Gilman, Benjamin Ives

Gilman, Benjamin Ives, American psychologist and ethnomusicologist; b. N.Y., Feb. 19, 1852; d. Boston, March 18, 1933. He studied at Williams Coll. (A.B., 1872), Johns Hopkins Univ. (1881-82), the Univ. of Berlin (1882), and the Univ. of Paris (1886); also did graduate work in psychology at Harvard Univ. (1883-85). He lectured on the psychology of music at Princeton Univ., Columbia Univ., and at Harvard (1883); was asst. prof. of psychology at Clark Univ. (1892-93). He then became secretary of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where he remained until his retirement in 1925. In 1890 Mary Hemenway commissioned J. Walter Fewkes to record Zuni speech and song. Gilman was engaged to do the analysis, and he became the first ethnomusicologist to use the phonograph in analyzing ethnic music. In 1891 he and Fewkes worked together on Hopi transcriptions, for which Gilman invented a graphic notation. At the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, he recorded over 100 cylinders of music, including the earliest extant recordings of music from Java, Samoa, and Serbia. These cylinders were rediscovered in 1976 and provide evidence of change in this music during the 20th century. Gilman was internationally recognized in the field of ethnomusicological research; he also publ. studies on psychology, comparative musicology, museology, and art criticism. Among his important articles are “On Some Psychological Aspects of the Chinese Musical System” Philosophical Review, I (1892), and “Hopi Songs,” Journal of American Archaeology and Ethnology, V (1908).

—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire