Stephen Blum

The field recordings from his research trips to Iran were donated to Harvard University, where they have been digitized and posted publicly online as the Stephen Blum Collection of Music from Iranian Khorāsān. In 1995, Blum donated copies of this collection to Iran's Ministry of Islamic Culture and Guidance.

Blum was to later co-edit the 1991 festschrift for Nettl, Ethnomusicology and Modern Music History, along with former Nettl students Philip Bohlman and Daniel M. Neuman.

Blum often returned to his Western roots, a prominent example being an article on the writing and music of Charles Ives published in 1977 in The Musical Quarterly. He discusses and analyzes Ives’ music through his writing, tackling the motivations and perceptions of a stubborn and controversial artist, concluding that Ives’ "musical techniques aimed to explore 'processes of musical differentiation' in relationships of sounds, with reference to their social and moral contexts." He has often tackled theoretical issues in musicology, ethnomusicology.

Blum's ethnographic focus on northeastern Iran in his PhD dissertation led to a number of published articles early in his career discussing the folksinging traditions of these regions. His final observations were not just theoretical, but took into consideration the racial and classist attitudes among his informants, the implications of which are included in his ethnographic work. In "The Concept of the ‘Asheq in Northern Khorasan" (1972) Blum presents part of his fieldwork undertaken in 1969 for his dissertation but pointedly focuses on social folk music of the (primarily) Kurdish minority. In 1974, his article, "Persian Folksong in Meshhed (Iran)", Blum continued a detailed rhythmic and melodic analysis of ten folk songs while focusing on informant-perceived rural and urban difference in style and performance. He observed that a lack of singing and dancing in Iranian society is not linked to a rural and urban divide but is a privation of poverty. He noted,

Blum’s teaching career began at Western Illinois University (1967–73), followed by an assistant professorship at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign until 1977. He then moved to Toronto's York University, where he remained for ten years, founding the MFA program "Music and Contemporary Cultures", the first of its kind Canada. In 1987 he founded the ethnomusicology program at City University of New York Graduate Center, where he worked until his retirement in 2016.

Blum received a bachelor's degree from Oberlin College in 1964,and then a PhD in music at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. As a PhD student, Blum worked with music scholars including Alexander Ringer, Charles Hamm, and Bruno Nettl. His first publications were co-authored with Nettl, a pioneering historical musicologist and ethnomusicologist, and supervising his dissertation, Musics in Contact: The Cultivation of Oral Repertoires in Meshed Iran, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, 1972.

Stephen Blum (born March 4, 1942) is an American scholar and musician, whose research has primarily been in ethnomusicology. He has lent a multidisciplinary approach to the writing and publication of numerous articles discussing a wide range of musical topics and ideas.