Warm Welcome to Dr. Timothy Rice, President and CEO

Timothy RiceThe Center for World Music Board of Directors and staff are pleased to announce the election of Dr. Timothy Rice as our new president and CEO. Tim is just the third president in the CWM’s long history. As president, Dr. Rice follows founder Dr. Robert E. Brown (president 1965-2005) and his colleague Dr. Lewis Peterman (2006-2016), both San Diego State University meritorious professors emeriti of ethnomusicology.

Tim, UCLA Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Ethnomusicology, moved to San Diego four years ago. His election represents a continuation of the CWM’s tradition of having leading figures in the field of ethnomusicology and musicology as president. A specialist in the traditional music of the Balkans, especially from the Slavic-speaking nations of Bulgaria and Macedonia, he is the author of May It Fill Your Soul: Experiencing Bulgarian Music (University of Chicago Press, 1994) and Music in Bulgaria: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture (Oxford University Press, 2004). He also writes frequently about ethnomusicology as an academic field, including a book titled Ethnomusicology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2014) and another called Modeling Ethnomusicology (Oxford University Press, 2017).

He was founding co-editor of the ten-volume Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, and he co-edited Volume 8, Europe. He has served the field of ethnomusicology as editor of its leading journal Ethnomusicology (1981-1984), as president of the Society for Ethnomusicology (2003-2005), and as a member of the Executive Board of the International Council for Traditional Music (2007-2013). He was associate dean of the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture from 2005 to 2008 and director of The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music from 2007 to 2013.

We invite you to read reflections on the work of the Center for World Music by Tim Rice, and a message from our immediate past president Lewis Peterman, both expressing their thoughts on this transitional moment in our history.

– Monica Emery, Executive Director