Richard K. Wolf

Richard K. Wolf, Professor of Music and South Asian Studies, began teaching in the Music Department at Harvard in 1999. He has been conducting ethnomusicological research in South Asia since 1982 and in Central Asia since 2012. Author of two monographs and editor of three collections, Wolf has published on such topics as social-cultural “style” in South Indian classical music, conceptions of space, time and music among the Kota tribal people in the Nilgiri Hills of south India, and drumming, “recitation,” and music in public Islamic contexts in India and Pakistan. Wolf’s current projects include a monograph on poet-singers entitled "The Nightingale’s Despair: Music and Moral Being in Greater Central Asia" and a volume, co-edited with Virginia Danielson, entitled "Musical Thinking: Poetry, Improvisation and Theory," both under contract with Oxford University Press. Wolf is also an ethnographic filmmaker. His first film, Two Poets and a River (distributed by Documentary Educational Resources), concerns the poetry, music, and lives of two Wakhi poets living on opposite sides of the river that divides Tajikistan and Afghanistan. He is currently working on a series of films, entitled Pots of Millet, Faces of Gold, concerning transformations in the indigenous Kota community of South India over the past century. He holds a 2023 article prize from the International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance for a comparative piece bringing together his Kota and Wakhi work: “The musical poetry of endangered languages: Kota and Wakhi Poem-Songs in South and Central Asia” (Oral Tradition 35). From 2012-2018 Wolf held a Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. During the 2018-19 academic year he was the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Fellow at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. His most recent book-length publication is Thought and Play in Musical Rhythm (OUP 2019), a volume he coedited with Stephen Blum and Christopher Hasty. Wolf is also a writer of creative non-fiction and a performer on the South Indian vina.