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[Petrus Aponensis ]

(b ?Abano, nr Padua, 1257; d Padua, 1315). Italian philosopher and doctor . He studied at Padua and spent some time at Paris; later he became a professor at Padua University. Music is discussed in two of his works, the Conciliator differentiarum philosophorum et precipue medicorum (Venice, 1476) and the Expositio Problematum Aristotelis (Mantua, 1475). They contain the traditional notion of music as a discipline of the Quadrivium, but also interesting references to musical practice. Rhythm is related to pulse beats, and mention is made of the instruments rubeba and viella, the forms of the muteti and rote, and the practice of ‘bordonizare’.

(b Genoa, c1600; d after 1640). Italian theorist. A Franciscan, he was chaplain and musician to Cardinal Franz von Dietrichstein, Prince-Bishop of Olomouc and governor of Moravia. Before 1629 he probably taught music at the seminary at St Oslowan and from 1629 at the newly established Loretan seminary at Nikolsburg (now Mikulov), the cardinal’s principal residence. He returned to Italy in 1632. His treatise Regulae contrapuncti excerptae ex operibus Zerlini et aliorum ad breviorem tyronum instructionem accommodate (St Oslowan, 1629/R), which in spite of its Latin title and dedicatory letter is written in Italian, was conceived as a textbook of counterpoint for his seminarians. It is an entirely unoriginal and conservative compendium of the most elementary rules concerning the use of consonances and dissonances, derived, according to the title, ‘from the works of Zarlino and others’.

(b New York, Nov 20, 1955). American musicologist. She studied at Yale University (BA 1977), and subsequently at Munich and Princeton, where she took the doctorate in 1984 with a dissertation on Wagner's Parisian Tannhäuser. She joined the faculty at Princeton in 1984, and was appointed professor there in 1991. She has also held visiting positions at the University of California, Berkeley, the Free University of Berlin and Harvard University. She was awarded the Dent medal in 1993. Abbate's primary interests are the history of opera, particularly Wagner, music and language and the metaphysics of musical performance. Her work centres on systematic criticism of methods in operatic interpretation, musical semiotics and narrative, the concept of voice in music, and music and gender. Her later research involves operatic performance and vocal power as a motif in music, philosophy and literature from the Enlightenment to the 20th century.

(b Verdello, Sept 14, 1898; d Bergamo, Jan 22, 1981). Italian music critic. He took a diploma in composition at the Turin Conservatory (1929) and studied musicology with Cesari. His career as a critic was centred in Milan; after working on Secolo sera (1928–34), he succeeded Cesari at Corriere della sera, remaining there until his retirement (1973). In 1949 he founded the monthly journal La scala, which he edited until its closure in 1963; he was particularly interested in opera, especially its authentic performance. Abbiati also published a history of music in five volumes (1939–46), which he later updated and revised in four volumes (1967–8). This was well received, although (being the work of a single author) it was inevitably incomplete; the comments in the second edition on 20th-century composers, notably Italian composers of Abbiati’s own generation, are especially valuable as a contemporary response. His four-volume work on Verdi (...

[Petrus Abailardus]

(b Le Pallet, nr Nantes, 1079; d Saint-Marcel, nr Chalon-sur-Saône, April 21, 1142). French philosopher, poet and musician of Breton origin. After studying philosophy in Paris, he taught dialectic at the cathedral school. His love affair with Heloise, the young niece of Canon Fulbert, brought him fame as a musician. However, after they had secretly married in 1118 Fulbert had Abelard castrated. Heloise became a nun and he became a monk at St Denis. His highly original scholastic method and his restless and blunt nature aroused opposition to his teaching; principal among his opponents was Bernard of Clairvaux. After condemnation by the Council of Sens in 1140, Abelard found support from Peter the Venerable, Benedictine Abbot of Cluny.

Abelard’s songs are few beside his numerous theological and philosophical writings. Heloise’s testimony suggests that his love songs must have been important from both a literary and a musical point of view. In a later letter (probably revised by Abelard) she declared that he had ‘the gift of poetry and the gift of song’; he ‘composed quite a number of metrical and rhythmic love songs. The great charm and sweetness in language and music, and a soft attractiveness of the melody obliged even the unlettered’. These songs, presumably in Latin, have all been lost: they have not been identified among the anonymous repertory....

(b New York, March 10, 1945). American music educator and scholar. He received degrees from the University of Connecticut (BS 1966, MA 1968) and the University of Maryland, College Park (PhD 1971). He served on the faculties of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (1972–5), Indiana University (1975–82), and Teachers College, Columbia University (1982–). At Teachers College he served as coordinator of music education, chair of the Arts and Humanities Department, and director of the Division of Instruction. He is coauthor (with C.R. Hoffer and R.H. Klotman) of Foundations of Music Education (1984, 2/1994) and coeditor (with L. Custodero) of Critical Issues in Music Education: Contemporary Theory and Practice (2010). He wrote chapters for the Handbook of Music Psychology (1980, 2/1996) and The New Handbook of Research on Music Teaching and Learning...

