Scholar

(b Stuttgart, March 25, 1871; d Stuttgart, Aug 13, 1927). German musicologist. His father was court Kapellmeister at Stuttgart and composed operas, seven symphonies and other works. From 1890 to 1895 Abert studied classics and then music in Berlin under Bellermann, Fleischer and Friedlaender. He took the doctorate at Berlin in 1897 with a dissertation on Greek music, and in 1902 he completed his Habilitation at the University of Halle with a work on the basis of the aesthetics of medieval melody. He was appointed honorary professor in 1909 and reader in 1911. In 1920 he was appointed professor at the University of Leipzig (succeeding Riemann) and in 1923 he became professor at Berlin University (succeeding Kretzschmar). In 1925 he was elected an ordinary member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences at Berlin, the first musicologist to have earned this distinction.

Abert was one of the leading German musicologists of his generation, and he did much to increase regard for his subject among followers of more traditional university disciplines. His numerous distinguished pupils include his daughter ...

(b Berlin, May 30, 1872; d Berlin, Jan 24, 1926). German physician and psychologist. He graduated in medicine at Berlin University in 1894, and thereafter dedicated himself primarily to psychoacoustics and the physiology of music. From 1896 to 1905 he was assistant professor under Carl Stumpf at the Psychological Institute of Berlin University (which in 1905 became the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv). In 1900, when Hornbostel joined the staff, Abraham and Stumpf recorded on wax cylinders a visiting Siamese court orchestra – the first German attempt to record non-Western music. Abraham also recorded music from South Africa in the same year. In 1901 he published an article on absolute pitch which later (1906) resulted in a polemic between him and Auerbach. Adopting Stumpf's methods, Abraham and Hornbostel entered into a collaboration which laid the foundation for comparative musicology; he also collaborated with the physiologist and otologist K.L. Schaefer (...

(b St Petersburg, 10/Feb 22, 1846; d Bonn, July 26, 1926). Russian composer and ethnomusicologist. The name Adayevskaya is a pseudonym derived from the notes of the kettledrum (A, D, A) in Mikhail Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila. At the age of eight she started piano lessons with Henselt, continued with Anton Rubinstein and Dreyschock at the St Petersburg Conservatory (1862–4), and later gave concerts in Russia and Europe. She also studied composition at the conservatory with N.I. Zaremba and A.S. Famintsïn and about 1870 began composing choruses for the Imperial Chapel Choir. Two operas followed, Nepri′gozhaya (‘The Homely Girl’)/Doch′ boyarina (‘The Boyar’s Daughter’, 1873) and Zarya svobodï (‘The Dawn of Freedom’, 1877), the latter dedicated to Alexander II but rejected by the censor for its scene of peasant uprising. A comic opera Solomonida Saburova remained in manuscript. A Greek Sonata (...

(Felice)

(b Florence, 20 Nov 1826; d Florence, 22 June 1891). Italian scholar. He grew up in a family with artistic influence (his grandfather Luigi Ademollo and his cousin Carlo Ademollo were well-known painters; his uncle Geremia Sbolci (singer) and cousins Jefte Sbolci (cellist and conductor) and Jubal Sbolci (oboist and composer) were behind the first attempts at creating musical and philharmonic societies in late 1850s Florence). He attended the Scuole Pie Fiorentine and from 1845 wrote political articles for Florentine journals (Il Commercio, Il Popolano, Il Lampione, La Vespa) as a liberal moderate. From 1851 and for about 25 years, he wrote theatre and opera reviews for L’Arte, Lo Scaramuccia, La Scena, Gazzetta d’Italia, the Revue Franco-Italienne, and Europe Artiste, sometimes under the aliases of ‘Giosuè’, ‘Malledolo’, and ‘Nemo’. In 1860 he became consigliere of the Corte dei Conti (State Audit Board) and moved with the central government to Rome after it became part of the kingdom of Italy in ...

(b Eibenschütz [Ivančice], Moravia, Nov 1, 1855; d Vienna, Feb 15, 1941). Austrian musicologist. He was born to Joachim Adler and Franziska (Fanni) Eisenschitz, both bourgeois Sudenten Germans of Jewish descent. Joachim was a medical doctor whose commitment to homeopathy, a therapeutic approach inconsistent with the germ theory of disease, tied him to the kind of premodern scientific tradition his son’s generation of scientists would be at pains to displace. He perished in 1856 at the age of 55 of typhoid fever, which he contracted from a patient. Fanni was the daughter of a prosperous merchant family. Any inherited wealth Fanni enjoyed in her early married life, however, had been spent by the time of her widowhood. She obtained a pension (Gnadenpension) from the state after Joachim’s death, which helped fund Guido’s early education. An amateur guitarist, Fanni was also Guido’s earliest musical influence. The family moved from Eibenschütz (Ivančice) to Iglau (Jihalva) before finally settling in Vienna in ...

