Judith Becker

Who is Judith Becker?

Judith O. Becker is an ethnomusicologist and Southeast Asianist noted for her study of musics in South and Southeast Asia, including Javanese gamelan, Burmese harp, music and trance, music and emotion, neuroscience, and a theoretical rapprochement of empirical and qualitative methods. Becker is professor emeritus of music at the University of Michigan. From 2000 until her retirement in 2008, Becker was the Glenn McGeoch Collegiate Professor of Musicology at University of Michigan.

Becker completed a bachelor's degree in music at the University of Michigan before completing the doctorate there in 1972. Her early work was based on in-depth ethnography and on-site research of the Burmese harp and Javanese gamelan; however, her later work challenged in-depth ethnography as the dominant research method in ethnomusicology, specifically by investigating the relationship between esoteric texts of Tantrism and sufism with musical thinking and more recently through explorations of the intersections of neuroscience, music, and emotion. These studies, which were informed by ethnography as well as other research methods, were the basis for Becker's books Gamelan Stories and Deep Listeners. From 1968 to 2002, Becker was director of the University of Michigan Javanese gamelan ensemble, and with Alton L. Becker directed many performances of wayang and klenengang in Ann Arbor and Indonesia.