Mantle Hood (June 24, 1918 – July 31, 2005) was an American ethnomusicologist. Among other areas, he specialized in studying gamelan music from Indonesia. Hood pioneered, in the 1950s and 1960s, a new approach to the study of music, and the creation of the first American university program devoted to ethnomusicology, at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He was known for a suggestion, somewhat novel at the time, that his students learn to play the music they were studying. Biography Born and raised in Springfield, Illinois, Hood studied piano as a child and played clarinet and tenor saxophone in regional jazz clubs in his teens. Despite his talent as a musician, he had no plans to make it his profession. He moved to Los Angeles in the 1930s and wrote pulp fiction while employed as a draftsman in the aeronautical industry. After Army service in Europe during World War II, he returned to Los Angeles. He enrolled in the School of Agriculture at the University of California before transferring to UCLA. Between 1945 and 1950 Mantle Hood studied Western music under composer Ernst Toch and composed several classical pieces. Hood earned both his BA in music and MA in composition from UCLA in 1951. As a Fulbright scholar, Hood studied Indonesian music under Jaap Kunst at the University of Amsterdam. He wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on pathet, translated as the modal system of Central Javanese music. He proposed that the contours of the balungan (nuclear theme) melody are the primary determinants of Javanese musical modes. The dissertation, The Nuclear Theme as a Determinant of Patet in Javanese Music was published in 1954. After completing his doctoral work in 1954, Hood spent two years in Indonesia doing field research funded by a Ford Foundation fellowship. He joined the faculty at UCLA where he established the first gamelan performance program in the United States in 1958. He also founded the Institute for Ethnomusicology at UCLA in 1960. UCLA quickly became an important American hub of this rapidly developing field. Hood's work spawned a legion of teachers and leaders of the more than 100 gamelan groups in the United States today. A renowned expert in Javanese and Balinese music and culture, Hood received honors from the Indonesian government for his research, among them the conferral of the title Ki (literally "the venerable") in 1986, and in 1992 was one of the