List, George, 1911-2008

George List was born George Harold Lisitsky in Tucson, Arizona in 1911. In 1933, he graduated from The Julliard School with a diploma in flute performance, and in 1941, earned a Bachelor’s degree in music education from Columbia University. After completing a Master’s in the same field at Columbia in 1945, he went onto earn a PhD in music theory with minors in composition and education from Indiana University in 1954. Throughout his life, List remained active as a musician, composer, and scholar of ethnomusicology and folklore.

Before entering academia, List had a career as a school music teacher in New York City. In 1934, he established and directed the Madison Square Boys Club, a music school for underprivileged children in Manhattan. From 1939-1943, List remained in New York, teaching and directing several orchestras and bands in public school systems, as well as conducting for the International Workers Order. During this time, he was also active as a performing flutist in New York and Denver, and also published several compositions for flute, piano, voice, orchestra, and band.

List began his academic career as an Instructor of Music at Colorado College from 1945-1946, then quickly became Assistant Professor (1946-1948) and Associate Professor (1948-1953) of music at Miami University in Ohio. He moved to Indiana University in 1954, where he remained until his retirement in 1976. During this time, he was prominent in the establishment of the Archives of Traditional Music and the Ethnomusicology program.

During his time at Indiana University, List taught courses in folk music, music, anthropology, and folklore, and served as Director of the Archives of Traditional Music from 1954-1976 and Director of the Inter-American Program in Ethnomusicology at Indiana University from 1966-1976. His primary research interests included folk music, the traditional music of the Hopi tribes of Northern Arizona, as well as the music of indigenous tribes in the Caribbean regions of Colombia and the Andes and Amazon regions of Ecuador. Some of his notable publications include Cantos Costeños, Folksongs of the Atlantic Coastal Region of Colombia (1973), Music and Poetry in a Colombian Village: A Tri-Cultural Heritage (1983), Singing About It: Folksong in Southern Indiana (1991), and Stability and Variation in Hopi Song (1993). He also founded and edited the periodical The Folklore and Folkmusic Archivist and created and narrated the television program Music in the Life of Man, produced by the Indiana University Department of Radio and Television.

List’s most prominent contributions to Indiana University were his involvement in developing the ethnomusicology program and his tenure as Director of the Archives of Traditional Music. Since ethnomusicology was not yet an established field, List began his career as a lecturer in folk music, anthropology, and the recording and transcripting of traditional music. In 1964, he was appointed an associate professor in the Department of Folklore. In 1966, with the help of a grant from the Ford Foundation, List established and taught in the Inter-American Program in Ethnomusicology within the Folklore Department. This program specialized in the traditional music of the Americas, Europe, and Africa, only the third program of this type in existence at the time.

Between 1954-1976, List also served as the Director of the Archives of Traditional Music. During this time, he formulated policies and procedures for the processing and use of the collections, making them accessible to researchers. His contributions were instrumental in turning the archives into an internationally known public research resource. Additionally, he was one of the first people to create practices for archiving and cataloging these types of materials, and some of his procedures served as models for similar music archives, such as those at UCLA.

List retired from Indiana University in 1977 due to the onset of blindness caused by glaucoma. Despite his retirement, he remained active in the field of ethnomusicology, writing books, obtaining research grants, giving lectures, staying active in professional organizations, and publishing articles up to the age of ninety-one. List passed away on September 28, 2008 at the age of 97.

From the guide to the George List papers, 1894-2008, bulk 1958-1990, (Indiana University Office of University Archives and Records Management http://www.libraries.iub.edu/archives)