Jaap Kunst was born in Groningen on August 12th in 1891. He was a Dutch musicologist and was famous for analyzing the gamelan music of Indonesia. He is the scholar who created the word ethnomusicology because it was more accurate than the existing word "comparative musicology."
He defined it as "the study of music and instruments of all non-European peoples including the so called primitive peoples and the civilized Eastern nations. Kunst is considered to be one of the fathers of contemporary ethnomusicology. He was taught the violin when he was very young. Later he also was very enamored with the folk music and dance of the Netherlands.
He made a recording called Living Folksongs and Dance Tunes from the Netherlands in 1956, which is still for sale. When performing on violin for a trio he was involved with, they toured in the East Indies as Indonesia was known then as part of the sprawling, politically and economically powerful Dutch empire. He made the decision to stay on Java.
While in Java, he found 7,500 gamelan orchestra sets in the region of central Java alone. Since each had a place for about 15 musicians he reasoned there must have been about 150,000 musicians in Java at the time. This meant that 1 in every 100 Indonesians must be a musician.
He took photos, made lists of instruments, made field recordings initially on wax cylinders and wrote books; on the music of Bali in 1925, of Java in 1934, New Guinea in 1967, Nias in 1939 and Flores in 1942.
He also wrote articles; Indigenous Music and the Christian Mission in 1947, Musicologica in 1950, Ancient Western Songs from Eastern Countries in 1934, Music and Dance in the Outer Provinces in 1946, Music of the Kai Islands in 1945 and Two Thousand Years of South Sumatra Retold in its Music in 1952, all for the museum in Jakarta.
He went back to the Netherlands in 1936 and took a post as head of the Royal Tropical Institute. Under his supervision it became the most important center of Ethnomusicology in the West at the time. Much later he also gave presentations at the University of Amsterdam on Indonesian music and began to teach there in 1958.
Jaap Kunst had originally wanted to give his entire collection to the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam but, because of extenuating events, it was given to the University of Amsterdam instead in 1963.
The collection reveals his passion for his field, which contains 2,500 books and professional journals. 3,000 photos, slides and negatives, 7 films, 800 records, tapes and wax cylinders and 8400 letters describing 1250 people written between 1919 and 1960. He died on December 7th in 1960 in Amsterdam.
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