Georg Herzog studied at the
Budapest Music Academy from 1917 to 1919, and at the
Hochschule für Musik in
Charlottenburg. Starting in 1921, he assisted
Carl Stumpf and
Erich Moritz von Hornbostel in the
Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv. In 1925, he emigrated to the United States, where he received a postgraduate degree in
anthropology from
Columbia University. While there, he studied with
Franz Boas,
Edward Sapir and
Ruth Benedict. In 1930/31 he went on a research trip to
Liberia, where he recorded, on behalf of Sapir, the language and folk music of the
Jabo people. He received a
Guggenheim Fellowship in 1935 (and 1947). Through field research, he wrote his doctoral thesis in 1937
A comparison of Pueblo and Pima musical styles which made him one of the fore-most authoritative scholars for
American Indian music. He taught and conducted research at the
University of Chicago,
Yale University and
Columbia University. During
World War II, he worked in the
US Army in
Military Intelligence. Herzog was a professor of
Anthropology at
Indiana University Bloomington from 1948 to 1958 where he formally established the
Archives of Traditional Music which he had begun collecting in 1936 while he was at Columbia University. His establishing of a formal sound recording archive, in the model of the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, shaped the nascent field of ethnomusicology by centering the preservation of sound recordings as a crucial methodological approach in the discipline. This legacy was carried forward by his student
Bruno Nettl who continued the work of bring together ethnology and cultural anthropology with historical and systematic musicology. Herzog was a North American pioneer in the field of
ethnomusicology and posed such radical research questions as:
"do animals have music?" (1941). Herzog was a member of the Board of Advisers of the
Institute of Jazz Studies and was briefly president in 1955. He, along with
David P. McAllester,
Alan Merriam,
Willard Rhodes und
Charles Seeger, founded the
Society for Ethnomusicology. After a serious illness in 1950, he had to give up work in 1958, retired in 1962, and lived for the next twenty years in a sanatorium. == Writings (selection) ==