Mantle Hood

Born and raised in Springfield, Illinois, Hood studied piano as a child and played clarinet and tenor saxophone in regional jazz clubs in his teens.

After completing his doctoral work in 1954, Hood spent two years in Indonesia doing field research funded by a Ford Foundation fellowship.

Hood's work spawned a legion of teachers and leaders of the more than 100 gamelan groups in the United States today.

In the 1980s, he came out of retirement in Hawaii to become Senior Distinguished Professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where he remained until 1996, establishing an ethnomusicology program.

In 1990, Mantle Hood presented a paper at the 7th International Congress of the European Seminar in Ethnomusicology in Berlin under the title "The Quantum Theory of Music."

The concept sought to revolutionize research in music by developing theoretical and practical constructs to close a 75-year gap between the 1920s, which were the beginning of the quantum age in the sciences, and the present.

This consortium resulted in an interdisciplinary five-day workshop with the keynote paper on this subject held in Trieste, Italy, including scholars in physics, mathematics, acoustics, computer-based musical composition, and ethnomusicology.

In subsequent years, a core group continued to explore new paradigms inspired by Hood's concepts, and worked through correspondence and meetings.

Schumacher and Myers delivered related papers at the annual conference of the European Seminar in Ethnomusicology, held in Barcelona, Spain, September 20–25, 1993.

The approach enables the researcher to, in some manner, learn about music "from the inside", and thereby experience its technical, conceptual and aesthetic challenges.

Now Javanese, Spanish, Hindi, Portuguese, Navajo, Finnish, Quechua, Korean or any other topic-relevant language can fulfill foreign-language requirements.