With a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, she traveled to thirteen Asian countries to collect books scores, and recordings of traditional and contemporary music. The university’s first course in non-Western music, based on the material she had collected in Asia, was taught by Professor Smith in 1957. In 1959, she and her colleague in music education, Dorothy Kahanaui Gillet, taught a course for elementary school teachers, “Pacific and Asian Music in Music Education.”
During the planning stages for the East-West Center, established at the university in 1960, Professor Smith was an influential advocate for performing arts; during the 1970’s she conducted training programs for Asians and Pacific islanders at the center. In 1963, at the request of Micronesians studying at the university, she conducted field research in the Trust Territory.
Professor Smith completed the editing of The Queen's Songbook started by Dorothy Kahananui Gillet published by Islander Group Incorporated.
At UH she developed new courses that focused on the study of music and the relationship it shares with the development of a culture, a study that came to be known as ethnomusicology. She also established the master’s degree program in ethnomusicology in 1960. Today the ethnomusicology program at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa is one of the world’s most widely celebrated. She formally retired from UH in 1982.
Professor Smith took her greatest pleasure from the contributions to ethnomusicology being made by both her former students, as wall as in her continuing contacts with scholars and performance traditions.
(Adapted from the “SEM Newsletter” of the Society of Ethnomusicology, and the Ojai Valley School Alumni Profiles.)
About Professor Smith
Dr. Barbara B. Smith was born on June 10, 1920 in Ventura, CA to Fred W. and Grace Hobson Smith. She attended Ojai Valley School whose founder Edward Yeomans made a constant and consistent effort to instill a love of music in the students. She graduated from Nordholf High School in 1938. Barbara became an accomplished pianist and continued her musical interests as an undergraduate at Pomona College and completed her graduate education at The Eastman School of Music. After completing her Masters at Eastman in 1945 she took a position at the University of Hawaii to teach piano and music theory at their recently established music department.
She soon realized that that the program, then almost exclusively focused on Western art and Musics, should not be limited to the music of only on of Hawaii’s multi-ethnic communities. As a pianist she decided to approach other musics in the same way she had western music and in 1955, began Japanese Koto lessons with Kay Mikami.
In 1956, she went to Japan to study with Miyagi Michio. In the 1960’s, to better understand similarities and differences in east Asian musics and the aesthetics. She also studied the Koto as played in Japanese Gagaku and in the Okinawan tradition, as well as the Korean Kayageum and the Chinese Chen. In addition, she learned some drum traditions of Korea and Japan was in demand as one of the best drummers in the Iwakuni tradition.
