

ed.: Essays on Music and History in Africa (Evanston, IL, 1971) [incl. ‘Musical Instruments in Kiganda Tradition and their Place in the East African Scene’, 93–134]

‘Universal Perspectives in Music’, EthM, xv (1971), 381–4

with R. Kay: ‘The Interrelations of Musical Instruments, Musical Forms and Cultural Systems in Africa’, Technology and Culture, xii (1971), 399–413

‘Spencer to Hood: a Changing View of Non-European Music’, Proceedings of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland for 1973, 5–13 [Huxley Memorial Lecture]

‘African Music’, Musica indigena: Rome 1975, 36–50

‘A “Shiplike” String Instrument from West Africa’, Ethnos, xl (1975), 43–56

ed., with D. Christensen and H.-P. Reinecke: Hornbostel opera omnia (The Hague, 1976–)

‘Acculturation in Action: Four Examples’, Symposium musico-ethnologicum: Bonn 1980, 336–40

‘La source dsapprouve presque toujours l'itineraire du fleuve, or Tradition and Innovation’, Musices aptatio (1982), 33–40

‘The Changeability of Musical Experience’, EthM, xxvi (1982), 197–215 [Charles Seeger Distinguished Lecture]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C. Seeger and B. Wade, eds.: Essays for a Humanist: an Offering to Klaus Wachsmann (New York, 1977) [incl. list of writings]

S.C. DeVale: ‘“Intrusions”: a Remembrance of Klaus Wachsmann (1907–1984)’, EthM, xxix (1985), 272–82

PAULA MORGAN/SUE CAROLE DeVALE