Vida Chenoweth - Academic Career

Academic Career

In 1961 she nearly lost the fingers of her right hand in a gas oven explosion which left her hand severely burned. Unable to regain complete freedom of movement, she turned her attention toward linguistics and ethnomusicology.

She went to the Territory of New Guinea and served for thirteen years with Wycliffe Bible Translators as a linguist and Bible translator. There, with colleague Darlene Bee, she lived with the Usarufa tribe and learned their unwritten language. After Dr. Bee’s death, she completed a translation of the New Testament in Usarufa. Meanwhile, she studied the music of the Usarufas and many other tribes and became internationally known as a scholar who pioneered a new method of ethnic music analysis. She authored eleven books, including her textbooks Melodic Perception and Analysis and The Usarufas and Their Music, and numerous articles on the validity of oral music traditions throughout the world. She then developed a program in ethnomusicology for the Wheaton College Conservatory of Music based on her own theory of analyzing the music of unwritten music traditions. She has since retired as International Consultant for Wycliffe and as Professor of Ethnomusicology at Wheaton College and has archived her nearly 1000 field tapes of world music in the Library of Congress.

Chenoweth also studied composition and wrote several pieces for marimba. While in high school in 1948, she spent part of a summer studying marimba with Clair Omar Musser at Northwestern University. She then attended William Woods College in Missouri, transferring to Northwestern for her final two years of study and emerged with a double degree in music criticism and marimba performance. For graduate school, Chenoweth attended the American Conservatory in Chicago (1952–1953), where she studied pedagogy of music theory, and canon and fugue with Stella Roberts, a pupil of Nadia Boulanger, and earned a double degree in music theory and percussion. In 1974 she earned a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She is included in seven different Who’s Who lists and is named as one of the two thousand outstanding musicians of the twentieth century.