Gerhard Kubik will present the 1998 Charles Seeger Lecture at the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Society in Bloomington, Indiana on Saturday, October 24, 1998. He is well known to scholars of African music for his extensive field research in southern and central Africa. Beginning in 1959, he carried out research projects in sixteen African countries as well as in Venezuela and Brazil. His most focused work has been in Malawi. In a performing role, he has also performed and toured with the Kachamba Brother’s Band, a kwela ensemble.

As a result of the numerous field research trips, Kubik has collected and documented over 26,000 items of music and oral data, of which some archival copies are available in the Phonogrammarchiv Vienna and the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin. He presently teaches at the University of Vienna in Austria and the University of Mainz in Germany.

Throughout the years, Kubik has visited the United States frequently. In 1993 he held a Senior Research Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and in 1997 he was awarded a Rockefeller Research Fellowship at the Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College in Chicago. Other countries have recognized his scholarship as well. He has been elected to an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, as well as awarded the Körner Foundation Prize in Vienna and made a life affiliate of the Centre for Social Research, University of Malawi. Kubiks’ numerous publications range from a two-volume Theory of African Music (Berlin: International Institute for Traditional Music) in 1994 to a one hour video, African Guitar (Sparta, New Jersey: Stefan Grossman’s Guitar Workshop, 1995).