George Herzog
(1901–1983)

In his day, George Herzog was a leading expert on Native American music. He rose to this position because of his fieldwork among the Apache, Comanche, Dakota, Maricopa, Navajo, Pima, Pueblo, Yuma, and Zuni.

Born in Budapest, Hungary, Herzog pursued musicology (the study of the science, history, forms and methods of music) and anthropology (the study of humans, especially of the physical and cultural characteristics) in Budapest and Berlin. He came to the United States in 1925 and became a research associate in anthropology at the University of Chicago in 1929. Through that program, he studied West African music in Liberia. In 1937, he got his Ph.D. at Columbia University in New York.

Herzog went to the University of Indiana at Bloomington in 1948. There, he founded the Archives of Traditional Music, which, together with the Library of Congress, houses the premier collection of recorded American Indian music. As a professor of anthropology and folk music at the University of Indiana, Herzog taught that music should be studied within a cultural context. He merged the fields of comparative musicology and anthropology into ethnomusicology—the study of music as a cultural phenomenon.

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