John Blacking
British ethnomusicologist
John Anthony Randoll Blacking (22 October 1928 – 24 January 1990) was a British ethnomusicologist and social anthropologist. Blacking began his career with a ground-breaking, 22-month study of the culture and music making of the Venda people of northern South Africa, from 1956 to 1958. In 1965 Blacking became a professor and head of the social anthropology department at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. In 1970 he was appointed chair of the social anthropology department at Queen's University Belfast, Northern Ireland, where he developed a vibrant program in ethnomusicology, the first in Europe.
He is best known for his 1973 monograph How Musical is Man? in which he argued that the activity of making music is fundamentally important to humans, dependent on society and culture, but separate from the Western musical traditions and standards. He argued that music making was important to developing senses and emotional sensibility and that it is essential for balanced action and effective use of the intellect.
In 1969 Blacking and his then girlfriend and future wife, Dr. Zureena Desai, were arrested by the South African government and charged with violating apartheid's Immorality Act. Blacking was white, Desai was Indian, and the racial purity law forbade relations between different races.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Blacking” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.