Fredric Lieberman

Fredric Lieberman (died May 4, 2013) was an American ethnomusicologist, composer, music professor, and author. As a faculty member at the University of California at Santa Cruz, he was affiliated with the Music Department (including the undergraduate degree programs, the master's program in ethnomusicology, and the Ph.D. program in cross-cultural musicology). UCSC is where he became known for teaching and studying the Grateful Dead. He was perhaps best known for his role as the key contact between the University of California at Santa Cruz and The Grateful Dead, in finding a home for the band's archives at the University's McHenry Library and for his collaboration with Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart on three of Hart's books: Planet Drum, Drumming at the Edge of Magic, and Spirit Into Sound. He was a composer of music and published several of his compositions. He co-authored a biographical study of composer Lou Harrison with Dr. Leta Miller and authored numerous other publications. His early research focused on East Asian musics (especially Chinese music, but his geographic areas of interest included Japan, Korea, Tibet, and South India), then American vernacular music (from Tin Pan Alley to contemporary rock), as well as his work on theories of organology and copyright law (as applied to music and intellectual property). He was an avid collector of traditional musical instruments from around the world.

Fredric Lieberman was raised in New York and graduated from Fieldston High School in 1958. He attended the Eastman School of Music where he graduated with a Bachelors in Music with a focus in composition, musicology, and conducting. Lieberman continued his education by receiving a Masters from the University of Hawaii at Manoa in Ethnomusicology. In 1968 he was given his Ph. D in Music with an emphasis in Ethnomusicology from the University of California, Los Angeles. Through the years he has taught at Brown, the University of Washington, and eventually settled at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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