Philip Yampolsky

Philip Yampolsky is an American musicologist, founding director of the Robert E. Brown Center for World Music. Yampolsky has played Javanese and Balinese gamelan music for nearly 40 years, and the percussion music of the Ewe of Ghana for still longer. His research interests include: various genres of Indonesian and West African music; intellectual property issues as they relate to traditional or communal music; the recording industry worldwide; the discography and preservation of early recordings; and the teaching of world music in elementary and secondary schools. He lived for fifteen years in Indonesia, including seven years as Program Officer in Arts and Culture for the Ford Foundation’s Indonesia office. He spent the entire decade of the 1990s recording, editing, and annotating a series Music Of Indonesia, published in the US by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings and in Indonesia by Masyarakat Seni Pertunjukan Indonesia; he is now planning a new series on the music of Timor-Leste.