Siegfried Frederick Nadel

Siegfried Frederick Nadel
Born	24 April 1903
Died	14 January 1956 Canberra
Citizenship	British
Nationality	Austria
Fields	anthropologist

Siegfried Frederick Nadel (24 April 1903 – 14 January 1956), known as Fred Nadel, was an Austrian-born British anthropologist, specialising in African ethnology.

Nadel was born in Vienna, Austria the son of a lawyer. He started his education in music, entering the Musik Akademie and the Musikhistorisches Institut in Vienna in 1920. He also developed interests in philosophy and psychology. He went on to study the latter with Karl Bühler at the Psychologisches Institut at the University of Vienna, and the former with Moritz Schlick. On 11 November 1925 graduated with a doctorate, his thesis being "Zur Psychologie des Konsonanzerlebens".

His career was at first in music. He served as an assistant conductor of the Düsseldorf Opera House and, in 1927, organized and conducted an opera company that toured Czechoslovakia performing Verdi and Puccini. On his return to Vienna he continued a career as a musician and began publishing on the topic as well. In 1930 published a book on musical typology entitled Der Duale Sinn der Music. and in 1931 he produced a biography of the Italian composer Ferruccio Benvenuto Busoni entitled simple Ferruccio Busoni, 1866-1924.

Throughout this period Nadel served as an assistant at the Psychologisches Institut and grew more and more interested in ethnomusicology. He produced radio programs for Radio Vienna on music which included discussions of non-Western music, and in 1930 wrote a piece on the marimba. This transformed into an interest in the anthropology of Africa, which was encouraged by Diedrich Westermann, with whom Nadel studied the musicology of 'primitive peoples' at the Phonogrammarchiv in Berlin, and African languages at the University of Berlin.

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