Ki Mantle Hood will present the 1999 Charles Seeger Lecture at the 44th Annual Meeting of the Society in Austin, Texas on Saturday, November 20, 1999. The title of his Seeger Lecture is "Ethnomusicology’s Bronze Age in Y2K.” He is presently Adjunct Professor in the Multicultural Musical Studies Program in the College of Creative Arts at West Virginia University. Hood has taught at numerous universities and remains Professor Emeritus at UCLA and an Adjunct Professor of The University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He has published widely in the field of ethnomusicology, particularly on the musical traditions of Indonesia, and has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a Senior Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Ford Foundation Fellowship. Hood began the first university program in ethnomusicology at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1954, where he later founded the Institute for Ethnomusicology and initiated the series, Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology. Most recently, he has started the scholarly series, World Music Reports, issued by the World Music Center at West Virginia University. Hood served as President of the Society for Ethnomusicology from 1965 to 1967.

Hood provided the following preview of his lecture:

"Computer designers give us the abbreviation Y2K. That benchmark has weighty implications for research in ethnomusicology—at least when music is an essential referent. In an advanced stage of development the Bronze Age arrived on the northern shores of Java around the 3rd century B.C. A Copper Age is the first stage of development; the addition of lead or tin is the second stage; the advanced third stage includes precision casting and hand forging.

"In an advanced stage of development bronze musical ensembles began affecting the field of ethnomusicology in the 20th century—e.g., from Java, Bali, Sunda, Thailand, Cambodia, The Philippines, Korea, Japan, China. The unique challenge of hearing these sounds has also produced three stages of development: 1. the Seeger Melograph Model A, inspired by Metfessel’s pioneering work; 2. Models B and especially C, which added to the display of pitch and loudness the most essential challenge: spectral display; 3. and finally, in his name, the Seeger Melograph Poly "D” and subsequent models. In this last period of development several things happened that set the stage for further developments in Y2K.

"In 1990, a paper entitled "The Quantum Theory of Music” was given in Berlin. An international consortium resulted. A number of papers have been published, the European Seminar in Ethnomusicology devoted an afternoon and evening to the subject at its annual meeting, and two conferences on the problems of transform have been held in Italy, sponsored by mathematicians, physicists, acousticians, and computer composers. A member of les six (core of international consortium), as a visiting scholar from Rome, recently conducted research in Paris based on comparison of the sound of six different bassoonists. The study brings into question the validity of all Melograph studies from Model C to the present. I shall expatiate on these matters in the next meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology in Texas.”