Dr. Dennis Waring is founder and owner of Waring Music. Dr. Waring is an ethnomusicologist, educator, author, instrument maker, collector, performer, and arts consultant. He teaches World Music, American Music, and Music Education courses on the university level, and is involved in public education in primary, middle, and high schools. Upon receiving a Bachelor’s of Music Education from the University of Kansas (`67), he taught in public schools in Missouri, New Jersey, Vermont, and Manitoba, Canada. After earning his doctorate from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut (`87), Waring taught at Wesleyan, Brown University, Trinity University, University of Connecticut, and other regional state universities. His World Music Teacher Institutes often take him from coast to coast. Dr. Waring has taken two four month journeys around the world as shipboard ethnomusicologist with the University of Virginia’s Semester At Sea program and was even on MTV’s “Road Rules”!

ETHNOMUSICOLOGIST: Specialist in General World Music and Euro-American Classical, Folk, and Popular Music. Expertise in Latin American, West African and East Asian music and music of the United States, Canada and Europe. Other specialty areas include Organology, Folklore and Popular Culture of the USA.

MUSIC EDUCATOR: Over forty years experience as a music educator. Multicultural specialist and consultant in curricular development and teacher education.

PERFORMER AND PRESENTER: Multi-instrumentalist musician in classical, folk, jazz, and ethnic idioms. Presents multicultural workshops and concert performances. Artist/scholar residencies in various institutions. Educational in-service facilitator and conference presenter.

INSTRUMENT MAKER: Maker of traditional and original musical instruments. Authored six publications on instrument making.

COMPOSER AND ARRANGER: Soundtrack projects for video documentaries and instructional media. Productions include several audio tapes, CD’s and DVD’s.

Newscast featuring Dennis’ cardboard stringed instruments and the Waring Harp. Was selected to be broadcast throughout the world on CNN.

Dr. Waring is in a lineage that traces back to the pioneering anthropologists, Erich Von Hornbostel and Franz Boas (1858-1942).  Boas’ interest in music as culture brought others such as George Herzog on board.  George Herzog, in turn taught David McAllester (Wesleyan University Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Ethnomusicology and a founder of the Society of Ethnomusicology).  And Dr. Waring was privileged to be one of the last doctoral students of Professor McAllester before his retirement in the early 1990s.Over the years, Dr. Waring has gradually amassed his many endeavors under the name of Waring Music. One facet of this conglomerate organization is ethnomusicology. Ethnomusicology is the scholarly study of all the world’s musics, each within their social, historical, geographical, and cultural contexts. Scholars normally have specialties within the ethnomusicology continuum. In this regard, Dr. Waring possesses a broad based knowledge of world music, and is an authority on music of the USA, a specialist in areas of African and Latin American, an organologist (the scholarly study of musical instruments), and an instrument maker.

Waring Music is an educational organization involved with “applied ethnomusicology” through publishing, performing, teaching, composing, and providing access to resources for information, services, and products. Do you need a special music for a particular occasion? Would you like to speak to an authority to confer about an unusual instrument or to check out a bit of folklore? Do you need information about where to find ethnic instruments, quality recordings, or other educational media? Would you like to know where to attend a concert or festival of another country’s music? Waring Music can either answer your questions or help you find a source that will have the answer. Related services such as instrument repair, custom instrument making, a recording and multimedia studio for small projects are also available through Waring Music.

Waring Music headquarters is well situated for access to academic information, facts about music, and musicians from around the world. Middletown, Connecticut is nestled in the rolling woods of Southern New England, halfway between New York City and Boston, and halfway between Hartford and New Haven. Its proximity to universities such as Yale, Wesleyan, Brown and many other private and state colleges make for a high density of talent and resource. Wesleyan University in Middletown, in fact, is one of the pioneering universities in ethnomusicology and continues to offer one of the best graduate programs for the field in the world.