R. Anderson Sutton joined the UW-Madison faculty in 1982 and was promoted to full professor in 1993. He teaches courses in ethnomusicology at the undergraduate and graduate levels: Introduction to Music Cultures of the World; Surveys of Music in East Asia and in Southeast Asia; Music, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States; Seminars in Ethnomusicology (theory and method, ethnography and ethnomusicology, oral traditions and music, music and media, and specialty seminars on music of Indonesia), among others. He also directs the UW-Madison Javanese gamelan ensemble, offering beginning and advanced classes in Javanese gamelan performance and presenting concerts in conjunction with the Javanese dance program and invited guest artists on a regular basis.

Since 1973, Professor Sutton has made numerous research trips to Indonesia, concentrating most of his work in Central Java and in South Sulawesi. He is the author of major books on Makassarese performing arts (Calling Back the Spirit: Music, Dance, and Cultural Politics in Lowland South Sulawesi, Oxford, 2002) and on Javanese gamelan music (Traditions of Gamelan Music in Java, Cambridge, 1991; and Variation in Central Javanese Gamelan Music, Northern Illinois, 1993). Since 2001 he has been devoting much of his research time to recent musical developments in South Korea, and is currently working on a book whose focus is "new music" in East and Southeast Asia. In addition, he has published numerous articles on music in Indonesia and Korea, including aspects of music television in both countries, and he wrote the Indonesia chapter in the widely-used ethnomusicology textbook Worlds of Music (Schirmer, latest edition, 2005). Sutton has served as First Vice President of the Society for Ethnomusicology, and is chair of the Publications Advisory Committee of that society and on the editorial board of three scholarly music journals. He is now serving his third term as Director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at UW-Madison (2006-2009), and recently completed a six-year term as co-director of the UW-Madison's Research Circle on "Media, Performance, and Identity in World Perspective." He has also taught at the Universities of Michigan and Hawaii and performed and lectured throughout the United States, and in Southeast Asia, China, Korea, Australia, Great Britain, and the Netherlands.