U of A Historians Win Major National Bruno Nettl Book Prize

The Society for Ethnomusicology recently recognized professors Elizabeth Markham and Rembrandt Wolpert of the Department of History in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences with the 2018 Bruno Nettl Prize. 

The annual prize recognizes an outstanding publication on the history of ethnomusicology. Markham and Wolpert, along with their colleague Naoko Terauchi, professor of Japanese studies at Kobe University, Japan, were recognized for their book, What the Doctor Overheard: Dr Leopold Müller's Account of Music in Early Meiji Japan, published in the Cornell East Asia Series in 2017.

Despite its significance, the writings on Japanese music by Prussian medical scientist and physician Leopold Müller, published in Yokohama in a series from 1874 to 1876, have been nearly forgotten and marginalized even in historical research on the courtly gagaku traditions they focus upon.

This study with full translation into both English and Japanese illuminates and reassesses Müller's pioneering contribution. It situates the essay-series historically in the light of an important line of thought about the evolution of ancient gagaku that arose only in the mid-twentieth century, as well as more widely for nearer their actual publication in relation to the emerging scientifically based 19th-century European scholarly discourse of "other" musics.

It reveals the author, founder of the Medical Academy in Tokyo and personal physician to the Meiji emperor, as an important man of his day both in Japan and back at home. And it proposes that, with the recent rise of interest in the medical humanities and a musicological call for embracing the cognitive-scientific along with the historical and ethnographical, Müllers' first hand observations of a foreign music made from the practical body-orientated approach and ethnographic pen of a medical scientist ought also find new resonance nowadays.

The Society for Ethnomusicology, founded by the prize's namesake Bruno Nettl in 1955, is a global, interdisciplinary network of individuals and institutions engaged in the study of music across all cultural contexts and historical periods.