(b Spanish Basque region, c1755; d San Sebastián, June 23, 1831). Spanish composer and theorist. After serving as maestro de capilla in San Sebastián, he took up the same post in Logroño collegiate church during the French invasion (1795). Five years later he returned to San Sebastián as maestro de capilla at S María la Redonda, where he remained until 1829. He composed a large number of sacred works, which enjoyed great success throughout northern Spain during his lifetime, in particular masses, Vespers, the Office for the Dead, motets and villancicos, many of which survive in manuscript at the churches which he served. He also wrote some piano music (of which a sonata is edited in J. Nin’s Classiques espagnols du piano, i, 1925) and a 133-page theoretical work, Instrucción metódica, especulativa, y prática, para enseñar á cantar y tañer la música moderna y antigua...

(b Rome, June 29, 1801; d Rome, June 12, 1863). Italian musicologist and composer. Ordained a Roman priest in 1823, his life was entirely directed towards the deliverance of liturgical music from what he saw as the debased theatrical style of contemporary composers and the neglect and incompetence of singers and organists in regard to Gregorian chant and Renaissance music. He contributed most importantly to this goal through his editions, particularly the Raccolta di musica sacra (Rome, 1841–6), the seven volumes of which provided the first large modern collection of Palestrina's music. Palestrina was Alfieri's ideal for new church music, which, according to his Ristabilimento, should be grave, succinct and suited in expression to the words, which were to be presented clearly and with few repetitions. His own compositions, many of them published at Rome, exemplified these principles.

Alfieri was also a pioneer in Italy in the historical study of Gregorian chant, which he sought to restore to its original purity, although along lines that now appear somewhat arbitrary and subjective. His early ...

(b Barcelona, March 27, 1862; d Barcelona, March 31, 1908). Spanish composer, folklorist and music critic. He studied composition with Antonio Nicolau and Anselmo Barba and piano with C.G. Vidiella in Barcelona and was music critic for various journals there, including La renaixensa, L'avenç and, from 1905 to 1908, El poble català. He published his Collecció de 6 melodies per a cant i piano and five Cansons per cant i piano (both Barcelona, 1887), which are settings of poems by Angel Guimerá, Francisco Matheu y Fornells, Apeles Mestres and Jacinto Verdaguer. He illustrated the latter volume himself, and some of his work was displayed at an exhibition of the Sociedad de Acuarelistas in Barcelona. A distinguished folklorist as well as a sensitive composer and skilful melodist, he collected Catalan folksongs and published arrangements of 23 of these in Cansons populars catalanas (Barcelona, 1891). He used native rhythms and melodies in his songs and piano pieces (among them ...

(b Northborough, MA, Sept 5, 1830; d Madison, WI, Dec 9, 1889). American classical scholar, teacher, editor, and writer. Allen is best known musically as an editor of Slave Songs of the United States (New York, 1867), also edited by Charles Pickard Ware and Lucy McKim Garrison, who were white collectors of black music.

Allen graduated from Harvard in 1851, subsequently studied in Europe, and returned to the United States in 1856. In 1863 he began an eight-month stint as a teacher on St Helena Island in South Carolina, home to former slaves who remained after plantation owners left in 1861. Here, Allen gained first-hand experience of slave singing that contributed to the detailed explanations of his 36-page prologue to Slave Songs. In 1867 Allen was appointed chair of ancient languages at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he remained until his death.

Allen’s interest in philology is evident in the many pages of the prologue to ...

