Jeff Todd Titon (born 1943) is a professor emeritus of

music Music is generally defined as the art of arranging sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm or otherwise expressive content. Exact definitions of music vary considerably around the world, though it is an aspect ...

Brown University Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providenc ...

. He holds the B.A. (1965) from Amherst College; and the M.A. (in English, 1970) and the Ph.D. (in American Studies, 1971) from the University of Minnesota. He taught American literature, folklore and ethnomusicology in the departments of English and Music at Tufts University (1971-1986), where he co-founded the American Studies program and also the M.A. program in Ethnomusicology. He taught at Brown University (1986-2013) where he was director of the Ph.D. program in Ethnomusicology. He held visiting professorships at Amherst College, Berea College, East Tennessee State University, and Indiana University's Folklore Institute. His published books include ''Early Downhome

Blues Blues is a music genre and musical form which originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the Afr ...

: A Musical and Cultural Analysis'' (

University of Illinois The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the University ...

Press, 1977; 2nd edition, University of North Carolina Press, 1994) and ''Powerhouse for God: Speech, Chant and Song in an Appalachian Baptist Church'' (

University of Texas The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...

Press, 1988; 2nd ed. University of Tennessee Press, 2018). He is co-editor of the ''Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology'' (Oxford University Press, 2015) and general editor of ''Worlds of Music: An Introduction to the Music of the World's Peoples'' (Cengage/Schirmer Books, 6th ed., 2016). He was editor of ''Ethnomusicology'', the journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology, from 1990-1995. In 1998 he was elected a Fellow of the American Folklore Society. In 2015 his field recordings were chosen for preservation in the National Recording Registry, Library of Congress. Titon is known for developing collaborative ethnographic research based on reciprocity and friendship, for helping to establish an applied ethnomusicology based in social responsibility, for proposing that music cultures can be understood as ecosystems, for introducing the concepts of musical and cultural sustainability, and for his appeal for a sound commons for all living creatures and his current ecomusicological project of a sound ecology. His definition of ethnomusicology as "the study of people making music"—making the sounds they call music, and making music as a cultural domain—is widely accepted within the field.''Worlds of Music'', 2nd. ed., p. xxi. New York: Schirmer Books, 1992.

References

Relevant literature

*Titon, Jeff Todd. 2020. ''Toward a Sound Ecology: New and Selected Essays.'' Indiana University Press. 324 pages. (hard cover). Living people Brown University faculty American ethnomusicologists 1943 births {{US-ethnomusicologist-stub