UMass Boston

American music, world music, ethnomusicology

PhD, Florida State University

David B. Pruett is an ethnomusicologist specializing in American folk and popular musics, commercial country music, MuzikMafia, musics of the Middle East and India, composer Carl Orff and the Guentherschule and German language and literature. Secondary areas of interest include global popular music, second language acquisition and study abroad. Dr. Pruett received his BMus in music performance (percussion) and a BA (equivalent) in German at Appalachian State University in 1996. He received his MA in German and MM in Musicology (Ethnomusicology) with a certificate in world music from the Florida State University in 2000, where he completed his PhD in Musicology (Ethnomusicology) in 2007. Dr. Pruett has participated in five study abroad programs, totaling over three years in Germany, two of which comprised a year-long stint at the University of Wurzburg and the Wurzburg Conservatory of Music, where he studied percussion under Siegfried Fink.

Dr. Pruett’s publications include articles in the journal Ethnomusicology, the Country Music Annual (2002), The Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World (2005); four entries in the Encyclopedia of Appalachia (2005); Discourses in Music 4:1 (Fall 2002); an article on Carl Orff in the Journal of Historical Research in Music Education; twenty entries in the Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd ed. (2013); and his recent monograph, MuzikMafia: From the Local Nashville Scene to the National Mainstream (University Press of Mississippi, 2010). Since spring 2000 he has presented 46 academic papers at meetings for the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM); the American Musicological Society (AMS); the Society for American Music (SAM); the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM-US); the Experience Music Project; the International Bluegrass Symposium; the International Country Music Conference (ICMC); and Tennessee's CMENC. In 2009 Dr. Pruett released his first recording, Bella-Musiqa, an album of instrumental music from the Middle East. He is former President of the Northeast Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology (NECSEM), on the board of advisors to the Southern Music Hall of Fame and is a member of the national music honor society Pi Kappa Lambda.