Georg Herzog studied at the Budapest Music Academy from 1917 to 1919, and at the Hochschule für Musik in Charlottenburg.
In 1930/31 he went on a research trip to Liberia, where he recorded, on behalf of Sapir, the language and folk music of the Jabo people.
This legacy was carried forward by his student Bruno Nettl who continued the work of bring together ethnology and cultural anthropology with historical and systematic musicology.
[2] Herzog was a North American pioneer in the field of ethnomusicology and posed such radical research questions as: "do animals have music?"
He, along with David P. McAllester, Alan Merriam, Willard Rhodes und Charles Seeger, founded the Society for Ethnomusicology.