Top Five Ethnomusicologists Based on the Suitability of Their Names as Fantasy Fiction Characters

Here's something lighthearted with which I hope will put a smile on your face...

I've noticed, over the course of my ethnomusicological studies, that some eminent personalities in this area have wonderful names. Well, not all of them... Timothy Rice, Jennifer Post, Charles Seeger and Helen Myers are a bit bland, but there are so many others who make up for them...

Here's my top five. Really, Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett would be proud to invent characters with names like these...

At the top of the chart is...*drum roll*... the inimicable Mantle Hood, who coined the term 'bi-musicality' in the 1970s. On Discworld, he'd be a wizard, or maybe an advisor to the Low King of Uberwald.

A close second is Ali Jihad Racy, Arab classical musician and author of several publications, including Improvisation, Ecstasy, and Performance Dynamics in Arabic Music, which I enjoyed reading on the tube this week. Douglas Adams might have made him a Playboy personality running a brothel on Eroticon Six.

And the Bronze Medal goes to Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, co-creator of the Hornbostel-Sachs method of musical instrument classification. He would make a great Vikingesque leader of a marauding army, charging into battle whilst playing fanfares on his bugle to instill dread in the hearts of the enemy.

At number four, it's Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, which my partner Duncan pointed out is a whole nine syllables. Wow. Actually, it's only eight, but it's still loooong. She's made significant contributions to the discussion of the klezmer revival (such as her chapter in Slobin's American Klezmer). She'd make an excellent member of Ankh-Morpork's City Watch... Perhaps she is a second cousin of Sally von Humpending?

Last on the list is Bruno Nettl, author of the snappily titled The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-One Issues and Concepts (which, incidentally, was the first ethnomusicology text I got my hands on. I tried, unsuccessfully to read from cover to cover whilst travelling for a month in the Balkans). 'Bruno' sounds like a giant, soppy dog, but 'Nettl' sounds... well... like 'nettle', sinister and threatening. In Douglas Adam's world, he might be a huge, multi-headed iron robot dog, roaming an abandoned corroding space ship somewhere in the outer reaches of the Galaxy.