Klaus Wachsmann
British ethnomusicologist
Klaus Philipp Wachsmann (8 March 1907 – 17 July 1984) was a British ethnomusicologist of German birth. Born in 1907 in Berlin, he is considered a pioneer in the study of the traditional musics of Africa. His studies in Germany (on pre-Gregorian chant under mentor Erich von Hornbostel) were interrupted by the rise of the Nazis in 1933, where he was also forbidden to marry his 'Aryan' fiancée Eva Buttenburg, a singer. Consequently, they both migrated to Britain in 1936.
While in the UK Wachsmann gained funding by the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning to study African languages at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. His wife worked as a voice coach. With help from the Church Missionary Society they then moved to Uganda in 1937, where Wachsmann compiled an extensive collection of field recordings between 1949 and 1952. The full collection was originally deposited at the British Library where they form part of the World and Traditional Music collection. He founded the International Folk Music Council, where he first met Charles Seeger, subsequently a lifelong friend.
After a year's leave in England was appointed as founding curator of Kampala's Uganda Museum, where he stayed until 1957.
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This entry incorporates text from “Klaus Wachsmann” 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.