Josef Kuckertz

Josef Kuckertz (Würseln, near Aachen, 24 November 1930 – Berlin, 25 March 1996) was a German ethnomusicologist whose work focused on the musical traditions of South Asia, particularly southern India, and of the Middle East. His work is of interest today for the way it linked art music, regional popular music and so-called "tribal" music, and for helping to give the comparative study of music its own methodological framework in the German-speaking world.

He first trained as a choral conductor at the Rheinische Musikschule in Cologne. Between 1957 and 1962 he studied musicology at the University of Cologne under Karl Gustav Fellerer and Marius Schneider, under whose supervision he received his doctorate in 1962 with a thesis on Romanian colinde collected by Bartók. After serving as an assistant lecturer at the musicology institute of the same university, he qualified as a university lecturer in 1967 with a work on the form and melodic structure of the music of southern India. In 1970 he was appointed professor in the ethnomusicology department in Cologne and, in 1980, full professor of comparative musicology at the Freie Universität Berlin, a post he held until his death. He also received an honorary doctorate from the Pontificio Istituto di Musica Sacra in Rome in 1986.

His fieldwork was carried out mainly in India and Iran. He edited the Jahrbuch für musikalische Volks- und Völkerkunde (1977–1996) and the series Beiträge zur Ethnomusikologie (1980–1996). His extensive written output ranges from studies of the Carnatic rāga and tāla to works on the Bengali bauls, the songs of the Toda and Santal peoples, and the Persian dastgāh, as well as reflections on the notation of non-European musics and on the relationship between oral tradition and writing.

His legacy lies in placing melodies and their structures at the centre of comparative analysis, and in insisting on the interaction between art and popular repertoires. His books on the music of Asia, published in Kassel and Wiesbaden, are still cited as standard references in the discipline.