Robert E. Brown

Robert Edward "Bob" Brown[1] (18 April 1927 – 29 November 2005) was an American ethnomusicologist who is credited with coining the term "world music".

Many of these recordings, among the first widely distributed and commercially available in the United States, inspired a generation of musicians to study and perform Indonesian gamelan music.

During his undergraduate years at Ithaca College and his graduate studies at Cornell University he continued to work as an organist.

Bob Brown followed the philosophy advocated by Mantle Hood, who could be considered the father of gamelan music education in the USA: that students become bi-musical.

In 1977, NASA launched the space probe Voyager with a gold-plated copper record featuring sounds and images of life and culture on Earth.

Brown also was the owner of Girikusuma or Flower Mountain, a center for traditional Balinese performing arts located in Bali.

In 2006, The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign announced that Brown had bequeathed his extensive collection of instruments, recordings, books, paintings and artifacts and to the school's world music center.