Blum, Stephen 1942-

After completing his dissertation fieldwork in the summer of 1969, Professor Stephen Blum taught first at Western Illinois University (1969-73) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1973-77). From 1977 to 1987 he was the founding director of an M.F.A. program in “Musicology of Contemporary Cultures” at York University in Toronto. Since 1987, he has taught at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center, where he initiated a concentration in ethnomusicology. Following the Revolution of 1979, Dr. Blum was unable to return to Iran until 1995, when he donated copies of his earlier recordings to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, and made additional recordings in Khorāsān as well as in the city of Qazvin, northwest of Tehran. He began to make more frequent visits in 2006, and remains in close contact with Iranian students and colleagues. He is collaborating with Dr. Ameneh Youssefzadeh on a series of critical editions of narratives (dāstān) in Khorasani Turkish, and in 2007 the Mahoor Institute of Culture and Art began to issue compact discs drawn from his recordings.

This collection holds the originally recorded fieldwork on audio reels. Copies are held by the University of Illinois Archives of Ethnomusicology [Collections 61 and 67], the Archive of Revolutionary Song maintained by the Iranian Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, and the Ethnomusicology Archive of the City University of New York Graduate Center [Collections 89-034-F, 89-039-F and 93-009-F].

From the guide to the The Stephen Blum Collection of Music from Iranian Khorāsān at Harvard University: original ethnographic sound recordings, 1968- 2006., (Archive of World Music, Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library, Harvard College Library, Harvard University)