EMSHEIMER, ERNST

EMSHEIMER, ERNST (1904–1989), Swedish musicologist of German birth. Born in Frankfurt on the Main, Germany, Emsheimer studied piano and music theory, and thereafter musicology, at the universities of Vienna and Freiburg, where he received his doctorate in 1927. After concluding his studies he went to Soviet Russia, where he began his research on folk and non-European musical traditions. He was research assistant at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Leningrad from 1932 until 1937, and accompanied a music research expedition in northern Caucasia in 1936. In 1937 he joined a scientific expedition to the northwestern provinces of China. In 1937 Emsheimer immigrated to Sweden, where he intensified the ethnomusicological tradition. From 1949 until his retirement in 1973 he was the curator of the music history museum in Stockholm. After War World ii he investigated Georgian folk polyphony. In 1962, he created jointly with Erik Stockmann the first study group on European instruments under the auspices of the International Folk Music Council and founded the famous series of studies dedicated to popular European and non-European instruments under the title Studia Instrumentorum Musicae Popularis, of which the first volume appeared in 1969. His writings include Musikethnographische Bibliogra phie der nichtslavischen Voelker in Russland (1943); Preliminary Remarks on Mongolian Music and Instruments (1943); Music of Eastern Mongolia (1943); and Lappischer Kultgesang (1950).

bibliography:

mgg², s.v; ng², s.v.

[Amnon Shiloah (2^nd ed.)]