Henry Kingsbury (born 1943) is a pianist turned ethnomusicologist. He is notable for his book, Music, Talent, and Performance, an ethnographic study of an American conservatory of music.[1] This book examines the social and cultural nature of musical talent, understood within the anthropological framework of such theorists as Emile Durkheim, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, and Clifford Geertz. The appearance of Kingsbury’s book in 1988 marked an innovative and significant application of principals of ethnomusicology in the study of Western art music.[2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
Kingsbury has written of the role that personal change can play in the ethnographic approach. He writes, “just as fieldwork is often understood to be a traumatic personal experience, so also… can traumatic experience be retrospectively reconstituted as ‘fieldwork’.” [7] Kingsbury was born in 1943. He was a disciple of the pioneering ethnomusicologist Alan P. Merriam.[8]
In 1991, while he was a faculty member in the music department at Brown University, Kingsbury suffered serious injury during brain surgery.[9] His efforts to resume his academic career after recuperation included a pair of lawsuits under the Americans with Disabilities Act. He has chronicled this episode in two self-published booklets.[9] [10]