Robert Lachmann (28 November 1892 – 8 May 1939) was a German ethnomusicologist, polyglot (German, English, French, Arabic), orientalist and librarian. He was an expert in the musical traditions of the Middle East, a member of the Berlin School of Comparative Musicology and one of its founding fathers. 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.
Robert Lachmann was born in Berlin, and had learned French and English as a young man. Having been assigned as interpreter at a German camp for prisoners of war (POW)[1] during World War I, he became interested in the languages, songs and customs of POWs from North Africa and India, and started to learn Arabic, which he later followed up at Berlin university. 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 study Musik des Orients (Music of the Orient), 1929, that compares musical systems of various “Oriental” traditions from North Africa to the Far East, and a translation of a musical treatise by the ninth-century Arab scholar Al-Kindi in 1931, he edited the "Zeitschrift für vergleichende Musikwissenschaft" (Journal of Comparative Musicology)[2] from 1932-35.
In 1935, he was dismissed from his position as music librarian at the Berlin State Library, because he was Jewish, and emigrated to Jerusalem. On the invitation of Judah L. Magnes, chancellor and later president (1935–1948) of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Lachmann established a center for Middle Eastern music and the university's archive for "Oriental music". With the assistance of only one sound technician, he recorded almost 1000 new examples of secular and liturgical music.[3] His sound archive was later incorporated into the National Sound Archives of the National Library of Israel. Lachmann died in Jerusalem at age 46.
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. 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:[4]
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."[5]