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CHAMPAIGN - In his foreword to Bruno Nettl's latest book, "Nettl's Elephant: On the History of Ethnomusicology," Anthony Seeger calls Nettl a living legend in the field.
For decades, Nettl shaped thinking in ethnomusicology and participated in many of its events and processes that he describes in the new book published by the University of Illinois Press, Seeger noted.
"Professor Nettl is an author of considerable wit as well as erudition, as anyone knows who has heard him give lectures or tell stories or received his holiday e-mails," Seeger (nephew of Pete) wrote. "The essays are fun to read partly because he often uses 'throwaway' lines - frequently placed at the end of paragraphs - to make his most profound statements or critiques, doing so without the fanfare and self-congratulation so common in our field but rather with humor or apparent (but not real) unconsciousness."
In that sense, the book of essays - Nettl calls it a personal retrospective of the field he helped establish - also offers glimpses into his life.
But perhaps better in that regard is another book, self-published this year by Nettl and his wife, Wanda, through their publishing firm, Elephant & Cat, a name that's a nod to the elephant figurines that he collects and the feline ones she favors.
That book, "Perverse at Eighty, for family and friends," is a collection of the poetry that Nettl has written through the years to celebrate birthdays and other important events and to tell of his earlier times and "excursions into academe" as well as other subjects that strike his verbal muse.
Nettl self-deprecatingly calls his poems verse or doggerel, but the subjects of his verses ("Perverse" means through verse and is not a reference to a sexual peccadillo) likely don't view them in that way. One is Alice Herz Sommer, a pianist and music teacher who at age 107 is the world's oldest known Holocaust survivor.
In 2003, when Nettl was 73, he hopped an airplane to London just to attend her centennial birthday party - and he returned the next day to his home in Champaign.
Here's the first stanza of that verse for Sommer:
A hundred years? Can't be! With flowers and wine,
They came from far and...