Authors

Mantle Hood
hood@umbc.edu

Ki Mantle Hood Mantle Hood is senior distinguished professor of music at the College of Creative Arts at West Virginia University. A pioneer in the field of ethnomusicology, he started the first university program in that discipline at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1954. Six years later he founded the famous Institute for Ethnomusicology there and initiated the scholarly series Progress Reports in Ethnomusicology.
He moved to Hawaii in 1974 and served as an editor of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. In 1980 he began the Program in Ethnomusicology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). Now at West Viriginia University, he has started a scholarly series, World Music Reports, issued by the university's World Music Center.

A renowned expert in Javanese/Balinese music and culture, Dr. Hood has received several honors from the Indonesian government for his research, among them the conferral of the title "ki" (literally, "the venerable") in 1986, and membership into the Dharma Kusuma (Society of National Heroes) in 1992. He is among the first non-Indonesians to receive that honor. Mantle Hood is also a composer, a performer, and an author of numerous articles and books, including The Ethnomusicologist and the three-volumed The Evolution of Javanese Gamelan, and has contributed to the Harvard Dictionary of Music and the Encyclopedie de la Musique. He has produced many recordings and several documentary films.
Hood has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Yale, Wesleyan, Indiana, and Drake Universities and the University of Ghana. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1964, is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and other scholarly societies, and served as President of the Society for Ethnomusicology from 1965 to 1967. He was awarded a senior Fulbright to India in 1975 and is honorary lifetime president of the Jaap Kunst Stichting, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.