Paul F. Berliner

Ethnomusicologist Paul Franklin Berliner specializes in Zimbabwean music and jazz, and more generally, aural traditions, creativity, and improvisation-based music systems. He is the author of The Soul of Mbira: Music and Traditions of the Shona People of Zimbabwe, awarded an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award, and Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation, which received the Alan Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology. He has produced two LPs based on his ethnographic field recordings, The Soul of Mbira and Shona Mbira Music, which served as companions to his first book.

A musical associate of Zimbabwean mbira players since the early 1970s, he has performed with Cosmas Magaya, Beauler Dyoko, and Ephat Mujuru, the mbira ensemble Mhuri yekwaRwizi, and The Zimbabwe Group Leaders Mbira Ensemble. After Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980, he served as a US Information Agency academic specialist assisting with the early development of the ethnomusicology program at the Zimbabwe College of Music and with the indigenization of the College’s curriculum.

Berliner is Emeritus Professor of Music at Duke University. He is the recipient of an honorary doctorate from DePaul University (Chicago), and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.