Jürgen Elsner

Jürgen Elsner (Finsterwalde, 22 April 1932) is a German ethnomusicologist whose career combines European musicology with the study of Arabic music and other traditions of the Near East and Central Asia. Trained in East Germany, his work has been one of the key references for understanding popular and traditional music from a comparative perspective.

His training began at the Deutsche Hochschule für Musik in East Berlin, where he studied music theory between 1950 and 1955. He then studied musicology at Humboldt University of Berlin, under Ernst Hermann Meyer and Vetter, and for six years he studied Arabic at the same institution. In 1964 he earned his doctorate with a thesis on the protest music of Hanns Eisler, and in 1970 he completed his habilitation with a study of the concept of maqām in modern Egyptian music. Between 1958 and 1964 he was an assistant at Humboldt University and, from 1964 to 1968, at the University of Leipzig; he then returned to Humboldt as senior assistant. In 1975 he was appointed professor of ethnomusicology at that university, and between 1979 and 1990 he directed the Institut für Musikwissenschaft und Musikerziehung.

As a visiting lecturer he has taught at other universities, including those in Tashkent, Warsaw and Vienna. He is the founder and director of the Forschungszentrum für Populäre Musik at Humboldt University and chairs the study group on maqām of the International Council for Traditional Music, whose proceedings he has edited on several occasions.

His fieldwork spans three continents and includes research in Algeria, Yemen, Iraq, Kazakhstan and Slovakia. His speciality is Arabic music, although he has written extensively on Hanns Eisler and on methodological questions in ethnomusicology. His legacy rests mainly on his editing of collective volumes and on the comparative study of modal systems, with the maqām as the central axis of his research.