Dr. Albert R. Rice is a clarinetist, author, an appraiser of musical instruments, and a librarian for the Los Angeles Public Library.

From 1986 to 2008, he was curator of the Kenneth G. Fiske Museum of Musical Instruments at The Claremont Colleges.

He awards include the Galpin Society’s 1999 Anthony Baines Memorial Prize; the American Musical Instrument Society’s 2011 Nicholas Bessaraboff Prize for the most distinguished book length publication written in English in 2009; and the American Musical Instrument Society’s 2011 Curt Sachs Prize honoring lifetime devotion to scholarship related to musical instruments.

Although his main area of research is the history of the clarinet, his articles and reviews encompass keyboard, woodwind, brass, percussion, and stringed instruments, and instrumental tutors and treatises.

Rice’s three books published by Oxford University Press are: The Baroque Clarinet (1992), The Clarinet in the Classical Period (2003), and From the Clarinet D’Amour to the Contra Bass: A History of the Large Size Clarinets, 1740-1860 (2009).