John Blacking

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John Anthony Randoll Blacking (born 1928; died 24 January 1990) was a British ethnomusicologist and anthropologist.

He was educated at Salisbury Cathedral School and Cambridge University.

After serving with the British Army in Malaysia, he studied music and culture of the Venda people in South Africa in the 1950s and 1960s.

He spent most of his later academic career at Queen's University Belfast, in Northern Ireland, where he was professor of anthropology from 1970 until his death in 1990. Many of his ideas about the social impact of music can be found in his 1973 book How Musical is Man?.

[edit] References

• Blacking, John Anthony Randoll (1928–1990), social anthropologist and ethnomusicologist, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004
• Cross, Ian, (June 2007). Book review of The Musical Human: Rethinking John Blacking's Ethnomusicology in the Twenty-first Century (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2006. ISBN-10: 075465138X ISBN-13: 978-0754651383) in Music Perception 24:507-510 ISSN: 0730-7829