Robert Lachmann

After having been forced to leave Germany under the Nazis in 1935 because of his Jewish background, he emigrated to Palestine and established a rich archive of ethnomusicological recordings for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

He also studied comparative musicology with Johannes Wolf, Erich von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs and published his Ph.D. dissertation in 1922, based on urban music in Tunisia.

Apart from his earlier field studies in Tunisia and Morocco, he participated in the 1932 Cairo Congress of Arab Music and was responsible for recording the performances of the artists and ensembles invited to the conference.

[4] His important contribution to the ethnomusicology of North Africa and the Middle East is reflected in a description of his radio programmes, transmitted by the English language programme of the Palestine Broadcasting Service (PBS) in 1936-1937, by British musicologist Ruth F. Davis:[5] Focusing on sacred and secular musical traditions of different “Oriental” communities living in and around Jerusalem, including Bedouin and Palestinian Arabs, Yemenite, Kurdish and Baghdadi Jews, Copts and Samaritans, Lachmann's lectures were illustrated by more than thirty musical examples performed live in the studio by local musicians and singers and simultaneously recorded on metal disc.

In two lectures (numbers 10 and 11), based on commercial recordings, he contextualized the live performances with wide-ranging surveys of the urban musical traditions of North Africa and the Middle East, extending beyond the Arab world to Turkey, Persia, and Hindustan.