Willard Rhodes, 91; Ethnomusicologist

Willard Rhodes, an ethnomusicologist who specialized in American and African music and who founded the Society for Ethnomusicology, has died in Sun City, Ariz. The emeritus professor of music at Columbia University was 91.

Rhodes, whose vast collections of traditional and folk music are in the Library of Congress, UCLA and other centers, in 1968 became the first musicologist from North America to head the International Folk Music Council, now the Council for Traditional Music.

At Columbia, where he earned a master’s degree in 1925 and taught from 1937 to 1969, he conducted the school’s opera workshop and before that was an assistant conductor at the Cincinnati Supper Opera Co. Rhodes died May 15.