Timothy Rice

Professor, Ethnomusicology, and Director, UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music

Bulgarian and Macedonian folk and traditional music; music cognition, politics and economics of music, musical symbolism, ethnoaesthetics, individual agency in culture; music education.

Ph.D. Music, University of Washington;
M.A. Music, University of Washington;
B.A. History, Yale University

Timothy Rice specializes in the traditional music of the Balkans, especially from the Slavic-speaking nations of Bulgaria and Macedonia. In terms of research themes, he has written, among other things, on musical cognition, politics and music, meaning and music, mass media, and music teaching and learning in the Bulgarian case and contributed more general articles on theory and method in ethnomusicology. 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) as well as numerous articles in major journals such as Ethnomusicology, Yearbook for Traditional Music, Ethnomusicology Forum, and Journal of American Folklore. He was founding co-editor of the ten-volume Garland Encyclopedia of World Music and co-edited Volume 8, Europe . He has served the field of ethnomusicology in a variety of ways, including editing a collection of scholarly essays called Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Music (University of Toronto Press, 1982), editing the journal Ethnomusicology(1981-1984), and acting as President of the Society for Ethnomusicology (2003-2005). He served as Associate Dean of the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture from 2005 to 2008. He is currently the director of The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.