Timothy Rice, professor in the Department of Ethnomusicology and the inaugural director of The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, is a widely respected scholar with extensive academic leadership experience. In his role as director of the new school, he will coordinate the development of new, interdepartmental curricular initiatives and courses on the music industry, public service, and professional development. He is further charged with strengthening development efforts and public relations for all music programs and seeking new interdisciplinary opportunities for music within the university. He will administer student scholarships funded by the gift; create, with the help of the gift, new opportunities for students to study and perform locally, nationally, and internationally. He will also be involved with supporting support the creation of new interdisciplinary research centers. Rice holds a B.A. in history from Yale University and a Ph.D. in music from the University of Washington. He joined the ethnomusicology program at UCLA in 1987 after teaching in the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto for thirteen years. He was named chair of UCLA’s Department of Ethnomusicology in 1996. In 2005 he became Associate Dean for Research and Academic Affairs of the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture.

His research focuses on the traditional music of southeastern Europe, particularly that of Bulgaria and Macedonia. His recent work engages questions of how culturally significant issues are encoded in musical sound and acted out in musical performance. He is particularly interested in how aesthetic values and practices influence, and are affected by, the political and economic life of a society. Rice has also contributed influential perspectives to theoretical debates about the nature of his discipline, ethnomusicology, and its relationship to other fields, especially music education. His work has been translated into Bulgarian, Chinese, Farsi, Italian, Japanese, Turkish, and Spanish, and he has been invited to lecture by scholarly societies, museums, universities, and music conservatories in many parts of the world.

In addition to numerous journal articles and book chapters, major publications include Cross-cultural Perspectives on Music (University of Toronto Press, 1982, co- editor), May It Fill Your Soul: Experiencing Bulgarian Music(University of Chicago Press, 1994), The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, Vol. 8: Europe (Garland, 2000, co-editor), and Music in Bulgaria: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture (Oxford University Press, 2004).

He has taken a leadership role in his field on numerous occasions. He edited Ethnomusicology, the main journal in his field, from 1981 to 1984. He was the co- founding editor of the first encyclopedia of music to be written from an ethnomusicological perspective, the ten-volume Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, a signal achievement in the history of ethnomusicology. In 2005 he completed a two-year term as President of the U.S. Society for Ethnomusicology, and he was elected in 2007 to a six-year term on the Board of the Directors of the International Council for Traditional Music.