Skip over navigation

In Memoriam James T. Koetting (1939-1984)

In the early morning hours of Saturday, October 20, 1984, Jim Koetting suffered a massive heart attack and died. The field of ethnomusicology lost one of its finest teachers, scholars, musicians, and colleagues.

The suddenness of Jim's death sent shock waves throughout the annual meeting of the Society of Ethnomusicology which he was attending and at which, the previous afternoon, he had delivered a very Koetting-like paper-thorough, deeply versed in its subject matter, imbued with the humor and humanity that was so much Jim's gift.

Jim Koetting was the complete ethnomusicologist, and excellent in every dimension of his field. He was a first-rate scholar. Both his Master's thesis and his doctoral dissertation-in African music- were prototypical of the kind of scholarly studies to which we were treated by Jim: thorough, well-researched, finely presented, with an intimacy and love of the music and the music-makers pervading every paragraph. His articles, too, were models of fine scholarship and I mention two here: "Analysis and Notation of West African Drum Ensemble Music," Selected Reports, 1:3 (Institute of Ethnomusicology, UCLA) 1970, 116-146; and "The Son Jalisciense: Structural Variety in Relation to a Mexican Forme Fixe, " in Essays for a Humanist: An Offering to Klaus Wachsmann (New York: 1977) 162-188. He was the co-author of an excellent new textbook, Worlds of Music (Schirmer, 1984) and was finishing the revisions of a book on Ghanaian music for the Contributions in Intercultural and Comparative Studies series for the Greenwood Press.

Jim was an excellent teacher. He was willing and always gave of himself in the field, in the classroom, with his colleagues. His classes were large and enthusiastic because of the substantive and rigorous nature of information he imparted and inquiry he encouraged. And what a musician he was! A superb trumpeter and guitarist, he drummed in the African Drum ensemble and was an integral part of any mariachi ensemble. He knew and loved music at every level.

The chronicle of Jim Koetting the ethnomusicologist extends from student days in the halcyon years of the Institute for Ethnomusicology at UCLA, through his teaching and travel with Chapman College in Mexico and Africa, to 1975 when he became Assistant Professor of Music at Brown University, a residency broken only by a sabbatical leave (after promotion to Associate Professor at Brown) with a visiting appointment at Indiana University and another semester teaching at sea.

The many of us who "grew up together at UCLA" will remember those Wednesday afternoon main seminars followed by dinner at Talpa; with Jim a featured player always. We'll remember the Mariachi and Veracruz ensembles, with Jim always a necessary participant. We'll remember his quiet strength, the wry smile, the sudden burst of laughter at something that struck his fancy just when we thought he was so far away in other thoughts. We'll remember the way he played and spoke about and wrote about music as if it were second nature to him. We'll remember what a kind, and sweet, and strong, and gentle man he was. We'll be sorry for what we have lost and for what we know could have been, but we are all richer for having known and loved him, and we'll always remember, Jim.

Bonnie C. Wade
University of California, Berkeley

©1985 Society for Ethnomousicology. Reproduced by permission of Bonnie Wade and the Society for Ethnomusicology