Dr. Gerhard Kubik (1934– ) is an ethnomusicologist specializing in the music of Africa and the worldwide African diaspora. Currently a professor in the musicology department of the University of Vienna, he was a student there until earning his PhD in cultural anthropology in 1971. Through fieldwork spanning more than thirty-five years in eighteen countries of sub-Saharan Africa and the South American countries of Venezuela and Brazil as well as the United States, Kubik has amassed the largest collection of African traditional music worldwide (more than 25,000 recordings), most of which are archived in the Phonogrammarchiv Wien in Vienna.

Throughout his research, Dr. Kubik stresses the totality of expressive culture to encompass not only music, but language, oral literature, costume, art, and performance. His publications are extensive, and include ethnographic studies as well as attempts to deal with larger concepts such as African approaches to rhythm, and Africanisms in American music. Translated into several languages, his over 300 scholarly articles and encyclopedia entries cover these topics and more, including African and African-American music and dance, masquerades, and the psychology of culture contact. He has written several important books in the field, among them Theory of African Music (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), Angolan Traits in Black Music, Games and Dances of Brazil: A Study of African Cultural Extensions Overseas (Lisboa: Junta de Investigações Científicas do Ultramar, 1979), Malaŵian music: a framework for analysis (Zomba: Centre for Social Research, University of MalaŵI, 1987) and Africa and the Blues (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999).

Dr. Kubik has received many awards including an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, the Körner Foundation Prize in Vienna, and a Senior Research Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. He was also one of the 1997 Rockefeller Foundation Resident Fellows at the Center for Black Music Research.

Dr. Moya Aliya Malamusi and Dr. Kubik enjoy a longstanding collaborative relationship. Kubik maintains a base in Malamusi’s hometown of Chileka, Malawi and has an affiliation with the Centre for Social Research at the University of Malawi. Both scholars are also performers and have appeared internationally with Donald Kachamba’s Heritage Jazzband (Kubik on guitar and clarinet, Malamusi on guitar), which specializes in kwela and other southern African styles.