Michael B. Bakan, Ph.D.

Michael Bakan is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology and Head of Ethnomusicology/World Music in the College of Music at Florida State University (Tallahassee). He is the director of the university’s Balinese gamelan ensemble, Sekaa Gong Hanuman Agung, and of the Music-Play Project at FSU, a medical ethnomusicology program for children on the autism spectrum and their families. He has been a visiting professor or invited lecturer at Harvard, Yale, Indiana, and Boston universities, at the Berklee College of Music, and at the universities of Chicago, Washington, Colorado, Louisiana, Florida, Illinois, and British Columbia. He formerly served as president of the Southeast/Caribbean Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology.

Bakan’s latest book, World Music: Traditions and Transformations (McGraw-Hill, 2007), has been adopted at more than 100 colleges and universities nationwide and internationally. His first book, Music of Death and New Creation: Experiences in the World of Balinese Gamelan Beleganjur (University of Chicago Press, 1999), was selected to the Choice Outstanding Academic Titles list for the year 2000 and was recognized in The Times (London) as one of the two “most significant publications on Balinese music in almost half a century” (17 May 2002). His many other publications encompass topics ranging from Indonesian music and world percussion to electronic music technology, early jazz history, multicultural music education, film music, and the ethnomusicology of autism. These have appeared in scholarly journals such as Ethnomusicology, Asian Music, Ethnomusicology Forum, and College Music Symposium, and in books published by Oxford University Press, the University of California Press, and the Music Educators National Conference, among others. He serves as Series Editor for the new Routledge Focus on World Music series and formerly served in that same capacity for the critically acclaimed ABC-CLIO World Music Series.

As a percussionist, Bakan has performed with many renowned world music, jazz, symphonic, and new music artists and organizations, including the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the Music at Marlboro Festival Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Green Umbrella Players, Rudolf Serkin, John Cage, A. J. Racy, Tito Puente, Phil Nimmons, I Ketut Sukarata, I Ketut Gedé Asnawa, I Nyoman Sedana, I Nyoman Wenten, and the championship beleganjur groups of Batur Tengah and Tatasan Kaja, Bali, Indonesia. He also is active as a composer, with traditional and experimental works for Balinese gamelan, intercultural jazz compositions, and film and modern dance scores to his credit. Leon Anderson Jr., Dana Hall, David Okerlund, Dale Olsen, Pamela Ryan, Wayne Goins, Charles Tremblay, Joël Johnson, Ben Koen, and Damascus Kafumbe are some of the artists who have been featured in performances of his works.