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Robert Garfias was born in San Francisco in 1932, the child of Mexican-American parents. As a youngster he studied classical guitar and jazz saxophone. In high school he studied Western classical music composition, and he formed a jazz combo that played gigs for beatniks in the North Beach area of San Francisco, where he traveled in a circle of musicians that included Dave Brubeck, Vince Delgado, Vince Guaraldi, Harry Partch, and Bill Smith. During his career he founded the ethnomusicology program at the University of Washington; served as Dean of Arts at the University of California, Irvine, as a member of the Smithsonian Council, and as a presidential appointee to the U.S. National Council for the Arts; and conducted significant periods of fieldwork and language study in Japan, Okinawa, Korea, the Philippines, Mexico, Zimbabwe, Central America, Burma, Romania, Turkey, Spain, Portugal, and among Okinawans in the United States.

- Society for Ethnomusicology Newsletter (Vol. 7, No. 4, September 2013)

Roderic C. Knight is an emeritus professor at Oberlin College, where he taught ethnomusicology courses for 32 years (1976-2008). His principal areas of research include the Mandinka people of Gambia, tribal music of Central India, abd organology (the scientific study of musical instruments). Additionally, he created the Knight-Revision of Hornbostel-Sachs, a system for classifying musical instruments.

For more information, see http://www2.oberlin.edu/faculty/rknight/