Helmut Brenner (1 January 1957 in Mürzzuschlag, Austria – 17 February 2017) was an Austrian ethnomusicologist.
[1] Brenner received music degrees in 1981 and 1984 at the Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Graz, Austria, and earned a master's degree in history in 1993 and Ph.D. in musicology in 1995 at the University of Vienna, (Vienna, Austria).
In 2000/01 he has been engaged as a UNESCO consultant for a multilateral marimba project with eleven participating Latin America countries within the program Patrimoine Oral e Immatériel de l'Humanité.
There he managed as field consultant a multilateral marimba-project in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Cuba, Colombia, Ecuador and Brazil.
In 2004 he earned his postdoctoral lecture qualification (Venia legendi/Habilitation) in ethnomusicology and popular music research at the Saarland University (Germany) with a professorial dissertation (Habilitationsschrift) on Marimbas in Latin America.