University of Massachusetts, Boston

Faculty Member, Performing Arts

Assistant Professor of Music

College of Liberal Arts

About

Dr. Pruett’s areas of specialization are American folk and popular musics, commercial country music, MuzikMafia, musics of the Middle East and India, composer Carl Orff and the Güntherschule, and German language and literature. Secondary areas of interest include global popular music, second language acquisition, and study abroad. His publications include articles in the journal Ethnomusicology 55(1) (winter 2011), the Country Music Annual 2002, The Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World (2005), four entries in the Encyclopedia of Appalachia (2005), Discourses in Music 4:1 (Fall 2002), an article on Carl Orff in the Journal of Historical Research in Music Education 24(3) (April 2003), twenty entries in the forthcoming Grove Dictionary of American Music 2nd ed., and his new book on the MuzikMafia (2010). Since spring 2000 he has presented 37 academic papers at meetings for the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), the American Musicological Society (AMS), the Society for American Music (SAM), the International Association for the the Study of Popular Music (IASPM-US), the Experience Music Project, the International Bluegrass Symposium, the International Country Music Conference (ICMC), and Tennessee's CMENC. In 2008 Dr. Pruett released his first recording Bella-Musiqa, an album of instrumental music from the Middle East. He is on the board of advisors to the Southern Music Hall of Fame and is a member of the national music honor society Pi Kappa Lambda.

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