(b Halle an der Saale, Sept 19, 1906; d Kiel, Jan 4, 1996). German musicologist, daughter of Hermann Abert. She studied musicology with her father, Blume and Sachs as well as history with Friedrich Meinecke and philosophy with Eduard Spranger at the University of Berlin and took the doctorate there with a dissertation on Schütz’s Cantiones sacrae in 1934. She then became an assistant lecturer at the musicology institute at the University of Kiel, where she completed the Habilitation in 1943 with a work on Monteverdi and music drama. In 1950 she became supernumerary professor at the University of Kiel and in 1962 research fellow and professor. From 1949 to 1958 she was an editor of the first edition of Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart and from 1964 she was a member of the Zentralinstitut für Mozartforschung. She retired in 1971. Her main field of research was opera from Monteverdi to Richard Strauss, with special emphasis on Mozart, and her writings laid particular emphasis on sources, librettos, aesthetics and the relationship between speech and music. Although her approach to music scholarship was essentially conservative, her conclusions about Mozart's Lambach symphonies were later criticized for being based on stylistic analysis rather than source studies. At the age of 88 she published a short history of opera summarizing a lifetime of thought devoted to the subject....

(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 ...

(fl c1000). Indian philosopher, mystic and scholar. He was born to a Brahman family probably of Srinagar, Kashmir, and continued in their Śaiva Hindu religious tradition, being trained in grammar and philosophy by his father; but he also studied more widely with Hindu, Buddhist and Jain teachers. He lived a life of renunciation as a scholar and religious devotee and never married. His hugely prolific scholarly and literary output in Sanskrit included approximately 50 works which may be crudely grouped into the areas of religious exegesis, philosophical analysis and commentary, and aesthetics. For the historian of music his most important contribution is the monumental commentary Abhinavabhāratī; this became the most celebrated of all commentaries on the Nāṯyaśāstra of Bharata and attests a flowering of interest in aesthetics and the arts in medieval Kashmir. Manuscript evidence has hitherto been insufficient for a full critical edition and reliable translation of the work, and there remain many obscurities in the existing text. Abhinavagupta showed considerable knowledge of the practice of his own time, and it is not always easy to assess the validity of his judgments of earlier music. He argued a distinction between the religious ...

(b Lisbon, 1437; d Venice, 1508). Philosopher and biblical exegete. His writing on music forms the introduction to his commentary on Exodus xv (the ‘Song of the Sea’, 1505; I-Rvat Rossiano 925, also printed in Venice in 1579). Relying on earlier sources including Ibn Rushd's commentary on Aristotle's Poetics and Moses ibn Tibbon's commentary on the Song of Solomon, Abrabanel describes three kinds of verse set to music: with metre and rhyme, as in Hebrew hymns (piyyutim); without metre or rhyme, yet arranged in a succession of short and long lines (as in the ‘Song of the Sea’); and metaphorical texts, by which he appears to refer to Psalms. Whereas, for him, the first and third kinds do not require music to qualify as poetry (prosodic considerations prevail in the first, conceptual ones in the third), the second kind does (its construction depends on its musical usage). Yet all three kinds rely on music for their usual mode of presentation. The author recognizes different functions for music in conjunction with poetry: to serve as a mnemonic device for retaining the texts, to improve the understanding of their content, and to elevate the spirit....

(Ernest Heal)

(b Newport, Isle of Wight, March 9, 1904; d Midhurst, March 18, 1988). English musicologist. Apart from having piano lessons as a boy, musically he was entirely self-taught. His formal education was completed in Portsmouth in preparation for a career in the navy, but he was obliged to abandon this plan owing to ill-health. During a period of recuperation he was able to put some of his self-acquired musical knowledge into practice by making orchestrations, arrangements and some attempts at original composition for the garrison band on the Isle of Wight. A year spent in Cologne resulted in his first major contribution to musical literature, a study of Borodin, which was begun in 1924 and published in 1927; this book (which he later disowned) immediately established him as an expert in the field of Russian music. He spent the next eight years as a freelance writer, contributing to a wide variety of publications, notably ...

(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 (...

(Schack Olufsen)

(b Brande, Jutland, April 9, 1893; d Copenhagen, Feb 17, 1949). Danish musicologist. After studying at the Royal Danish Conservatory of Music (1910–13), where he graduated as an organist, he was organist and choirmaster at the Luther Church (1914–24) and head of the music division of the Copenhagen Royal Library (1916–21). As a student he attended Hammerich's lectures in music history at Copenhagen University (there was no degree course in music history until 1915) and in 1917 he became the first MA in musicology in Denmark, graduating with a dissertation on the transition from Catholic to Protestant liturgy in Denmark in the 16th and 17th centuries. During his years at the Royal Library he began to study its large collection of Latin liturgical fragments on the basis of which he tried to reconstruct the Danish medieval liturgy and to provide a demonstration of Peter Wagner’s theory of the two traditions, Roman and Germanic, of Gregorian chant. He submitted this as a doctoral dissertation to the university in ...

