Philip Yampolsky

Director, Robert E. Brown Center for World Music

B.A., Columbia College; M.F.A., California Institute of the Arts

Philip Yampolsky’s position as founding director of the Robert E. Brown Center for World Music brings him full circle, as he was a student, teacher, and office manager at the original Center for World Music founded by Robert E. Brown in Berkeley in the mid-1970s. That early experience of full-time involvement with world music convinced him of the power of music both as a source life-long personal enrichment and as an avenue to understanding and deep respect for other cultures.

The mission of UI’s Center for World Music, in his view, is to offer exciting and broadening musical experiences — as audiences, but more importantly through learning to play—to the University community, area school children, and the community at large.

Philip Yampolsky has studied musics of Indonesia since 1970, but he maintains strong interests as well in West African music and early jazz and blues. He also works on intellectual property issues as they relate to “traditional” or communal music; on the recording industry worldwide; and on the teaching of world music in elementary and secondary schools. He lived on and off for 15 years in Indonesia, including seven years as Program Officer in Arts and Culture for the Ford Foundation’s Indonesia office. He recorded, edited, and annotated Music of Indonesia, a series of twenty CDs published in the U.S. by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings and in Indonesia by Masyarakat Seni Pertunjukan Indonesia. New CDs on Burmese theater music and vocal music of Western Timor are in preparation. He has published a book-length discography of the national recording company of Indonesia and designed and edited an Indonesian-language collection of essays and interviews on developments in Indonesian arts since Independence in 1945; he wrote the lead Indonesia article (and two subsidiary ones) for the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2001); and he has published articles in Indonesia and Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde and chapters on music in Indonesian secondary-school textbooks.