PUBLICATIONS Inside Illinois Vol. 26, No. 2, July 20, 2006

Music school gift includes instruments, books, art, artifacts, property

By Melissa Mitchell, News Bureau Staff Writer
217-333-5491; melissa@uiuc.edu

Click photo to enlarge Photo by L. Brian Stauffer A recent gift to the UI music school includes many instruments from Indonesia, India, Turkey, Afghanistan and elsewhere..

The UI School of Music has long been home to one of the nation’s top ethnomusicology programs. Now, a major gift has increased the size and brilliance of the school’s star on the world music map.

The multifaceted package – one of the largest gifts to the music school to date – originates from the estate of Robert E. Brown, the ethnomusicologist credited with coining the phrase “world music. ” Brown died in November 2005.

The gift to the UI music school includes a veritable treasure trove of instruments from Indonesia, India, Turkey, Afghanistan and elsewhere; an extensive library of recordings and books; Balinese paintings; museum-quality artifacts from around the world; and various properties, most notably a seven-acre educational compound in Bali called “Flower Mountain.” The site, located in Payangan, in the hills near the town of Ubud, includes rustic dormitory-style accommodations, rehearsal halls and performance spaces, a library, kitchen and dining facilities, and adjacent rice paddies.

It also comes equipped with several gamelan orchestras. The Indonesian equivalent of the Western symphony orchestra, a gamelan consists of percussion and string instruments, metallophones of all shapes and sizes, gongs, chimes and drums.

The gamelans at the Bali site are in addition to three others that arrived at Illinois recently along with Indian sitars, vinas and tamburas, Turkish-Arabic takhts, African drum ensembles and scores of other instruments and artifacts.

Also moving to Illinois as part of the gift is the Center for World Music, originally founded by Brown in Berkeley, Calif., and most recently located at San Diego State. At its new home in the UI’s Levis Faculty Center, it will be known as the Robert E. Brown Center for World Music.

“This gift will have a profound impact on the things we do here,” said Karl Kramer, the director of the UI School of Music.

“We have one of the finest music schools in the nation, and Dr. Brown’s generous gift is a wonderful complement to its activities,” said Chancellor Richard Herman. “As our campus becomes increasingly global, the Bali site – as well as Dr. Brown’s other gifts – will offer a unique opportunity for our students, faculty and others to study, create and learn about world music.”

Click photos to enlarge A gift from the late ethnomusicologist Robert E. Brown (top), includes Brown's Bali property, Flower Mountain, which includes a music library (above), student dormitories and rehearsal facilities (below).

Details of how the center, the Bali property and other items will be put to use to benefit the school most are still unfolding. The music school director expects a more complete program and plan for the acquisition will likely evolve over four to five years.

 Kramer does have a few directions and goals in mind. Chief among them is a desire to keep alive, and build upon, Brown’s own legacy, which included fostering cross-cultural understanding through music appreciation and participation, particularly among young people.

 “One of the principal goals of the center would be to integrate non-Western – and perhaps vernacular – music traditions into the curriculum of music education majors, who after graduation typically teach at public schools and community organizations in Illinois and elsewhere throughout the United States,” he said. “…Ultimately, I would like to develop and implement a revolutionary degree program specifically geared toward preparing teachers in world music studies that would be recognized and be appropriate for public-school teaching.”

Kramer and others – both in the school and across the campus in a variety of international programs and studies units – also are enthusiastic about the variety of possibilities associated with the gift, including research, performance, study abroad and community outreach opportunities.

Charles Capwell, a UI ethnomusicologist who specializes in Indonesian musical traditions, had known Brown since 1967 and first visited him at “Flower Mountain” in 1994.

Capwell noted that the center’s location at the university will not only cement the UI’s reputation for ethnomusicological scholarship, but allow the school to expand in areas previously not possible, due to a lack of resources.

Capwell led 13 students on a study tour to “Flower Mountain” in 2000 as part of a campuswide, Ford Foundation-supported program.

“The students had studied Balinese musical performance at the UI with a Balinese teacher, I Ketut Gede Asnawa, the semester preceding the trip, and continued their studies with him in Bali that summer,” Capwell said.

Asnawa, who most recently was on the faculty of the University of Missouri at Kansas City, will return to the UI this fall as the new center’s first faculty appointment. Asnawa will lead three sections of Balinese gamelan, which will be open to UI students as well as interested community members.

“One of the most important concepts associated with this gift and new center,” Kramer said, “is that we will have native musicians teaching native music.”

Furthermore, he emphasized, the sizeable collection of instruments included in the gift will be tuned, reconditioned as necessary, but above all, put into service.

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