(b Mauth [now Vysoké Mýto], Nov 17, 1816; d Vienna, June 28, 1876). Austrian music historian and critic. His mother, sister of the musicologist Kiesewetter, fostered his love of music, painting and architecture; the performance of older music in the Kiesewetter home belonged to Ambros’s strongest early impressions. He acquired a musical training, despite his father’s objections, through a keen enthusiasm, an exceptional memory and an unbounded capacity for work. A humanistic Gymnasium education, a doctorate of law completed in 1839 at Prague University and vast reading, with a youthful predilection for Jean Paul, underlay his later scholarship and influenced his prolix style. Robert Schumann was his spiritual and journalistic model, and as ‘Flamin’ he associated with enthusiastic young followers, including Hanslick as ‘Renatus’, in a Bohemian branch of the ‘Davidsbund’ to fight musical conservatism in Prague. He was indebted more to the concepts and methods of art historians and historians of antiquity, of law and of literature, than to such musical colleagues as Kiesewetter or Fétis....

(François)

(b Geneva, Sept 1, 1862; d Nyon, Feb 29, 1928). Swiss theatrical theorist and stage designer. He studied at Geneva (1879–89), and at the conservatories of Leipzig and Dresden, at the same time acquainting himself with contemporary theatrical practice by attendance at the Bayreuth Festival (from 1882), and the court opera houses of Dresden (1889) and Vienna (1890). After 1890 he pursued his interests as a writer and artist and led a secluded existence in the vicinity of Lake Geneva.

Like many contemporary artists Appia reacted against the economic and social conditions of his day, registering a Romantic protest by aspiring to a theatrical art independent of reality and determined solely by the creative imagination of the artist. Wagner’s music dramas were the focal point of his ideas. Whereas Wagner’s music and text as a product of the ‘first and primordial idea of creation’ was to his mind free from the conventions of the real world, its stage representation had been taken over by the ‘conventional influence of the milieu’. For Appia, the solution followed on from the insight that in Wagner the music constituted not only the time element but also that of space, taking on ‘bodily form’ in the staging itself. However, this could come about only if there were a hierarchical order of the factors of presentation to guarantee that the music, as the prime revelation of the artist’s soul, would determine all the relationships on the stage. Appia’s hierarchical synthesis – a departure from the equal participation of the arts in Wagner’s ...

(b Hanau, June 20, 1839; d Hanau, Jan 13, 1900). German acoustician, son of Georg Appunn. At the Leipzig Conservatory he continued the acoustical experiments of his father, especially the determination of vibration ratios of very high tones by optical means, and constructed fine acoustic apparatus. He devised a new shape for the glockenspiel, with right-angled metal rods in a circular arrangement and a metal half-sphere above as a resonator....

(b Hanau, Sept 1, 1816; d Hanau, Jan 14, 1888). German musical theorist and acoustician. He studied theory with Anton André and Schnyder von Wartensee, the piano with Suppus and Alois Schmitt, the organ with Rinck and the cello with Mangold. He became a well-rounded musician who could play almost every instrument. Until ...

(b Correggio, nr Reggio nell’Emilia, Aug 30, 1769; d Correggio, May 18, 1832). Italian composer and theorist. Born into a family of musicians, he was essentially self-taught although he studied briefly with Giovanni Battista Lanfranchi, the assistant maestro di cappella in the basilica. At the age of eight he had already written complex sacred pieces and chamber music. He studied in Parma with Angelo Morigi (called ‘Il Merighi’) during 1780–81 and in 1782 stayed for a time in Bologna (where he visited Paudre Martini) and Venice, where he had great success as a harpsichordist and improviser. Having returned to Correggio, at the age of 14 he taught the harpsichord, flute and cello at the Collegio Civico and in 1786 was appointed maestro di cappella. La volubile, performed in Correggio in 1785 with the intermezzo Il ratto di Proserpina, marked the beginning of his career as an opera composer. In the retinue of the Marchese Gherardini, he moved to Turin (...

(b Paris, Feb 14, 1874; d Dieppe, Aug 31, 1910). French musicologist and philologist. He graduated in philology (1892) and law (1894), and subsequently became archiviste paléographe at the Ecole des Chartes in Paris (1898). He took a diploma in Armenian (1900), and after travelling in Central Asia published articles on Armenian church music and on music of the Tajiks and Sarts in Turkestan. He later taught in Paris at the Institut Catholique, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Sociales and at the Schola Cantorum, through whose Bureau d’Edition he issued his early articles.

Aubry brought to bear on musical problems the skills of the philologist (comparing concordant sources and establishing the best reading for a text) and of the palaeographer. In this he resembled his contemporary Friedrich Ludwig and others of the senior generation of 20th-century music scholars. He continued the work of Coussemaker and Riemann in the field of 13th-century French music, making texts available in edition and facsimile: his name is closely associated with three major sources, the Roman de Fauvel, the Chansonnier de l’Arsenal and the Bamberg manuscript. He produced much textual criticism in article form, and two series of larger studies, many of them in collaboration with literary scholars....