(b March 28, 1936; d Nov 6, 2006). Bulgarian composer and musicologist. He studied composition under Pantcho Vladigerov at the State Conservatoire (now renamed the Pantcho Vladigerov National Music Academy) in Sofia, Bulgaria. He worked as a conductor with the Filip Kutev National Folklore Ensemble, and as a lecturer (from 1966) and professor (from 1990) of symphonic orchestration at the NMA. He served as vice-president of the NMA (1999–2001) and as Minister of Culture (2001–2005).

A composer of symphonic and chamber music, his individual style epitomizes the post-tonal tendencies of the early 20th century; he distanced himself from the Social Realism movement that was imposed upon composers in the countries of Eastern Europe. After 1990 he also wrote cantatas and oratorios, which exhibit an even more radical post-tonal style. He is the author of a number of theoretical studies on symphonic orchestration....

(b San José, Aug 24, 1943). Costa Rican composer, ethnomusicologist and baritone. He obtained a teaching diploma and the BA at the University of Costa Rica Conservatory, with singing as his special subject. During 1975–6 he lived in Paris, where he studied singing at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Musique, Gregorian chant and choral conducting at the Catholic University and ethnomusicology at the Sorbonne. He taught at the Escuela de Artes Musicales of the University of Costa Rica (1976–90; director of the Escuela, 1983–7; dean of the fine arts faculty of the university, 1987–91). In 1994, with the painter Ronald Mills, he co-founded the Centro de Investigaciones y Documentación de Musica y de Artes Plásticas, researching the traditional music of Guanacaste and Limón provinces and of the Costa Rican indigenous people, conducting field studies in Costa Rica, Guatemala and Mexico, making recordings, publishing books and articles, and holding lectures and seminars....

(b Atri, 1458; d Conversano, Jan 19, 1529). Italian humanist, patron and theorist. He was a member of the Accademia Pontaniana in Naples and initiated a long-standing tradition of musical culture in the family of the dukes of Atri, who were important patrons; his son Giovanni Antonio Donato was also a lira player. Acquaviva d’Aragona financed the Neapolitan printer Antonio de Frizis and housed the press in his palace in Naples. One of the earliest examples of music printing in the kingdom of Naples was the Motetti libro primo printed by De Frizis in 1519 (it is no longer extant, but a copy was owned by Fernando Colón). In 1526 De Frizis printed Acquaviva d’Aragona’s Latin translation of Plutarch’s De virtute morali, which was followed by an extensive Latin commentary including a 76-page treatise De musica (the whole was reprinted in Frankfurt in 1609). Notable for its wealth of illustrations and for its incorporation into a broader context addressed to humanists in general rather than to a specialized musical readership, the treatise is largely based on the writings of Boethius and Gaffurius, and takes as its point of departure Plutarch’s observations on music’s power of suggestion. The ...

(b Piraeus, May 19, 1929). Greek composer and musicologist. He graduated in theology from Athens University (1954), in neo-Byzantine music (1955) and harmony (1956) from the Piraeus League Conservatory, and in counterpoint, fugue and composition (1959) from the Hellenic Conservatory, where he studied with Yannis A. Papaïannou. At Brandeis University (1962–5) he studied composition (with Arthur Berger), Byzantine music palaeography and electronic music. In 1950 he revived the boys' choir of the Greek Royal Palace, which he directed until 1967. He also established and conducted the Athens Chamber Chorus (1958–61). Between 1961 and 1963 he taught Byzantine music at the Holy Cross Theological Academy, Boston, Massachusetts. In 1965 he established the first electronic music studio in Athens. He was a founder-member (1965) and later president (1975–85) of both the Hellenic Association for Contemporary Music and the Greek section of the ISCM. In ...

(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 (...

(bc1080; dc1150). Music theorist active in England. He studied in Tours, probably taught in Laon, travelled in Sicily, southern Italy and the Crusader states, but apparently spent much of his life in the south-west of England. He translated Arabic scientific texts into Latin and wrote original works of considerable literary merit, perhaps in his role as a tutor in an episcopal or royal court: one such text was addressed to the future King Henry II. Adelard dealt with music as an integral part of the Quadrivium. In the De eodem et diverso he mentioned studying music with a master (unnamed) in Tours; he himself played the kithara there in the presence of a queen. Speaking of the powers of music and giving examples from his own experience, he maintained that the soul, before entering the body, has already drunk in the celestial harmonies. In his Questiones naturales...

(d 1024). North Netherlandish ecclesiastic and treatise writer. He was Bishop of Utrecht under Emperor Henry II. The proximity of two short treatises on the division of the monochord to Adelboldus’s treatise on geometry, De crassitudine sphaerae, in a 12th-century manuscript from Tegernsee ( D-Mbs Clm.18914) prompted Gerbert to attribute them to Adelboldus in his ...