Henry Kingsbury (born 1943) is a pianist turned ethnomusicologist. He is notable for his book, ''Music, Talent, and Performance,'' an ethnographic study of an American conservatory of music. This book examines the social and cultural nature of musical talent, understood within the anthropological framework of such theorists as

Emile Durkheim Emil or Emile may refer to: Literature *''Emile, or On Education'' (1762), a treatise on education by Jean-Jacques Rousseau * ''Émile'' (novel) (1827), an autobiographical novel based on Émile de Girardin's early life *''Emil and the Detective ...

E.E. Evans-Pritchard Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, Kt FBA FRAI (21 September 1902 – 11 September 1973) was an English anthropologist who was instrumental in the development of social anthropology. He was Professor of Social Anthropology at the University ...

, and Clifford Geertz. The appearance of Kingsbury’s book in 1988 marked an innovative and significant application of principals of ethnomusicology in the study of Western art music. Kingsbury has written of the role that personal change can play in the ethnographic approach. He writes, “just as fieldwork is often understood to be a traumatic personal experience, so also… can traumatic experience be retrospectively reconstituted as ‘fieldwork.’” Kingsbury was born in 1943. He was a disciple of the pioneering ethnomusicologist Alan P. Merriam. In 1991, while he was a faculty member in the music department at Brown University, Kingsbury suffered serious injury during brain surgery.‘‘The Truth of Music: Empire, Law, and Secrecy,’’ Full Court Press, 2005

pp. 24, 107, 113 His efforts to resume his academic career after recuperation included a pair of lawsuits under the Americans with Disabilities Act. He has chronicled this episode in two self-published booklets.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kingsbury, Henry Living people American male pianists 1943 births 21st-century American pianists 21st-century American male musicians