(von)

(b Moscow, 24 March/April 5, 1839; d Moscow, 12/Jan 24, 1881). Russian composer and scholar. In 1858 he resigned from the civil service and went to Leipzig, where he studied music theory with Richter and Hauptmann. Later he took lessons from Liszt in Rome. While in Paris in 1886, he bought the extensive collection of music which had belonged to G.E. Anders. On his return to Russia in 1870 he was appointed honorary librarian to the St Petersburg Conservatory, and in the following year became its director. Unlike his predecessor Zaremba, he was favourably disposed towards the New Russian School, and one of his first acts as director was to appoint Rimsky-Korsakov as professor of practical composition and instrumentation. This bold step had a profound effect on the history of composition in Russia, and the conservatory soon became as important in the field of composition as it had already become in producing excellent instrumentalists and singers (one of its graduates during Azanchevsky's time was the great bass Fyodor Stravinsky, whose son Igor later became a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov). Tchaikovsky referred to him as ‘a good and kind person’. Ill-health forced him to resign in ...

(Giacobbe Baldassarre)

(b Rome, Oct 21, 1775; d Rome, May 21, 1844). Italian musicologist and composer. At 13 he entered the Seminario Romano and studied there under Stefano Silveyra. In 1795 he was accepted as a member of the choir of the papal chapel, even though he was not yet a priest (he became one in 1798). He studied singing with a bass from the choir, Saverio Bianchini, and, from 1802, counterpoint with Giuseppe Jannacconi. He was probably also a pupil of the organist G.B. Batti and of his uncle, the composer Lorenzo Baini. In 1814 he was entrusted with the reorganization of the archives of the papal chapel and in 1819 became camerlengo (general administrator) of the college of papal singers, an elective office which he held until his death. In 1825 he was made an examiner at the Congregazione di S Cecilia, although he was not a member of it. His efforts to persuade the pope to found a school of singing and a conservatory were unsuccessful. A member of many European academies and the teacher of numerous composers and musicologists, among them Cartoni, La Fage, Nicolai, Proske and Hiller, he spent the last part of his life in extreme seclusion....

(b New York, June 3, 1851; d Dresden, Oct 13, 1934). American music scholar and lexicographer. Trained as a young man for a business career, he decided rather on music. For a time he was an organist in Concord, Massachusetts. He went to Germany to study in 1874 and took the doctorate at Leipzig in 1882 with a dissertation based on field studies among the Seneca Indians in New York state. This, the first serious work on American Indian music, was shown to MacDowell by Henry Gilbert, and provided themes for MacDowell's Second (‘Indian’) Suite for orchestra. Baker returned to the USA in 1891 and became literary editor and translator for the music publishing firm of Schirmer, Inc. (1892), a post he held until his retirement in 1926, when he returned to Germany. Besides making many translations into English of books, librettos and articles (the last especially for the ...

(b Kissy (nr Freetown), Sierra Leone, March 14, 1893; d ?Sierra Leone, 1961). African ethnomusicologist and composer. Missionaries changed Ballanta, the grandfather’s African surname, to Taylor. Nicholas George’s father, Gustavus, hyphenated the name, under which the son published. He sang and played the organ at St. Patrick’s Chapel, Kissy, as a youth. In 1917 he passed the intermediary examination for the BM degree at Fourah Bay College, Freetown, an affiliate of the University of Durham, UK, but he could not complete this degree because of travel requirements that the final examination be taken in England. Between 1918 and 1919, he participated in a Freetown choral society, for which he wrote the oratorio Belshazzar’s Feast. He spent the winter of 1921 in Boston, sponsored by an American patron, where he conducted his African Rhapsody at Symphony Hall and studied orchestration privately. In 1922 he matriculated at the New York Institute of Music Art (now Juilliard School of Music), where he obtained his diploma (...

(b Oxford, March 18, 1854; d Oxford, Feb 16, 1919). English musical palaeographer. After reading classics and theology at Pembroke College, Oxford (1873–7), he held a number of ecclesiastical appointments before devoting himself to musical palaeography. He travelled extensively and accumulated an encyclopedic knowledge of library collections in his chosen field of the medieval liturgy and its music, in which he published numerous articles (in ...