Stephen Blum
Stephen Blum (born March 4, 1942) is an American scholar and musician, whose research has primarily been in ethnomusicology. He has lent a multidisciplinary approach to the writing and publication of numerous articles discussing a wide range of musical topics and ideas. Blum's writing displays a strong knowledge of parallel disciplines through the thoughtful inclusion of academic theory from the fields of sociology, historical musicology, philosophy, anthropology, composition and analysis. Through his continued participation and critiques, he has made numerous contributions to the dialogue surrounding the fields of ethnomusicology and musicology. Biography. Blum received a bachelor's  degree from Oberlin College in 1964,and then a PhD in music at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. As a PhD student, Blum worked with music scholars including Alexander Ringer, Charles Hamm, and Bruno Nettl. His first publications were co-authored with Nettl, a pioneering historical musicologist and ethnomusicologist, and supervising his dissertation, "Musics in Contact: The Cultivation of Oral Repertoires in Meshed Iran", University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, 1972. Blum was to later co-edit the 1991 festschrift for Nettl, "Ethnomusicology and Modern Music History", along with former Nettl students Philip Bohlman and Daniel M. Neuman. Academic  appointments. Blum’s teaching career began at Western Illinois University (1967–73), followed by an assistant professorship at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign until 1977. He then moved to Toronto's York University, where he remained for ten years, founding the MFA program "Music and Contemporary Cultures", the first of its kind Canada. In 1987 he founded the ethnomusicology program at City University of New York Graduate Center, where he worked until his retirement in 2016. Scholarship and legacy. Blum's ethnographic focus on northeastern Iran in his PhD dissertation led to a number of published articles early in his  career discussing the folksinging traditions of these regions. His final observations were not just theoretical, but took into consideration the racial and classist attitudes among his informants, the implications of which are included in his ethnographic work. In "The Concept of the ‘Asheq in Northern Khorasan" (1972) Blum presents part of his fieldwork undertaken in 1969 for his dissertation but pointedly focuses on social folk music of the (primarily) Kurdish minority. In 1974, his article, "Persian Folksong in Meshhed (Iran)", Blum continued a detailed rhythmic and melodic analysis of ten folk songs while focusing on informant-perceived rural and urban  difference in style and performance. He observed that a lack of singing and dancing in Iranian society is not linked to a rural and urban divide but is a privation of poverty. He noted, With Ameneh Youssefzadeh, Blum is the consulting editor in music for "Encyclopædia Iranica". He is also the author of a number of entries in "The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians" and has contributed to the three volumes of the "Garland Encyclopedia of World Music" devoted to the United States and Canada, the Middle East, and Europe. Blum often returned to his Western roots, a  prominent example being an article on the writing and music of Charles Ives published in 1977 in "The Musical Quarterly". He discusses and analyzes Ives’ music through his writing, tackling the motivations and perceptions of a stubborn and controversial artist, concluding that Ives’ "musical techniques aimed to explore 'processes of musical differentiation' in relationships of sounds, with reference to their social and moral contexts." He has often tackled theoretical issues in musicology, ethnomusicology. The field recordings from his research trips to Iran were donated to Harvard University, where they have been digitized and posted publicly online as the "Stephen Blum  Collection of Music from Iranian Khorāsān". In 1995, Blum donated copies of this collection to Iran's Ministry of Islamic Culture and Guidance.